In my mind I see a vast flood delta being fed by streams and rivers, small and vast, flowing thick with blood, bullets and bombs, propelled by bigotry and bile.
The vision first appeared in my brainbox whilst watching a Sky News report about Michael Adebolajo, the suspected killer of the British soldier Lee Rigby. My eyes dropped to the news banner running along bottom of the screen, which declared that 50 people had been killed in a wave of car bombings in Baghdad.
Each family will mourn their dead with equal love and loss, but sadly each death will be exploited by others to speed the flow of the river.
There’s enough hate around at the moment to fill an ocean. The dangerous idiots at the English Defence League (EDL) have taken Rigby’s murder and turned it into a pogrom, attacking mosques in England in a bid to incite civil war.
English society usually enjoys an innate acceptance of differences, but bigotry buds are collectively buzzing at the moment, because bank balances are empty.
In Greece the Troika’s austerity programme has spawned xenophobic hatred in the shape of the fascist Golden Dawn party, while here in Ireland reaction is tempered by the same conservatism entrenched in the minds of Middle England, which dictates that when things go wrong, you blame your societal fringes.
Blaming foreigners comes quickly and easy to the English and the Irish. Nigel Farage’s UK Independence Party (UKIP) performed incredibly well at recent local elections, because UKIP say exactly what small-minded people think but dare not speak out loud.
Standing outside a pub with a pint in one hand, a ciggie in the other, Farage talks engagingly and clearly about how he has nothing against them personally, there’s just too many people on one small island, and it’s only fair that English society prioritises jobs for the English, because you have to look after your own first.
It’s a horribly tortuous river that flows from Farage’s pint to the destruction of Fallujah, onwards to Helmand Province and the murder of Lee Rigby, but the painful truth is that war will come home. You simply cannot wage war in foreign countries and expect no reprisal in your own. I learned that as a teenager, when the IRA brought their bombs to my London school route.
When hatred flows, common sense and perspective disappear. Violent young things with more balls than brains go out and sign up to the EDL, so they can burn mosques, because the flow of their ignorant hatred tells them that Muslims have it coming, because they killed that solider on the streets of London.
Meanwhile, the self-styled ‘silent majority’ who live behind the privet-hedges of Middle England have their darkest suspicions and deepest-felt grudges legitimised by UKIP’s electoral success.
Rivers of bigotry flowing in all directions.
Here in Ireland I see friends posting on Facebook how the act of one Muslim doesn’t mean that Islam as a whole is bad. I write and then delete a comment asking why that simple truth escapes them each time they post articles about Israeli actions against Palestinians?
Do they really think that the opinions of a crazed West Bank settler or the military actions of Bibi Netanyahu truly represent the wishes of the entire Israeli population? Just like the rest of us, my friends are being selective in the application of their truths.
If they are humane enough to care about the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, then they can at least imagine what it might be like to live surrounded by countries sworn to your destruction.
This reflexive anti-Israeli movement in Ireland appears to care only for the Palestinians who live in Gaza and the West Bank. Maybe it's more important to hate Israel than it is to support the Palestinian people as a whole, because nobody here seems to care about the poor Palestinians coming under fire from all sides in Syria.
I say ‘all’ sides, because nobody's exactly sure of what constitutes the Free Syrian Army. Even the BBC have reverted to calling them ‘Rebels.’
Tragically the Palestinians are only one of many Middle-Eastern populations being bombarded by hate. As Assad tried to unite his severed country by inciting hatred against Israel, the Druzes in the Golan Heights are stockpiling food and water, preparing to be flooded by war. The Kurds have the most hopeless of homelands, crossing so many lines drawn in the sand by old European overlords their dreams of independence appear impossible. All of a sudden the safe haven that Syrian refugees once found in Turkey exists no more, as the people of Turkey are at last fighting back against entrenched government corruption.
Fresh blood bringing new death flowing down our rivers of hatred. From the tragic spew of a drummer’s blood on a London pavement we arrive finally at the delta of this putrid river.
Just before it empties into the ocean of all-out international war, our swollen blood river splits in two.
One branch is the Iranian river, armed with support for Syria’s President Assad and the regime it has supported for decades. Flowing downstream here, alongside Assad, come Hezbollah, funded and armed by Iran, fighting the Free Syrian Army alongside Assad’s forces. Far away, the source of this river hides in a vast range of dark Russian mountains.
Gushing along in the other river branch flows the blood of the rebels that fight Assad and Hezbollah, covertly supported by Israel, the USA, and those bloodthirsty countries of the EU who just can’t wait to get involved in another war, even though they have no idea who they might be arming.
The two rivers meet and flood the delta with a messy tragedy of hate, where NATO can back the rebels as an excuse to wage war with Iran.
It might seem a long way from your well-intentioned post on Facebook to Armageddon, but from such misplaced droplets, fearsome rivers of destruction flow.
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