The world can only hope that the Islamic State has turned all Muslims against it after its barbarous and utterly heinous and callous behaviour towards one of its own.
The shocking way in which the organisation killed Jordanian pilot Lt Moaz al-Kaseasbeh is simply beyond the comprehension of the rest of the world, who recoiled in horror as news of the way he died became public.
The poor man was locked in a cage, doused in petrol and burned alive. What a terrible fate. IS did what it did to garner more support in the wake of the defeats it has suffered on the battlefields in the Middle East of late. It has resorted to engaging its followers and supporters on twitter by getting them to suggest how the pilot should have been killed. What is even more terribly disturbing in all of this is that IS and its methods are actually a fusion of its own twisted views and the twisted movies and television programmes that the western world gorges on.
It takes no genius to figure out that the way the video was produced was akin to a western television series. IS’ modus operandi is to terrify the West by bringing to life our fiction and movies and broadcasting them to us in a manner that looks just like a film, a terrible and horribly distorted one at that. Who else could have put it together but a person who has been brought up around television programmes all their life?
The footage of the video also shows the pilot seemingly looking destroyed when he was paraded around the site of an area that was bombed by coalition jets. Kaseasbeh looks totally and utterly broken when he sees the destruction that he caused, coupled with the fact that he was going to be killed in a barbarous manner, for the sake of a propaganda video. What on earth have we created?
Just a couple of years ago, we were celebrating IT for the way it helped revolutions in the Arab world. Now we are sickened by the fact that we have western boys of Asian descent in trouble spots producing such despicable material.
Libya is in the throes of more violence. It sits on our doorstep. We are here, and there are Islamic State militants just a stone’s throw away. These are very dangerous and worrying times. We ought to be vigilant and we ought to be prepared. As PM Joseph Muscat told his counterpart in Germany, we should not wait until Libya becomes a failed state before we act. The government has denied that there are any specific terror warnings, but we have to be realistic, Europe is a target and Malta is part of Europe and we are, by default, a target. There is nothing wrong in admitting that we have upped our watch when it comes to terror attacks, even if it is just a blanket response to the levels of violence which are escalating around us. The government might worry about alarmism, but it would be even more positive if it were to reassure investors and tourists that while there is no specific threat against Malta, we have increased our vigilance and state of preparedness. World War III has been declared, it might not involve invasions, but it certainly does involve infiltrations and strikes where we are weak. This is not 20th century warfare, this is guerrilla warfare on a global scale. We are not immune.