What in the World?

We must learn how to overcome fear. When I talk about fear in this instance, I am not referring to the fears that many of us have about death, heights, spiders, and so on. What I am talking about is the number one fear of many people today, according to polls, the fear of terrorist attacks.

The fear of such attacks is an induced fear. It comes from the outside, in contrast to many other fears that are internal and self-generated. This fear can be generated both by the terrorists themselves or by governments that use fear for their own political ends, as I have written about previously,

Ever since 9/11 and the "war on terror" that followed, many governments have played the fear card, Fear is useful in order to persuade voters to support their new measures, including war, or to distract people from the failures of the government by focusing their attention elsewhere.

Without 9/11, the US would not have plunged itself into the Middle Eastern swamp, where it still unable to extricate itself. In the process, the US created Al-Qaeda and the other denizens of this swamp.

The Canadian government is now playing the same card with the introduction of Bill C-51, which grants new powers to Canada's spy agency, CSIS, but does so at the expense of the rights and freedoms that the Constitution guarantees all Canadians.


The Conservative government also extended the term of reference of the forces that it sent to Iraq to fight the Islamic State. Not only will another year be added but it also mandates these forces to bomb Syria, even though international law does not permit this. The justification the government offers was that ISIS has declared war on Canada,and thus Canada needs to defend itself.

According to a Conservative party email, all these measures are necessary to protect Canadians from morphing into Islamic State North. But the tool that it uses is fear, in this case the fear of terrorists.

The government is using this tool for political reasons: in order to distract voters in the election that is scheduled for the fall from the economy, which is dismal because of the drop in the price of oil, as well as the potentially embarrassing trials of several former Conservative senators.

What can Canadians do in response to this induced fear? Thomas Carlyle taught, "The first duty of man is to conquer fear; he must get rid of it, he cannot act till then." Fear has been aptly described as a prison.


Another way of expressing faith is found in these words: "Have no fear. God is near." Fear and faith are similar; the difference is that fear is faith in the wrong direction. As St. Augustine teaches, "Faith is to believe what we do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what we believe."

When people trust in God, they do not have to fear those who want to terrorize them or who spread such fears for political gain. Faith inoculates them against fear. Or to use another image, it drives fear away so that people are no longer fearful.


When people trust in God, they are also able to trust in one another. When that trust is reciprocated, there is mutual trust, an idea that Dwight D. Eisenhower has encapsulated in this warning: "This world of ours... must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect."

Hope follows faith just as despair is the product of fear. Goethe once observed, "In all things it is better to hope than to despair." To get rid of despair, people must first examine their souls and discover the hope that resides there.

Alexander Pope stressed that hope is always present: "Hope springs eternal in the human breast. Man never is, but always to be blessed."  Somewhere hope has been described as "the thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all."

Hope makes it possible for people to see past all the smoke and mirrors of all the induced fears and to see everything as it really is. Hope restores 20/20 vision to everyone by eliminating fear. Then people can no longer be misled by their leaders whose only concern is themselves, not those whom they were elected to serve.

Barely three days after Netanyahu had told Israeli voters that there would not be a Palestinian state if he were to be reelected as prime minister, and only two days after the Israeli election, he reversed his pre-election promise..
"I think that anyone who is going to establish a Palestinian state today and evacuate lands, is giving attack grounds to the radical Islam against the state of Israel," Netanyahu had told an Israeli news website only a day before the election.

This post was delayed for several days. One reason is my research into the motivation for the recent destruction of Iraq's artifacts. This process led me to modify my ideas and I now offer them, albeit somewhat tentatively, since they are not yet part of mainstream thought at least in North America where the Islamic State, Islam, and terrorism are all equated by most people. I seriously question this equation and I hope to share my thoughts more extensively on this in a further posting.

The Islamic State (IS) continues to destroy Iraq's ancient artifacts. For a while now IS has been methodically demolishing the ancient cultural heritage of Iraq.(see video). If it has its way, it would destroy that heritage elsewhere.as well. What motivated IS to do this? And this raises another pertinent question: by destroying these artifacts is it really Islamic?

IS is not alone in engaging in such a cultural rampage. The Taliban did the same in Afghanistan when they destroyed the enormous Bamiyan Statues of Buddha. There are more examples of this from history, including those involving other religions. But the question is, are they all identical?

Christians did something similar when they destroyed the Library of Alexandria in the fourth century, and later engaged in an orgy of iconoclasm in the eighth and ninth centuries. Iconoclasm is the destruction of religious icons and other images from religious or political motives, but the religious element seems to have predominated.

This early example of Christian iconoclasm was motivated by their interpretation of the second commandment which forbids the making and worshiping of "graven images," but there were also political factors that led to the elimination of images. The advance of Islam, with its own prohibition of images, also contributed to this development.


During the Reformation, John Calvin, among others, encouraged the removal of religious images from churches because of the same commandment, although this removal was generally orderly. There were also iconoclastic riots, inspired by the Swiss reformer Huldrych Zwingli, which were more destructive.

Islamic iconoclasm (or more properly, aniconism) is motivated by the prohibition of creating images of sentient living beings, especially those of Allah, the prophet Muhammad and his associates. Some Muslims add that the prohibition extends to the depiction of all humans and animals.

In Saudi Arabia, the destruction of early Islamic heritage sites, including mosques, cemeteries, and tombs, and other religious structures, were the result of a policy to erase any elements that might give rise to practices contrary to the strict Wahhabi creed that is still prevalent in parts of that country.

Yet even these examples (with the possible exception of the destruction of the Library in Alexandria which was local and religiously-motivated) should not be compared with wholesale destruction that IS is perpetrating in the parts of Iraq that it controls, although the Saudi example does anticipate it. But there commercial factors played a leading role, since new hotels and other buildings needed to be built for the many Muslims pilgrims who came every year for the Hajj.

The motivation for IS to destroy these artifacts is not chiefly financial, even though it lost a lot of oil revenue in the current fighting in Iraq. The Taliban and al-Qaeda have resorted to this practice as well as a major source of income. The sale of artifacts can be used to raise funds for the fighting which has suffered some setbacks lately. But money does not explain the destruction of religious shrines, whether Christian, Jewish, or Muslim.


Some have speculated that IS wants to provoke the US into a holy war, but that is extremely unlikely, since the West only offered money to help preserve the statues of Buddha and no further aid.

The primary motivation should be sought in the ideology that drives IS. It is largely political, part of a publicity campaign to grab the religious and political leadership mantle in the Middle East.

Although IS self-identifies itself as Islamic, it is not, as I shall argue more extensively in a future posting. Thus it should not be branded with the label Islamic when it is not recognized as such by many Muslims.

IS indeed presents an Islamic face, but its true roots are found in the alliance between self-proclaimed Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and the remnants of Saddam Hussein’s secular Ba’athist regime. It is this alliance that has shaped IS into the monster that the world sees today -- one that destroys ancient artifacts, and even more seriously, executes its enemies in a cold-blooded way that is contrary to Islam. (Watch the video that illustrates this.)

Although Baghadadi clearly presents himself as a Muslim, which is only natural as Caliph, the operational experience of the former Ba'athist senior officers is equally evident in the way the fighting has proceeded thus far. According to one expert, the Ba'athist elements are key and without them IS would not have been able to hold Mosul.

This is a marriage of convenience in which an ostensible religious force is united with a secular or ideological one to such an extent that the result is something which is neither, but instead a new force that shares some of the traits of both, but in which the true Islamic spirit has been lost.


Muslim leaders, whether Sunni or Shia, Salafi or Sufi, conservative or liberal, have almost unanimously condemned and denounced IS not merely as un-Islamic but actively anti-Islamic.The wholesale slaughter of prisoners by IS, although not unknown in the history of Islam, is not true to the Islamic faith, in spite of the protests of many people who know next to nothing about Islam.

A leading Russian opposition leader, Boris Nemtsov. was cruelly murdered in Moscow. He was shot four times as he was crossing a bridge only steps from the Kremlin, which is probably the most secure place in Russia. He was likely under surveillance before a march planned for Sunday. This suggests the killers were professionals, and were not afraid of detection. Nemtsov is survived by his wife and four children.

The murder of such a prominent political figure has not happened in the decades since the breakup of the Soviet Union, although lesser figures have been killed in the violent atmosphere that is endemic in Russia and has been fostered by President Vladimir Putin. Some think this would not be the last killing of an opposition leader in Russia.