The shock at the savagery of the murder two days ago of a Japanese journalist Kenji Goto by the Islamic State of Iraq and al Sham, ISIS, which has since renamed itself simply as Islamic State, IS, would have crossed all barriers of community, religion and nation. There is only one word to describe the cold blooded daylight butchering of a helpless and innocent hostage `“ madness. At its most basic, sanity is about an intuitive understanding that human behaviour is predictable to all other humans. This is what makes it is possible to presume how somebody would behave if he or she is hungry, angry, afraid, suspicious, jealous, in love, in joy, in sorrow etc. This predictability of human behaviour is also what gives sense to the academic pursuits of economics, political science, history, psychology… As a matter of fact, this is what makes communication between humans possible at all. Where would the magnanimous human virtues of mercy, love, forgiveness, empathy, compassion etc, be if one human were not at all to know what can influence or be of appeal to another. The beauty of this presumed harmony of human nature is that there is an underlying fundamental and irrefutable commonness in all human beings. Indeed this acknowledgment is what gives substance to the idea of universal justice and jurisprudence. All philosophies and all religions of the world would collapse if this presumption of commonness and predictability of human behaviour were to be given up. Such a world would be even worse than that of animals, for even animals behave predictably, although not to the extent of humans. It is difficult to image what such a situation where nobody is able to predict the response of anybody else. It would be a state of complete mindlessness and chaos.
Whatever was the cause behind the birth of the Islamic State, whether it was a Frankenstein`™s monster created by the Western alliance led by the US which invaded and destroyed Iraq, or whether it is a monster always inherent in the political ideology professed by the killers, the fact of the matter is, the Islamic State is managing to destroy all faith in the basic sanity and predictability of human behaviour. No amount of appeals or reasoning by the rest of the world could touch the killers and they went ahead to perpetrate the savagery they had all along threatened and to the utter shock of the entire world, beheaded the innocent journalist who had nothing to do with the war the killers were waging or their enemies, unless they see everybody else as their enemies. The chilling cold bloodedness of the killers did not end at just the murder, for they also went further ahead to publicising their savagery by making public the video of their gory crime, perhaps in their odacious hope that they would be able to terrorise the world. What they did not in their insanity realise is, rather than strike terror in the heart of the world, they only elicited universal disgust. We join the rest of the world, in particular Japan, to condemn the extremely inhuman and beastly murder.
We are aware of the danger of generalisation, for quite understandably, though not justifiably, the popular tendency has been to equate the acts of the IS monsters with that of teachings of Islam. This is false. There are so many Muslim countries too which have condemned the murder in the strongest of words. They have emphasised the point that one of the foremost teachings of Islam is mercy, and this quality is precisely what the IS murderers are evidently lacked totally. Let this distinction never be allowed to be blurred. Equally earnestly, let everybody be judicious as not to allow the acts of the IS killers to dilute their vision of injustice in the Western alliance`™s invasion of the oil rich region IS took birth in.
Leader Writer: Pradip Phanjoubam