The Abyss of Humanity

We were all shocked on Friday by an unusual terrorist incident in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, specifically in the village of Karak, where three gunmen opened fire on crowds gathering at St. George’s Church, leaving seven people dead and dozens injured. Why didn’t any of the terrorists choose to wake up to the autumn breeze of Jordan and its cool air, head to the nearest bakery for fresh pastries to choose what delights them and their families, buy a cup of black coffee while greeting the morning with “Good morning” and a smile, then return home to sit at a round table with their loved ones, savor their meal, listen attentively to the sweet, nostalgic voice of Tawfiq al-Nimri, and watch the colorful birds flitting around the neighborhood? I imagine the beauty of that moment, which that terrorist could never have known. Blinded by his dark worldview, he reduced humanity to a binary: whether people deserve death or not. The abyss of such ideas, the delusion of the mind, and the flawed reasoning that leads someone to pull the trigger on people whose names we don’t even know—people who are highly likely to die themselves—can only be committed by a madman. Ideas lead to madness. I wonder, bewildered, how a human being can choose a path of misery because of an abstract, intangible idea that will never improve his bitter reality, instead of experiencing a peaceful morning that could bring a day filled with tranquility. The greatest enemy of humanity is the human mind and its illusion of achieving a victory that exists only in one’s head. Defending an idea that is not truly an idea, and sacrificing oneself for a cause that has nothing to do with one’s own life, represent the pinnacle of human intellectual absurdity, as Iraqi thinker Ali al-Wardi also concluded. How terrifying it is for an idea to lead to your own destruction and death, or for you to commit a catastrophe or massacre simply because you harbor hatred toward a certain group. Oh, wretched one, you despicable individual, who have committed atrocities against others, devalued your own worth and humanity, and become a pawn for an ideology you do not truly possess. The result is that you are zero in the human equation, because you have produced nothing but hatred, which cannot even build a single brick. Go, then, you criminal, to the gallows of justice; all of humanity rejects you, and you will remain cursed in the memory of hell and its eternal flames.