Saturday, December 06, 2008

Terrorists... Are they even human?

The recent terror attacks in Mumbai has been thoroughly reported here in Singapore, with the Straits Times and Today Newspaper running articles on it for consecutive days, hogging all the headlines. Not least because one of the casualties in this horrifying incident was a Singaporean.

To us sheltered and pampered Singaporeans, this piece of news was shocking, sad, but sobering at the same time. All these while, the many terror events unfolding in various parts of the world, though reported over the same news channels (ie. newspapers and TV, radio, internet), felt like events that was a little too far away to have any real impact on our lives. We sympathised with the victims but there just wasnt that "connection". It was almost like watching a well-crafted tragedy drama unfolding on your TV. You feel for the characters on screen, you can sometimes even shed tears because of the sense of injustice your feel for them. Yet, they remained merely "characters" who had no link to the reality you are living in - ie. in safe, sunny Singapore.

Well, not anymore.

The death of Ms Lo Hwei Yen caused such a stir amongst the citizenry of this little island, not merely because of the tragic-ness of her demise. The shockwaves are also a result of many us waking up to the sense of renewed awareness of the ugly truth - that terrorism is EVERYWHERE.

My personal thought at this point is: Are these so-called "terrorists" even human? They may seem human on the outside; they walk like us, talk like us, breath like us, feed like us... Yet, they do not share the most BASIC of social norms as us (ie. human beings in general), that is - the respect for another human's right to live.

Their way of life and their thinking is SO drastically different from the typical human being, that it seemed almost farcical that we consider them as human beings. Just because they look like human does not make them human.

Boy, if I were to make a Hollywood movie, I'd definitely spin a story along these lines.... That these terrorists are actually a form of virus, mutated from a strain long-believed extinct (or exterminated) centuries ago. Either that, or they are actually aliens sent from another dimension, disguised in the form of us humans, so that they could mingle amongst us, learn our weaknesses, with the single objective of wiping out the entire human population on Earth. :PP

Anyway, if you asked me, all us REAL human beings on Earth ought to band together and rid the planet of this scourge once and for all. We should stop thinking of them as "human beings".

Their acts have shown us that they are not.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Just a thought...maybe it's precisely they're humans, that's why they are capable of such acts.

Animals/beasts/non-humans are not capable of such nonsense. Only us, homo sapiens, can do it. Or feel the need and motivation to do such stuff.

1:44 AM  
Blogger 北海道的大黑熊 said...

Actually, I was more thinking of them as aliens - not from this Earth.

For any creature to feel such need and motivation to cold-bloodedly destroy lives of other sentient beings (animals included) without any reason, guilt or remorse, I'd classify this creature as "something out of this Earth".

They just cant be human...

6:46 PM  

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