The Unbridgeable Sunni/Shiite Divide

That the Islamic sects detest one another is undeniable. Nor do the putative leaders of the majority Sunni Muslims make any effort to deny their antipathy for the Muslim-minority Shiites. Each, in fact, embraces a most unhealthy, unwholesome and un-pacific, although typically Islamist loathing for one another. Sunnis consider the Shiites beyond misguided; more to the point utter apostates, while Shiites have no doubt whatever that the Sunni version of Islam is heretical.



One believing that leadership must descend from the line of the Prophet's actual descendants, the other quite certain that leadership is derived from one who follows in the tradition of the Prophet, the one who appears most capable of representing Islam. The differences in political ideology between the two groups which equally venerate the principles of Islam and the Koran remain hotly contentious and represent the violence that exacerbates relations between the sects.

Iran, an Aryan, non-Arab nation of Shiites is fully as fundamentally Islamist as their Wahhabist Sunni counterparts in Arab Saudi Arabia. Each aspires to be recognized as the leader of the Muslim community, and each loathe the other, their antipathy stretching to each inciting, supporting, training and arming non-state militias as their proxies in their war against one another. Into this lethal mix of historical hatreds entered the West.

In electing finally to counter the deadly atrocities committed by fanatical Islamists whose embrace of jihad, the most fundamental of the Islamic precepts in the surrender to Islam, perhaps as important to pious Muslims as the Hjra, the trek to Mecca by the faithful, the United States has called upon others to commit to aiding it in turning back the hateful tide of the Islamic State caliphate. This is a mission best left to the residents of the Middle East whom it directly impacts.

Wealthy Saudis, Qataris and UAE citizens made it their business to fund the activities of Islamist militias viewed by the West as terrorists for their exploits in obeying the injunctions of the Koran to solve problems of reluctance to surrender to Islam by meting out deserved punishment:

"Fight those who believe not in Allah" (9:29); "Slay the idolaters, wherever you find them" (95); "The only punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger ... is that they should be crucified, or their hands and their feet should be cut off on opposite sides, or they should be imprisoned" (5:33); and finally, "I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. So smite above the necks" (8.12).

"Smiting" above the necks, beheading, also represents state punishment meted out to those who have been convicted of apostasy, of turning their backs on Islam, of committing to a religion other than Islam, of shaming themselves by spurning Islam and embracing non-Muslim status. And the punishment is death, and the means of punishment often beheading by the state. Beheading, in other words, is 'normal' in Islam, not as it is portrayed as horrendously inhuman practised by ISIS.

The West viewed at their distance the atrocities carried out by Muslim against Muslim. When minority groups and Christians became targeted the West sat up straighter to take keener notice. And when members of Western culture and society became the victims, attention was riveted upon the carnage. Western consciences were alerted to these distortions in human values, and suddenly it became imperative that action be taken.

But try to convince Egyptians and Saudis and Turks that they are obligated to act in their own defence to combat the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, a group they genuinely now deplore, and suddenly everyone who detests their extreme butchery grows silent. These are Sunnis, they have been encouraged to smite the apostate Shias among them.

And the outraged West is then faced with the reality of becoming involved in a dispute within Islam itself; destroy a Sunni terror group and the Shia terror groups are empowered.