Love for all and hatred for none!

ON Wednesday, March 22, 2017, terrorist bombs were detonated at Westminster in London by some suspected Muslim terrorists. This was about the same time that both the US and UK had independently restricted travelers from obviously some given “Islamic countries” doing so to their countries with laptops, smart phones and such other devices. They were reported to be doing these independently of each other, but on sure security risk warnings based on such terrorist activities. Again on Thursday the 6th of April 2017, another “Islamic terrorist” attack involving the driving of a truck with bomb into a crowd in Sweden and killing several people.

Before all of these, Donald Trump had won the USA presidential elections, against all predictions and even expectations in that country. One of his principal campaign points was that he was going to ban all immigration or even travelling to the USA by people from most of these so-called Islamic countries, precisely as the best way to curb all these growing terrorism and especially against the USA. Since Donald Trump got to the American presidency, he has tried to carry out this particular campaign promise, but the judiciary and the opposition have consistently been blocking it. But he would not seem to be ready to give up on that. After all, that was one of his most important campaign promises, upon which he won.

However, on Wednesday, the 29th of March 2017, there was a massive public rally, apparently  by all sorts of people in the UK and said to reflect popular solidarity of the people that in spite of this immediate past Westminster and all the other previous or even future terrorist attacks, all the people are united for peace. Some people in that rally, wearing blue dresses, had inscriptions on them that read “love for all and hatred for none”. There were other interview reports of some of the Muslims on the rally about how they feel about the rally and the solidarity it was displaying. These interviewees kept repeating this well-known cliché that Islam is a religion of peace and not of war and/or terrorism. However, none of these people were able to explain why Islam keeps being the reason for virtually all the international terrorism of the modern world; and what the world should do in that regard.

While all these were going on in the UK, other perhaps smaller rallies and social activisms are being reported from Canada and some parts of the USA about Muslims there wearing t-shirts with inscriptions reading “I am a Muslim, ask me”. Without any serious doubts, the answers that the people will be providing is the same cliché that “Islam is a religion of peace” and that all the terrorisms associated with it are either not true of were just from fake Muslims. How this routine answer solves the problem at hand and its continued growth is what none of these clichés are doing. So, people interested in true world peace are constrained to ask, where do the people think that repeating that lame cliché will take the world to? What are these apparently more genuine Muslims doing to change this  actual fact?

Why would/do many so-called Islamic countries prevent any other people in such countries from having their personally preferred religions and living them openly in such places, as they are trying to do in other peoples’ countries? Why are those people demanding to have full respect of themselves and their religion in other people’s countries but are not similarly fighting or asking such countries to allow other people in their countries to practice their own religions; even quietly in their homes and provided places of their quiet and non-noisemaking worship? This should obviously be the way of world peace; as well as all self-confident and assured/genuine religions that all of us should be praying and working for!

The conclusion from all these mass rallies and the smaller movements as attempts at reducing the tensions that these terrorist acts and the so-called western negative attitudes to Islam, must be one and only one: all lovers of genuine religion across all religions must ask these demonstrators to go beyond those toothless rallies and sloganeering! We must all unite to develop universally accepted answers to all the obvious and growing terrorism. We should be able to do so more peacefully and without any of the currently growing and wasteful western military bombardments going on about it – In Turkey, Afghanistan, Syria, etc. These more honest and genuine efforts will have to include persuading all the countries (especially those where most of the world terrorists go to train themselves) that ban the profession of other faiths; that these should stop. These are obviously the type of things to be brought to the United Nations for universal agreements for genuine universal religious and spiritual freedoms which these United Nations organisations were created in the first place to pursue and to achieve for all the people of the world.

The genuine pursuit of world peace should also include the curbing of the (primary or original) western Secular Humanism and its terrorist anti-God-believing religion and imperialism; which these western world people had been trying to impose on everybody, individually and civilly through their innumerable government and non-governmental organizations. It would appear that most of these so-called “Islamic terrorisms” are the inevitable  responses to these western imperialisms – silent and non-silent, but most clever imperialisms – at the individual country manipulations as well as at the UN and related agencies! These two forms, of well-organised/smooth western atheistic on the one hand and the cruder “Islamic” terrorisms must be curtailed by all lovers of world peace and harmony. It would not appear that the one may be curtailed without the other one as well!

We must all work for a world of all possible but truly peaceful and all-loving religions; not in words but in spirit and in truth! May God Himself help us all to achieve this needed world peace and mutually loving and supporting religions and individual spiritualities? Such kingdom of God situations on the earth are obviously possible; but only with such diverse, peaceful, “love for all and hate for none” and mutually respectful religions!

• Asuzu is Professor of Public Health and Community Medicine at the University of Ibadan