We all have our limits, and we all have those people in our lives who know how to lead us past that personal tripwire.They are the button-pushers, the psychological assassins who can bring us to our knees through emotional destruction, triggering pride, anger and fear the way no amount of physical pain can.
The mind is humanity’s single greatest strength and it’s most vulnerable target, capable of absolute control over another and the ability to be utterly defeated with a word, a memory, a threat.
Since the dawn of man, it is manipulation that has caused rifts in families, between countries, and between opposing faiths.
Faith and religion, especially, has been the easy target at which those psychological assassins have aimed their weapons, fixing on the fastest route to someone’s Achilles’ heel through the mysticism of the heart.
Americans, Europeans, Christians, do not react to the desecration of Jesus or the God that the Western world knows the way Muslims do.
That is not a judgment against one side or the other, but an observation, and, ultimately, an idea those responsible for this latest uprising are well aware of. “Those responsible” seems like a loose idea, but it’s not, as this is clearly what is going on today, and in all likelihood the cause of the attack on the U.S. Embassy in Libya, where four Americans were killed.
As of Thursday morning, this tidal wave of Islamist unrest has spread to Yemen, Egypt, Iraq, Morocco, Sudan and Tunisia.
All of this violence, this growing fire threatening to ignite the ever-present Middle Eastern powder keg, was sparked in the West — not at all that far from us, in fact — by a 13-minute YouTube video.
It’s difficult for the Western mind to understand how maligning, criticizing or spoofing a religious leader can elicit as much anger and unleash as much violent fury as has been wrought throughout the Arab world since Tuesday.
Yet the headlines of the moment provide the proof that this is theological manipulation of which we are all willing participants, part of a carefully orchestrated campaign of chaos to pit extreme ideologies against one another, traced back to a viral Internet video produced in Southern California earlier this summer by a member of the Coptic diaspora, the outspoken native Christians of Egypt who believe Islam to be an abomination.
What the news is not communicating is this unrest is the result of fringe Christians artificially inflaming fringe Islamists, two extreme, bankrupt versions of differing faiths helping to incite more strife, more East vs. West, Jesus vs. Allah, Everybody vs. the United States.
This video, which casts the Prophet Muhammad as a murderous pedophile, is taunting and poking at the most fundamental, deeply held part of many Muslims’ faith — the idea that thou shall not speak ill, defame, characterize, or even depict the Prophet. It’s a basic tenet of Islam, and one of the fastest ways to bring a people to anger — violent, irrational, irresponsible anger.
This video was not making its point when it was posted to YouTube in June. However, when translated to Arabic, posted twice more and promoted by extreme Islamic clerics and known terrorists, the video caught fire just in time for the 11th anniversary of 9/11.
In the end, every flesh, blood and bone human being involved in this, whether it be an angry young Muslim burning a U.S. flag on the streets of Yemen today, or a disconnected Westerner posting another American eagle meme on Facebook calling for the carpet-bombing of the Middle East, we’re all reacting exactly how we’re supposed to be reacting.
Manipulated. Again and again. It’s the destructive forces of faith pulling our puppet strings, eliciting our reactions and driving our responses. Religion, religious tension, religion as the bait to keep humanity divided, fueling war abroad, war in the halls of government, war between friends and family, keeping humanity out of balance, off-kilter, angry and seething for revenge. Many see it, many more don’t.
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