Different Perspectives

My story on Rashid who became a terrorist was written to shock and show a different perspective to how the human mind works. What may seem wrong to one is right for another. Amazing isn’t it? All of us or at least most of us are taught as children about right and wrong and yet our varied perceptions see the world in many diverse shades other than just black and white.

Rashid believed he was doing the right thing by choosing destruction to seek Allah, not feeling a bit of remorse or fear before killing thousands of people and himself. Did he actually believe or was he made to believe, did he really understand the meaning of religion and the teachings of Allah, and did he ever know the difference between right and wrong? The war he was waging against the world …was it really his or was he brainwashed into believing that Allah needed him to destroy life in order to attain him?

It’s a well-known fact that terror groups are targeting children transforming them into killers and fanatics who are willing to die defending their state and religion. The children are taught the Quran but a different twist is given to the teachings thus training them to be jihadists.

Dan Grant says…

The boys become men who would have strapped explosives to their bodies and walked into crowded market places to blow everyone – old women, mothers and children – to pieces. They would have happily died to kill. In fact they would have welcomed it with praise to God.

These young men – more accurately boys – were primed for death. They had been programmed for it. Their heads were full of hate.

Rashid wanted to belong, he had something to prove, he had been deprived of love and affection his whole life and was easily brainwashed into believing that Allah was waiting for him and all he had to do was wage a war against those who were opposing Islam.

The Dhaka terror attacks enforce what I have written above. The terrorists were from well to do, educated affluent families and very young. According to the official statement, “The terrorists were from a top school and University in Dhaka... Some of the terrorists were from the Scholastic School -- a very well-known school and private university. The parents of these boys are normal and have secular credentials”. Seemingly normal boys had transformed into cold blooded killing machines. 

What could have transformed these boys, what made them believe that ending and taking the lives of the innocent was the right path to God. And herein lies the mystery of how the human mind functions. Doesn’t it confuse you that what you believed to be wrong is thought of as right in the eyes of some, that a person could be so easily brainwashed.