By Akin Owolabi

The world has never been more unsafe for peaceful coexistence than it is today. Truth has taken a permanent flight in the face of unrelenting attacks by falsehood and brazen bigotry. And, as Chinua Achebe cued it from earlier writings, the centre can no longer hold on the global village. The cap is askew everywhere. Religionists are the most barmy and bloodthirsty of all. In fact, mankind today exhibits total religious and moral bankruptcy.

The monumental havoc being wreaked around the globe even in the name of God bears eloquent testimony to the death-like condition of mankind. Isn’t it horrendous for persons professing to reverence God to stuff fellow adherents, including the weaker sex, with explosives, brainwashing them to make mincemeat of themselves in the process of killing other innocent, a thing the leaders would never ever wish for themselves? The golden rule that man should do to others what he wanted done to himself is inapplicable to those demented extremists who could do anything to stay alive.

Zeroing in, modern Israel is currently in conflict (not at war per se) with Hamas militias in the Gaza Strip. The world, particularly the piqued section of it, has focused of the effects and turned a blind eye to the cause. The truth of ‘cause and effect’ remains as unassailable as it is constant. A child cannot be poking sharp object at an adult and you forbid the latter from stripping the child of the offensive object.

In like manner, Israel had hitherto complained bitterly about Hamas’ rocket attacks to tune of over 2,000. Does the world view such as the antics of an errant child? It is disquieting that Israel’s neighbouring countries have been breathing murder and violence towards this tiny state since its creation in 1947. The sheer might of the Jews has prevented their annihilation to date. It is unscriptural to believe that the Almighty is still supportive of biological Israel because the Most High is neither a lover of violence, vengeance and retaliatory strikes that cost human lives as it is currently unfolding in Gaza.

It is disturbing that some could assess the Palestinian conflict from pejorative perspective, from effects occasioned by Israeli retaliatory strikes rather than the cause – fire ignited by Hamas’ unbridled rocket attacks. The view that Hamas’ actions – attacks – are heroic, and that Israel ought to absorb the assault with utmost geniality and therefore should not have retaliated is untenable and patently absurd. A particular worldview is behind the Gaza militias and other violent groups in some parts of the world. Is Israel expected to turn the other cheek to its enemies’ rocket strikes? The precarious condition of this tiny nation would not permit it to take serious security challenges for granted.

Israel says it is determined to rid its neighbourhood of weapons build-up but the world is asking it to tarry a while. This nation, surrounded by very hostile neighbours, can ill afford the gruelling effects of procrastination as such could spell its death knell. Israel should be allowed to go the whole hog in sanitising its neighbourhood.
The world must come to terms with the fact that individuals’ inalienable right to life and ownership of place of abode on this planet is God-bestowed and therefore sacrosanct. No group, however truculent, should arrogate to itself the power to stifle others. The nation of Israel, created or not, is today a fait accompli and so deserves existence and any act to the contrary is unjustifiable from the divine standpoint of equality to existence. This position has no religious or tribal coloration. It is borne out of the right to existence on the globe. Neither is it saying modern Israel is still the favourite of God.

The Middle East episode is replicated in other parts of the world where extremists chose belligerence instead of peace, violence in opposition to mutual coexistence, erroneously believing that the True God approves of bizarre and mindless killings and abduction of the innocent.

Nigeria has expended trillions of investible earnings on fighting the Boko Haram – what difference is there between Hamas and Haram? – scourge, an evil group fighting a relentless religio-political war since President Goodluck Jonathan assumed power in 2011. Those bigots are pushing for the enthronement of a Mallam and the Islamisation of Nigeria. The insurgents, determined to make the country ungovernable, are being funded and armed to boot by sponsors within and outside Nigeria. It does a lot of havoc to our collective psyche that a sect, claiming to submit to the God of peace, has enthroned violence as a way of life, mass murder as a way of redressing perceived national imbalance. Yet, terrorism as a bloc is fighting terribly shy of attacking its perceived root of global injustice for fear of being thoroughly worsted in the process.

Terrorism in Nigeria has a tinge of paradox. On 14 April this year, the insurgents stormed a girls’ secondary school hostel in Chibok, North-East Nigeria, kidnapping 234 teenagers. The girls have spent more than 100 days in those religious wolves’ den without much hope of a rescue. Tonnes of invectives are being daily poured on Jonathan for not going, even if it has to be personally, after the abductors. Most of those castigating the President, though to score cheap political points, are of the same faith with the terrorists. The castigators know the source of Boko Haram’s funds and weapons and could therefore rescue this country from the vice grip of their faithful but have chosen to run with the hare and chase with the hound. In which case, the cause – insurgency – and effect – kidnapping – are being jettisoned while a third party is pilloried.

The solution to the security challenges has always been with the adherents – political and religious. They should have prevailed on the warriors to sheathe their bombs and guns, assuring them that power would soon swing their way or urged the sponsors to stop investing in life-guzzling enterprise. More succinctly, they could have ordered the abductors to return our girls in the oft-recited Name. If this more efficacious steps had been taken, the President and the people of other faith would have been overwhelmed by the unity, cohesion, peace and good governance underscoring the fighters’ creed, not the bombs and guns and rockets and death and anguish and violence and abduction and sophistries being peddled in Gaza, Nigeria, Libya, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Mali, Syria, Sudan and several other places.