Solidarity With Manchester

It was a terrorist act with a difference because apart from causing maximum casualties as it was intended to do from all indications, it was directed at innocent kids.

The safety of the world can no longer be guaranteed given the now wider reach of the bad boys and how far they can go to exterminate lives regardless of the sex or age of their victims using their bad bombs at will.

Our hearts are broken by the bedlam which Manchester, England, was turned to when Salman Abedi decided to kill innocent children who attended a music concert.

The civilised world must come together to fight this evil called extremism. A shocked member of the Islamic community in Manchester while condemning the barbaric act said such murderous acts have no place in Islam, Christianity and, indeed, any faith in the world.

We cannot think of any faith which sanctions the snuffing of life. We are appalled by the sheer volume of the deaths and injuries sustained by the survivors and pray that parents who lost their children will be bestowed with the fortitude by God to bear the loss.

Using ones children under such circumstances at the hands of a crazy man who thinks his place is in paradise not others is painful. We are just wondering the source of the authority to kill and maim. God Almighty is certainly not the source and so if they think so they must be deranged which they are anyway.

We might be thousands of miles away from the epicentre of the massacre but that should not stop us from grieving the death of so many kids. They perhaps did not understand or even know about how the world had become those young creatures of God. If they did, they perhaps thought it was far away in Syria or any of the theatres of war across the world. Their lives were cut short by a disgruntled loner consumed by the fallacy that the British or the West are collectively responsible for the barrel bombs or chemical weapons that are killing innocent kids in Syria and elsewhere.

The Syrian conflict and others raging in the Middle East are beyond the comprehension of the young persons who are so brainwashed that they are ready to end up martyrs as Salman Abedi did.

Much as we appreciate the frustration of some young persons, most of them of Middle Eastern or North African descent about the bloody strife in the Middle East, the double standards of the West – a resort to such barbarism – cannot under any circumstances be an appropriate response.

Any act of barbarism on the scale of the one under review must trigger disturbing circumstances which would affect innocent persons.

In spite of the bloodshed, the people of Manchester have not regretted the diversity of their city and have come out in their numbers- Muslims, Christians to condemn the madness. The people have never for any moment regretted accepting diversity as the way to go for any a civilised society.

Let our clergymen, Muslims and Christians make reference to the nonsense of extremism as their contribution towards making the world a better to live. We have enough of this carnage perpetrated by crazy religious zealots. May the souls of the young angels rest in peace.