Al-Qalam 
The recent social media images of mainly Hindu mobs attacking Muslims and burning down mosques in New Delhi was revolting. These acts of religious intolerance have fuelled the fiery inferno of hate which has consumed lives. It has overpowered reason.
Hate is a contagious strong emotion. It’s mental venom that can pollute your spirit, poison your soul and seep into all of the relationships that surround you. Hate, when left unchecked, will certainly drain your spirit, tarnish your soul and darken your days.
While the savagery in New Delhi was chilling, hatred in general has spread across continents, engulfing the global landscape in an orgy of mindless bloodletting. Its chilling message has crossed international frontiers at an alarming pace, placing international security at risk. Its venomous message defies logic and sanity. Like a tsunami, it is difficult to stop as it hurtles like a tornado harvesting the unwary in its vicious tentacles. It has no season and it breeds like wildfire as it scorches the land that gave birth to it. Like a deadly virus, it is constantly mutating as it assumes new variations. Mankind is struggling to find a cure for hate a disease that has decimated humanity for over 2000 years, even before the advent of organized religion.
If unchecked, India could be heading for a destructive civil war that could set the whole of Asia ablaze.
Hatred has enveloped the globe on a massive scale. After disease, mankind’s deadliest scourge has always been hate. Hate has killed hundreds of millions in thousands of conflicts, for the past two thousand years. It knows no season and no limit. It is immensely irrational and is a deadly phenomenon. It is in us all. And it will forever, unless we choose to confront and expunge it from our lives. In the collective memory of humankind, most nations have been ruled by something else than hatred. Asia has become a breeding ground for extremist ideology; reason has ceases to exist as fascism steamrolls its way through polluted cities of Asia.
Today, fanaticism has become, or recently re-became a source of danger, the gravest of all, placing billions of lives at risk. Harsh inflammatory language has become normalized as part of the rhetoric of regional leaders against perceived and manufactured enemies, to mobilize the intended ‘imagined community’ against ‘the other’. The rhetoric of hatred has been echoed and amplified by leaders who are grimly unaware that the fate of billions is tied to their delusional outbursts. In the era of fake news and half-truths, a single miscalculation could lead to regional nuclear incineration.
In a world awash with hate, vengeance and brutal competition, there is a need for radical generation of compassionate and principled people.
There is a need for those who are going to live lives driven by the kind of love which circumvents self-centred conventions of our world which is self destruction from its seams. Leaders inspiring prejudice, anger and fear among their supporters are guilty of crimes against humanity.
Of all the wars spawned in recorded human history, hatred was the catalyst that set this planet ablaze in two world wars. It is the greatest evil that will ultimately destroy this planet.
Hatred neither lives in the land of its own nor the house of its own. It is both hereditary and acquired. Hate means a progrom. All hatred is that it evolves from one form of violance. Mankind shows no sign of tolerance, we are moving on a path of self-destruction from which there is no escape from naked hatred.
Farouk Araie.
Johannesburg
