Children of All Faiths- the Real Victims of Radical Islam and Universal Hatred
There are times when certain images of war tear at the heartstrings in ways no words can possibly do so. In black and white, the image of a small Jewish boy liberated from Auschwitz, pulling up his sleeve to reveal on his tiny forearm, a branded serial number of his internment, or decades later, the image of a young girl running in the nude- her clothes burned away in a napalm attack in Viet Nam. In living color, the image of a dazed and confused small boy, pulled from the rubble in Aleppo, Syria, unaware of a bleeding head wound that is his own.
Such are the real victims of Radical Islam and the wars it has perpetrated- the innocent lives of the smallest among us who, regardless of whether they are Christian or Jew or Muslim, pay the full price of the hatred perpetrated by the mothers and fathers who use their twisted doctrine of Islam to justify the slaughter of thousands of innocents. This boy, Omran Daqneesh, all of five years old, miraculously survived the bombing of his home after being rushed to the hospital. Amazingly, all of the members of his family managed to survive the attack as well, blamed on an airstrike courtesy of the Assad regime and aided by Russia. Yet, there are others- countless others- who are not so (forgive the word) fortunate as this little boy. The children who are beheaded because they are Christian, the little Jewish children who die from terrorist attacks in Jerusalem, the many Muslim children who are systematically slaughtered in front of their parents, because their parents refuse to submit to a radical and fundamentalist form of Islam seeking to bring on a caliphate of world domination.
That children are caught in the crossfire of war is certainly nothing new. Recorded history is replete with such tales of carnage, and it is always the most innocent among us who pay the highest costs of man’s inhumanity to his fellow man. Jesus once said, “Suffer the children who come unto me (Luke 18:16),” and it seems that Jesus was referring to the tragic circumstances surrounding the unfortunate death of children who, at the hands of adults, lose their lives to violence throughout the world.
In the example of this photo, it is a little boy in Syria. Yet, it might have been a little black boy on the streets of Chicago, a little Jewish boy in his school in Jerusalem, or a little French girl in Nice, along the French Riviera- all of whom are caught in the crossfire of hatred and callous disregard for human life that is the darkest side of our own human existence.
Golda Meir, the former prime minister of Israel, once said, “We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.” It only stands to reason, some fifty years later, that the scourge of Radical Islam which has set the world in a global war will only come to know its end, when the Radical Islamists who perpetrate this war come to love their children more than they hate the rest of us. Until we as a people, of all faiths and all nationalities, unite in determination to rid the world of this hatred, it is our children- all our children, who will pay the ultimate price of our own undoing.
-Drew Nickell, 29 August 2016
© 2016 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.
author of “Bending Your Ear- a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times”
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