Islam Imploding

The Islamist Springboard masquerading as a more palatable, understandable 'Arab Spring' has launched the Arab and Muslim world into a self-destructive scenario of unimaginable dimensions and incalculable self-harm. The potent mixture of the heritage of Islam, the uniting of disparate, warring Bedouin tribes into a unity of all-conquering religious devotion, intent on looking outward to wage their war of divine conquest as a diversion from their historic animosity between themselves has gone full circle.

The religion that once defined and united them, has now fully disunited them. The split between the two major sectarian factions of Shia and Sunni has been transformed from its low-explosive potential to full-blown status as the defining and dividing line between believers and heretics. The designation of believer and heretic is fully exchangeable; the Sunnis invested in the belief that they and they only represent the true flame of Islamic purity, and the Shia convinced that the Sunnis are blasphemers.

Each sets out now to destroy the other. And they are doing a very creditable job of it, in the process slaughtering one another, and triumphing for the reflection of Islam that they alone represent. Islamism, a robustly rabid orthodoxy that will not accept the possibility that all within Islam are devoted to the worship of their one true god, is on a rapacious rampage to do honour to that one true god which they only represent in complete and honourable fealty.

All others must perish to satisfy the stern demands of jihad, a mainstay of pure Islamic philosophy. By dispatching pretenders to Islam, the Islamists are perfecting themselves and their devotion to surrender themselves to Islam as demanded by their theology of fiercely Salafist purity. From Sudan to Somalia, Tunisia to Mali, Libya to Iraq, Bahrain to Syria --Shia Iran and Sunni Qatar and Saudi Arabia are helpfully leading their followers to the one true path.

That the path leads to the extinguishing of countless lives deemed in their errant ways of devotion to represent an insult to Islam, and a slow dissolution of the humanity that represents Islam with the religion fading backward to its inception, where the tribal wars and continuing desert warlord-invested conflicts guaranteed no evolution toward an advanced society.

What is occurring in Syria and what occurred before that in Iraq, and what is unfolding now in Egypt, speaks to a profound human dysfunction, one held in thrall to a brutal past, with no collective will to evolve and become enlightened, humane, productive and prosperous. Destruction, carnage, rape and murder have become the ammunition most commonly used in this war of Islam against itself.

The mass psychosis has delved deep into the psyche of those unwilling to shake off the ghosts of the past and the distemper of these times. Hundreds of foreign 'fighters' have chosen to join the growing ranks of the Islamist jihadists challenging the butchering regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, coming from Britain, France, Libya and elsehwere to rank alongside Jabhat al-Nusra.

Iran and its partner-in-terror Hezbollah, now minus Hamas, have supported Syria's regime, while Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States have bolstered the Syrian opposition. The West sees clearly enough the situation they support; their choice being to do nothing to help stop the slaughter of civilians, or to arm the rebel groups who will later turn on those same civilians and in turn the West.

The desperate Syrians who leave the areas of conflict to endure life in refugee camps are spared the bombardments of the regime, and the uncertainty of how rebel forces will treat them. Solutions to the impasse between the factions appear remote; they seem evenly arrayed against one another; one a conventional military, the other a guerrilla army, both fuelled with sectarian hatred.

Human Rights Watch arrived at some attack sites - such as this one in Azaz, Aleppo, last August - just hours after Syrian Air Force strikes

The chemical weapon attack that the regime launched on rebel forces was not as successful in its scope and breadth as that launched by the elder al-Bashar decades earlier, but does represent a beginning of the end.