Hostages to horror and atrocity
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But Indian schoolkids and Australian netizens showed us this week that humanity is not yet a lost cause
It seems that everywhere you turn nowadays there is horror, tragedy, and fanatics on the loose.
Political and religious hatreds have risen to a point where people no longer make a distinction between faith and logic. Common humanity is out of fashion.
Political differences have descended into tribal violence and senseless killing, as the world has been witnessing in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia for quite some time now. And religion has been used to justify the atrocities.
The scary thing is that an end game is nowhere in sight. Governments and societies the world over have been drawn into this unholy tangle of religion, politics and brutality.
Yet judging by the reaction of the Australia public and the outpouring of moral support for Pakistanis from their Indian neighbours this week, there is hope for humanity.
The massacre in Peshawar and the hostage crisis in Sydney demonstrated that this is no “clash of civilisations”, as some erroneously call it. In fact the picture is far more complex and not confined to any one particular army or militant group. The role now being played by so-called “lone wolves” – self-radicalised fanatics – has complicated things further.
A local militia was responsible for Tuesday’s attack in Pakistan. Peshawar is no stranger to violence, but the Pakistani Taleban’s attack on the school for children of army personnel is without precedent in that country. Going classroom to classroom, the gunmen murdered 145 – most of them children and many shot at point-blank range in the head. One teacher was burned alive.
Compounding the horror, and suggesting that more such atrocities could follow, was the Pakistani Taleban’s eagerness to justify their action.
“We selected the army’s school for the attack because the government is targeting our families and females,” Muhammad Khurasani, the group’s spokesman, was quoted by Reuters news agency as saying. “We want them to feel the pain.”
Khurasani was referring to the June 2014 assault on the Pakistani Taleban by government forces in an operation that ended in the death of 1,800 militants.
The Pakistan government responded swiftly to Tuesday’s massacre, with air strikes on Taleban strongholds, while a groundswell of outrage gripped the public. But these enemies of the state have demonstrated there is no limit to the brutality they will use to meet violence with violence.
However, amid the bleakest despair, hope always emerges. This week, schoolchildren in neighbouring India came out to show solidarity with their counterparts in Pakistan. The international community stood with the Pakistani public in voicing abhorrence of the militants’ action.
In Australia, people from all walks of life expressed solidarity with their Muslim fellows, after an Iranian immigrant took 17 people hostage in a downtown coffee shop.
Taking to the social media in their thousands, Australians attempted to head off any anti-Islam backlash by rallying around the “#illridewithyou” hashtag.
It started when Facebook user Rachel Jacobs saw the Muslim woman sitting next to her on a train in Sydney quietly take off her headscarf.
“I ran after her at the train station. I said ‘put it back on. I’ll walk with u’,” Jacobs wrote on Facebook. “She started to cry and hugged me for about a minute – then walked off alone.”
Not long after, the hashtag went viral as Australians reached out to their Muslim compatriots.
“Mine was a very brief encounter – a small gesture to a stranger in response to the sadness that I felt that someone would ever feel unsafe or unwelcome because of their beliefs,” Jacobs wrote.
Solidarity and courage: The students of India and social-media users in Australia have shown us the way. Humanity is not yet a lost cause.
