A Growing Concern

As I've written before, ISIS concerns me greatly. The last time I wrote about them, it was because of the potential for them to commit individual murders here in the United States, specifically videotaped beheadings carried out by individuals either sympathetic to or outright part of their organization. While that concern is still valid, it's not what's captured my attention about them lately. It's hard for decent people to understand the hard reality of people so evil that they haven't got even the most basic commitment to morality or ethics. We think, and perhaps cannot help but think, that there are lines in the sand that no person, however evil, insane, and/or religious he might be, would ever cross. Well, that is precisely what we face with ISIS and they sealed my opinion of them with their most recent outrage.

ISIS has been killing civilians for a while now and, bad enough as this is, they have managed to do worse than even that. In the Syrian city of Kobani, they have been terrorizing the citizenry in ghastly ways, including the visceral example of crucifying a teenager for simply videotaping the outside of a local ISIS headquarters building. What pushed me over the edge though was the way ISIS reacted when they came upon a man with Down's Syndrome. He did not have the mental capacity to recognize that he was in danger from them and should flee. Nor was he capable of grasping concepts like Allah or Mohammed. So ISIS beheaded him for being an atheist and a kafir, which is a profound insult and a term to suggest one has read the Koran and rejected it. This poor man could not understand the concept of a deity or the Koran well enough to reject either.

Let us not sugarcoat the depth of the evil I outlined in the last paragraph. People that cannot understand that a man with Down's Syndrome might be an exception to their murderous dogma cannot be reasoned with. There's no room in them for pity, remorse, or logic. They stand prepared to grind everyone and everything that does not fit within their vision for a caliphate into dust. Meanwhile, what are we prepared to do? The weak die under the tyranny of the strong. We drop some bombs, maybe. They'll survive that. More utterly defenseless people will be beheaded. "Too bad," we'll say, because we have our own problems. Because crimes against humanity only concern us when convenient. Because war must be avoided at all costs and if people with Down's Syndrome suffer a fate like this, tough.

-Frank