A harvest of hate!
Nice death toll 84?
Editorial. In Indian Express, July 16, 2016 – From Nice comes another terrible image of a war of attrition with no geographic core
Note: Destroy and rebuild, (destroy oppression, rebuild freedoms) were the two-fold goals of French revolution. Bastille, the prison, was the symbol of oppression which the revolutionaries crushed on July 14, 1789 and put to the Guillotine, (machine to chop off heads fast) the royalty of the times who wanted to rule by Divine Rights. It was the dawn of secularism, liberty, equality, universality and unity, which the French observe as their national day. It was that celebration which the terror strike in Nice bathed in the blood of 84 dead and hundreds critically wounded. The political ideology that appeared as the Islamic state in 2014, is said to be the driving force behind these terror attacks. Even the military coup taking place in Turkey now is also said to be guided by a Muslim cleric living in US. It only shows no geographical borders can stop ideologies to travel to and fro and spread in this internet age. The simple truth is Islam inspired radical violence should be fought only by more attractive and powerful ideologies of peace, friendship and collaboration, not by weapons of blood shed and death.
Probably it was for this purpose France went ahead banning all religious symbols like Muslim headscarves, along with Christian crosses, Jewish skullcaps and Sikh turbans in schools. This was countered by Islamic State spokesperson Muhammad al-Adnani who ordered to kill all unbelieving Americans, “filty French”, the Spanish, Europeans and march ahead with Allah’s blessings to conquer Rome, White House, Big Ben, and the Eiffel Tower”. Now it is for the peace 
loving free peoples of the world to come out with ideological counters capable of blunting the edge and taking all the sting and attraction from the ISIS propaganda. Immediate need of the hour is to reduce the repeated blood baths around the globe to a war of words without animosity and then to a dialogue between well wishers. james kottoor, editor)
For more than a hundred years, France has celebrated July 14, 1789 — the day the citizens of Paris stormed the hated Bastille prison, freeing four forgers, two lunatics and an aristocratic sexual deviant, but setting in play great forces of history which would destroy the divine right of kings to rule and establish the principle of the equality of humans, and sever religion from the state.
It will now also be marked as a day of mourning, to remember the more than 80 people killed on Nice’s Promenade de Anglais, as they celebrated France’s secular heritage. Little is known about the attacker, who is thought to be a French national of Tunisian origin, with a record of criminal acts. Though Islamic State social media accounts have exulted at the killings, there is no evidence the group was directly involved — and in critical senses, it does not matter. French President François Hollande has blamed the killings on “Islamist extremism”. He is right to identify a political ideology, rather than a religion or group, as the adversary.
France’s aggressive, often controversial, efforts to keep religion out of the public space — for example, by prohibiting Muslim headscarves, along with Christian crosses, Jewish skullcaps and Sikh turbans in schools — makes it a kind of polar opposite of the Islamic State’s effort to impose God’s order on earth. Thus, in September 2014, Islamic State spokesperson Muhammad al-Adnani ordered, followers to kill any “disbelieving American or European — especially the spiteful and filthy French”. Thus, in January, 2015, al-Adnani asked the world to “know that we want Paris, by Allah’s permission, before we want Rome, and before Spain, after we blacken your lives and destroy the White House, Big Ben, and the Eiffel Tower”.
The Islamic State is, at its core, an agent of counter-revolution against the ideals of the French Revolution, which have spread across the world. Today, as the world gazes at the carnage in Nice — coming just eight months after the attacks in Paris, at the end of a long line of massacres that have bloodied cities from Malaysia to the United States — it may well be that more slaughter will follow. As a territorial entity, the caliphate is collapsing, under relentless military assault. The Islamic State is now preparing, like al Qaeda before it, for a long war of attrition that has no geographic core. It has planted the seeds, and is witnessing the harvest: Hate is a robust plant, and needs no special soil, nor a gardener’s tending, to flower.
