Wednesday, August 06, 2014

 

Another quiet crisis


Sometimes I am struck by the number of humanitarian crises going on around the world that I had never heard about.  Yesterday, I stumbled on one (via a Ron Fournier tweet) that was particularly striking and sad.

As Sunni extremists continue to hold much of Iraq's north, over 10,000 members of a minority group are stranded on a mountaintop and dying of hunger and  thirst.  According to the Washington Post,  the refuges are from "the minority Yazidi sect, which melds parts of ancient Zoroastrianism with Christianity and Islam. They are considered by the al-Qaeda-inspired Islamic State to be devil worshippers and apostates."  It appears that the Sunni extremists are killing them when they are found.  

It's just... profoundly sad.

And the thing that makes me the saddest is that it is faith that drives such hatred. 




Comments:
Why is it that faith based persecution is time immemorial? Why in this day and age faith embracing people have come to learn nothing from past hurt and what good is faith if it teaches nothing from past hurt?
 
Thousands of years of killing because of faith... when will we learn to accept those with beliefs different from our own. I was truly saddened to read this article.
 
You may be right, but I don't think so.

I don't think "faith" kills. Insecure people caught up in extreme tribalism, garbed in religious, racial, national and economic superficialities and ignorance do the damnedest things. Not every devout and faithful Sunni participates in or condones the actions of ISIS and their "brothers." Were the problem one of "faith" how may they and other faithful throughout history who abjured violence and hatred be explained?

The actions of ISIS no more puts "faith" on trial than did the actions of Mengele and other Nazi scientists and pseudoscientists put medicine and science on trial.

Anyway, that's as I see it.
 
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