Kenya mall attack terrorists are evil thugs, not animals

THE behaviour of human beings is plummeting at an ever increasing speed into the extreme depths of depravity.

In the last century, many wars saw countless millions of innocent people annihilated in appalling circumstances, but terrorist attacks of more recent times seem determined to make these conflicts seem almost reasonable as they inflict unimaginable horrors on their fellow men.

In the latest terrorist abomination – the attack on the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya – terrorists gunned down totally innocent men, women and children and claimed they were sending some sort of religious message.

A British businessman, whose wife and daughter were amongst those murdered, probably understandably, said: “The people who did this are animals.”

No, they were not animals! Animals simply do not behave like this, this was the sickening behaviour of depraved, evil thugs who call themselves human beings and believe they are superior but who do not deserve to belong to any class of living creature.

Animals do not attempt to destroy millions of others; they do not attempt to impose their views on others; they do not torture or wilfully impart pain and death to show their perceived superiority; they do not die in order to take many lives of others with them and when they do kill to eat, even in this respect, their behaviour is superior to that of humans.

Where we transport animals for many miles to be killed, often in dreadful fear as their superior senses have informed them of their fate; where animals are killed accompanied with bizarre religious rituals; where animals are transported hundreds of miles to meet their fate, this is not animal behaviour but the dreadful behaviour of human beings, no such cruelty is shown by animals. The prey of an animal is not subjected to hours of fear as he is totally unaware he is being hunted until the final moments of his life when death is quick and humane.

And what about the appalling butchery of such magnificent creatures as elephants and rhinoceros? Is this the behaviour of animals? How do we excuse this? Elephants are destroyed by poachers for their ivory tusks purely to satisfy the greed of humans, and rhinoceros for their horns in the sickening belief that their horns, made of keratin the same as our fingernails, have magical properties. How can humans believe they are superior to other creatures when they behave so disgracefully? If God made human beings in his image, we are not living up to his wishes.

From: John Watson, Hutton Hill, Leyburn.

AS a lifelong Christian, though not a churchgoer, it really does test my faith when the Archbishop of Canterbury says that not only must we pray for those who lost their loved ones who were slaughtered in Kenya for no apparent reason but we must pray for those who carried out this atrocity.

Never in a million years would I do that, neither would I pray for those members of the Taliban who murdered 80 Christians in Pakistan. When Justin Welby became Archbishop of Canterbury, I thought that, at last, we have got a man as head of the Anglican Church who approaches things in a more pragmatic way than what has happened in the past.

No. We have to pray for every Tom, Dick and Harry – whatever they have done.