You may have read about this. The suggestion, on social media, that people should publish photographs of their cats rather than recirculate and retweet images of the Barcelona terrorist attack.
These mindless terrorists (do they know what they really want?) would be pleased to know, if they had survived, that reports of their exploits were widely published, internationally, and the events reported on in minute detail. All these reports get back to ISIS leadership. They fuel their confidence. They fuel the desire to carry on and create more mayhem. They encourage others to join them in their mindless pursuit of the destruction of the way of life in the West.
There is no better panacea to that horrific carnage than pictures of cats, the most popular genre of photography on the Internet. They are almost diametrically opposed to pictures of the victims of the Barcelona terrorist attack.
It is worrying, to me, that people in the West are becoming a accustomed to the indiscriminate bombings of innocent people including children, and tourists being mown down by speeding vehicles on pedestrianised roadways. We are getting used to it. It happens so often. We learn almost to accept it and I think this is dangerous.
We need a new strategy to deal with these attacks. The strategy should have many strands to it and one of them is to educate Muslims on how to interpret the Koran in a non-violent and non-misogynistic way. A lot more can be done by the leaders within the Muslim faith to turn young men away from violence in the name of their religion. They misinterpret the Koran to suit their own ends.
And I think we need to enter into a dialogue of some sort with the terrorists even if it does seem utterly ridiculous to do so because we can’t go on like this. They are ruining too many lives and I include those of us who are spectators. They undermine society. Dialogue does not mean giving in. It means finding solutions to stop the carnage. We can’t go on like this for 30 more years.
