Christchurch carnage

No place in this world is safe today,

Criminals and terrorists are on the prowl;

Mosques were once upon places of shelter,

Alas, today even mosques have become unsafe.

The above couplet, translated from Urdu appropriately captures the angst at yesterday’s shoot out at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand that killed 49 Muslims present there for Friday Namaz.

New Zealand, till yesterday, was considered a highly safe and peaceful country of around 5 million people, including immigrants of various nationalities and religions. However, a fanatic chose to go berserk and motivated to act criminally by some faulty ideology, killed 49 innocent persons in cold blood. And these faulty ideologies are prevalent across the world propagating fanaticism and intolerance. Some youngsters get so much brainwashed by these teachings that they perpetrate acts of barbarism like one witnessed yesterday.

Let countries learn their lessons quickly and destroy all infrastructure on their respective lands that is fostering future fanatics and terrorists. Let no country support such ideologies and infrastructure, whatever be the cause justifying propagation of such ideologies and resultant acts. In today’s times, words like jihad, holy war, dharma yudh etc have no relevance and whether the cause is Kashmir, Khalistan, Palestine or even cow slaughter, no cause is big enough to justify encouragement to such elements. Let the nations of the world unify on this aspect and take vow to uproot terrorism in all forms and of all hues and ideologies to make this world a safer place. Let the entire world become peaceful, beautiful and tolerant like New Zealand instead of NZ becoming a terrorism infested place like several other places in the world.