An Effect of Modern Terrorism - Invocations of a Violent Era of Yore

Italy's Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni fittingly explains: "Responding to terrorism inevitably implies military consequences." 

He explains in a Reuters report earlier this morning: "This may shock some people that these groups must also be dealt with on a military footing. I won't use the word 'combat' to avoid being painted as a crusader." 

However, noting that Italian forces are committed to training local forces in Somalia that fight against al Shabaab terrorists who singled out Christians for execution in a bloody attack upon a university in Kenya last week that killed 150 people, the Italian foreign minister said the fact that these terrorist groups are targeting Christians, brings the need to help even closer to home because "it concerns our identity and our roots," Reuters reported.

He acknowledged: "For years Europe has had a bad habit, a mix of selfishness and cowardice that prompts it to turn its gaze elsewhere when it comes to what happens beyond our little old world." Thus, it was now important to protect Christian sites and minority religious communities that may become targets of terrorists, Reuters cited Gentiloni from an interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.

The Italian Foreign Minister has formed a fitting conclusion and response to modern terrorism, for recent deadly attacks by terrorists, have been committed with violent invocations of a bygone era of the Seventh Century and of the Middle Ages when religious expansion or the restraint of a particular faith ruled the day.

Whether of the time of the Muslim Conquest or of the time of the Crusades by Christendom, much of modern terrorism appear to hold an invocation of the violence of a time of yore. 

Therefore, in this modern era of 2015 and beyond, any and all responses to quell the slaughter of human beings based upon the nature or selection of faith, of ethnicity or of national origin, must be employed in order to avert all parallels to a sorry past and to ensure the continuity of  humankind's election and selection of free exercise.