The recent terrorist attacks in France were tragic in terms of the lives lost.
Sadly we can search world news almost any week and find where militants, radicals, and terrorists have tortured, bombed, and shot innocent civilians.
There are always militant radicals somewhere in our world preying on the innocent.
The flags at half-mast in Yorkton for the dead in France is a nice showing of our concern, but they could stay at half-mast for the innocent dead 365 days a year too.
While the death and carnage is obviously devastating, and to be condemned, perhaps a greater sadness is settling in in the wake of the attacks.
They have become like a stone cast by the terrorists into the pool which is our world. Their action is now taking on a much more devastating effect than the already tragic deaths.
In this diabolical act of terrorism the terrorists have created a heightened sense of fear not just in France but throughout Europe and as far away as North America.
And with that increased sense of fear, the feeling of powerlessness to doing anything to prevent such attacks, people are now lashing out.
We have a militant faction of terrorists within Islam (ISIS), carrying out the attacks in France, and we see more and more people succumbing to a form of paranoid hysteria in blaming all Muslims.
With little we can do directly, we begin to lash out widely.
We find a growing voice wanting to stop Syrian refugees from coming to Canada. We have lost site of the fact ISIS is killing Syrians too. A Daily Mail report in the United Kingdom in Dec 2014, suggested ISIS had killed nearly 2000 Syrians in six-months.
There is a reason Syrians have become refugees from their country, and that reason is ISIS.
Should a country such as Canada be concerned a refugee from Syria could have ISIS ties?
Of course.
We should have a screening process, whether that means after they land here, or before they board a plane, just as we should be as sure as possible not to admit known criminals, or terrorists from any number of hotspots around the world.
Care is needed, but not an outright abandonment of refugees on the run from the same terrorists that hit France.
When we get to that point, of building walls to hide behind preventing the endangered safe haven, then ISIS has won.
We have to avoid creating a backlash which feeds an ISIS agenda of terror. It is a time for heightened caution, but not a time to paint all Syrians or all Muslims with the brush of being ISIS. We as Canadians have to be wiser than to go down that very slippery slope.
