Julie and Len are here. Marty and Brian are here. The fun and games and partying has begun. It will last all the way through the weekend and on to Monday and Tuesday. The wine is already flowing and gorging has already commenced. For training, it was rest day today for me.
Sad news came from Paris today. There were coordinated terror attacks on the general public at theaters and stadiums. It was all done in the name of Islam. It makes me angry and upset to see terrorists hiding behind religion to rile up emotions. Religion or not, terrorists are terrorists. Country or not, war is war.
There are an estimated 1.6 billion Muslims in the world today. You may have read or heard that a majority of Muslims support ISIS. This is absolutely not true. Most Muslims are peace-loving people but there are extremists in every religion. In the present times, Islam unfortunately seems to have a lot more extremists than other religions. A few thousand ative extremists can carry out a few dozen attacks and the entire 1.6 billion population of mostly peace-loving Muslims face the wrath of the world (mostly the west). The results are predictable. War, war and more war. This will only lead to terrorism, terrorism and more terrorism. The cycle is never-ending.
It is not an easy problem to solve. Today’s politicians have strong rhetorics centered mostly around attacking terror cells and eradicating terrorism through force. Unfortunately, that’s what people want to hear. It all sounds great in theory but if you kill a terrorist, you are simply giving rise to ten more!
So what is the solution? This may sound naive to you but in the short term, the solution is more and more tolerance and forgiveness. In the long term, the solution is the spreading the religion of economics. If the citizens of the world can somehow figure out how to uplift all peoples from all religions, races, colors and creeds, it will automatically decrease conflict. Hence, the goal should be economic prosperity for all and not war. That’s my 2-cents worth.
As for Paris, of course we are sad and are with the victims of violence; much as we are with the victims of violence from any terror act or act or war.