Fanaticism, Terrorism, Love and "The Way"

I was sent the paper below in a chain email. I was not sure how to react to it. It asks questions and does not provide answers. This is precisely what Socrates, Confucius and others asked of their pupils down the ages. So I thought.

The answer I arrived at was not original, “love is all there is”. Violence exists as an inevitable consequence of it's withdrawal . Mankind has existed on this planet for approximately 2.5 million years, + or – half a million years. For most of that time man was a hunter gatherer operating in loose family/tribal groups with no concept of individual property. Only since “peaceful” farmers came to be did man develop the concept of property.

Cultivating nature, rather than accepting it as it is, requires man to make three new differentiations in plants, animals and other human beings: plants become crops or weeds; animals, become food or vermin; people become friends or enemies. Only with our “own” land to cultivate and develop do we seek the exclusions from "our" part of the planet these differentations imply. We then need laws to protect "our property" from the invasion by others: weeds, vermin, thieves and enemies. This requires a state to administer the policeman, judges, lawyers, soldiers then needed.

In hunter-gather societies social exclusion is a death sentence. Without social support a child, an older person,or somebody that is ill or injured face inevitable death before their due time. Without the love of others we can not exist. It is no wonder that we fear exclusion. Ask yourself why so many battered wife's accept their situation rather than escape from it. In the modern world they can. The answer given is out of fear but ask fear of what exclusion or their husbands fist.

In the absence of love violence is the only means for the excluded to re-establish the human at-one-ment that is their right, our gift from the universe.

The Nazi's are quoted in the paper I was sent. Hitler and most of his active supporters were excludees from German society and of course after World War I the whole German people were excluded from membership of our wider human community. This was highly fertile ground for what then occurred yet note it produced one of the most beautiful loving books ever written “Man's Search for Reason” by Frankl the Jewish professor of pyschiatry at the University of Vienna who spent the war in Auschwitz and lost every single member of his family to the final solution including his wife and children but alone argued for the re-enstatement of a Nazi to the university after the war. Read this to know love.
American's to the rest of the world particularly their former enemies, after World War II, the Marshall Plan. This has all but eliminated Germany or Japan as potential enemies of the US or for that matter anybody else in the modern world.

In the paper below the silent majority are rightly observed to be the real culprits not the isolated minority of social outcasts, “terrorists who are fighting to be let back in. Love is an active business not an activity of the mind. Feeling love is not love. Love requires active unselfish giving of real things, physical succour and support, no matter the response of others. In action is thus a withdrawal of such love. The solution to the problem surely is not further exclusion but to make the excluded integral appreciated parts of humanity. America showed the way after World War II.

In the end there is only love. The Prophet himself, may his memory be blessed, knew this as no other. He saw Christians Catholic and Orthodox slaughtering each other in huge numbers in the Balkans in the name of the all loving all giving one all powerful God. He asked how this could be? God gave his answer directly, the Koran, as he had given it to Moses before in a shorter version, the Ten Commandments. Love God and follow his will as he directs you as an individual not as others interpret him and there is only love.

Conflict can not exist in a world where this is true for then there is only at-one-ment and atonement achieved. This is God's message in the Koran.


Individual human being are limited in their capacity to truly understand God's word in a language other than their own. However the people of the Book and human experience bears out that giving true love (unselfish care succour and support) inevitably results in receive love in kind as an unexpected reward. The Koran asks Muslims to do just this and no more.

Exclusion, inclusive of inaction, is as much a withdrawal of love as aggression


I BELIEVE THE FOLLOWING IS A "MUST READ."

A man whose family was German aristocracy prior to World War Two owned number of large industries and estates. When asked how many German people were true Nazis, the answer he gave can guide our attitude toward fanaticism.

"Very few people were true Nazis "he said," but many enjoyed the return
of German pride, and many more were too busy to care. I was one of those who
just thought the Nazis were a bunch of fools. So, the majority just sat
back and let it all happen. Then, before we knew it, they owned us, and we
had lost control, and the end of the world had come. My family lost
everything. I ended up in a concentration camp and the Allies destroyed my
factories."

We are told again and again by "experts" and "talking heads" that Islam is
the religion of peace, and that the vast majority of Muslims just want
to live in peace. Although this unqualified assertion may be true, it is
entirely irrelevant. It is meaningless fluff, meant to make us feel
better,and meant to somehow diminish the spectre of fanatics rampaging across
the globe in the name of Islam.

The fact is that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history. It
is the fanatics who march. It is the fanatics who wage any one of 50
shooting wars worldwide. It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter
Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave. It is the fanatics who bomb, behead,
murder, or honour kill. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque.

The hard quantifiable fact is that the "peaceful majority" the "silent
majority" is cowed and extraneous. Communist Russia comprised Russians
who just wanted to live in peace, yet the Russian Communists were responsible
for the murder of about 20 million people. The peaceful majority were
irrelevant.

China's huge population, it was peaceful as well, but Chinese Communists
managed to kill a staggering 70 million people. The average Japanese
individual prior to World War 2 was not a warmongering sadist. Yet,
Japan murdered and slaughtered its way across South East Asia in an orgy of
killing that included the systematic murder of 12 million Chinese civilians;
most killed by sword, shovel and bayonet. And, who can forget Rwanda,
which collapsed into butchery. Could it not be said that the majority of
Rwandans were "peace loving"?

History lessons are often incredibly simple and blunt, yet for all our
powers of reason we often miss the most basic and uncomplicated of
points: Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence.
Peace-loving Muslims will become our enemy if they don't speak up,
because like my friend from Germany, they will awake one day and find that the
fanatics own them, and the end of their world will have begun.

Peace-loving Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Rwandans, Serbs,
Afghans,Iraqis, Palestinians, Somalis, Nigerians, Algerians, and many others
have died because the peaceful majority did not speak up until it was too
late. As for us who watch it all unfold; we must pay attention to the only
group that counts; the fanatics who threaten our way of life.

Lastly, at the risk of offending, anyone who doubts that the issue is
serious and just deletes this email without sending it on, can contribute to
the passiveness that allows the problems to expand. So, extend yourself
a bit and send this on and on and on!! Let us hope that thousands, world
wide, read this - think about it - and send it on.