This refers to the unfortunate incident in the US where a Saudi scholarship student, Abdullah Alkadi, was brutally killed, and whose body was found more than a month after he had gone missing. (“Student’s death in US: Cousin reveals details,” Oct. 20)
Al-Qaeda and other faces of terror like Anders Behring Breivik may be the perpetrators of the crudest form of hate crime and terror, but the roots of such hatred may be found in the minds of several such elements living in the society whether they be in America or in parts of Europe.
Recently an innocent American was killed in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, by an unknown person, who may not be affiliated with Al-Qaeda, but is surely explosive enough to burst like IS radicals from nowhere.
If left unchecked, these seeds of hostility grow to take a shape, the kind of which we currently see in Boko Haram in Nigeria, IS radical group in Syria and Iraq, Taleban in Pakistan or radical Hindu groups like Vishwa Hindu Parishad in India.
A greater problem is our approach and policies while dealing with such a crisis.
We keep targeting these groups while simply ignore the germination of such elements within us, within our society — a specter that is quietly growing to take an ugly shape in future.
And in many cases we nourish such elements. It is now an open secret that Osama Bin Laden was propped up by CIA of the US. Taleban too were a US creation to deal with the Russian forces in Afghanistan. When the embers of fire that you nurture begin burning your own hands you call them evil forces and terrorists that need to be destroyed.
The world, the US in particular, talks about terrorism in the Muslim countries, but will never pay attention to the growing tide of Islamophobia in the European countries. Such a partial approach to deal with the widening atmosphere of hatred will yield hardly any tangible results.
The world needs a global approach to deal with this phenomenon of hatred. We need to nip such a culture in the bud, if we really want to usher in a better future and more civilized world. — Bakhtiyar Khan, Riyadh
The rising tide of hatred
