* A mantra in Voltaire’s “Candide”, a satire against utopian optimism.
For the past twelve days Israeli have lived like the British, the French or the Americans, without the need to look for a shelter and run for cover. The 30-day cease fire interrupting rocket launches from Gaza to which Hamas, Jihad and Israel have agreed under Egyptian auspices is holding. As the involved parties keep radio silence, it may well be that under the cover of secrecy some sort of arrangement is underway. “All for the best?”
Suddenly headlines have turned to the forceful territorial control by Sunni Moslem ISIS (alias ISIL, Day’esh) of Northern Syria and Iraq, through ritual massacres against Yazidis, Shia Moslems and Kurds (Sunni), topped by the sacrificial beheading of two Infidel journalists. Fierce fighting in the Syrian Golan, near the Israeli border, opposes Syrian President Bashar El-Assad troops (Alawis, a Shia break away sect) and Sunni Jabhat El Nusra rebels who overran UN peace keeping units, abducting 43 UN soldiers from Fiji.
Headlines can now feed on the mass murders in Libya, where apparently tribal rivalry is the source of the conflict. Next on the list we have the fighting in Eastern Ukraine, a conflict that Samuel Huntington predicted many years ago in his “Clash of Civilizations” on the basis of ethnic cultural differences. Are we really “in the best of all possible worlds?”
fabrexo 