Resurgence of Excessive Brutality: Are We Beefing Up Against The Wrong Enemy?

Asks Benson Agoha

A day after a lone gunman took 17 people hostage in a Sidney Cafe, the world woke up to another horror of unimaginable proportion. The Martin Place attack resulted in a 16 hour face-off with special forces, and ended only after he was shot dead.

If the incidence inside the Lindt Cafe shop resulted in 3 deaths, the shooting of 100 school children in a military school by the Taliban, only a day later, has brought a whole new dimension to an unraveling scenario on which, no one as yet, has a proper grip.

Across the plane in the middle east, the Islamic State, in their on-going drive to unleash as much mayhem on perceived enemies as possible, has reportedly killed several women (a reported 150) and buried them in mass graves - for refusing orders to marry militants. This was in addition to the thousands of unarmed civilians, already similarly killed, for either not being converts or for having sympathy for other faiths.

How come our values for human lives have taken such ignominious dimension? When a Mexican gang beheaded a woman for infidelity, and posted it on Facebook, the rebuke by Prime Minister David Cameron led to its immediate removal. Yet, the Islamic state had gone ahead to behead not one or two, but a minimum of five Western aid workers, captured and held as hostages, then posted the video on social websites.

Excessive and despicable brutality appears to have pushed its way to the fore. Reports say, the Taliban attack on school children did not just end in gun shots, but that some bodies were seen with there heads already hacked off.

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