Which sect do you belong to

 

 A picture speaks a thousand words. The picture of that little dead boy who had drowned in an attempt to reach the shores of Europe, his limp body resting in the arms of a man who picked him up off the beach where he washed up, the image went around the world and drew, if only for a short time, the worlds attention on the plight of the refugees fleeing from Syria.

Today it's an even more poignant video clip of a little boy sitting in the back of an ambulance, his face blooded his body covered in dust from the rubble of the bomb which caused his plight. What made this video have more of an impact on me is the image of his vulnerability, his shock, the incomprehension as he put his hand to his head and then looked at the blood on his hand, as if to ask,what's that.

Aleppo a name we are all familiar with, the town that has been under siege and bombed out of existence by the government forces in Syria was the little boys home.Some home. The rubble which used to house people now covers who knows how many bodies.  The residents who the Syrian army would like to annihilate come from a different religious sect, they are Muslim whist the president of the country, Basher al-Assad as are all senior members of the ruling Ba'ath (incidentally the same party which had another despot as leader Saddam Hussein) party Alawite, a branch of Islam.

As with the Sunni and the Shia who both seem to loath each other so the Alawite hate the Sunni Muslims who make up the majority of the people who lived in Allepo.

To bomb them with chlorine gas is commensurate to the Nazi exterminating the Jews, they are not people they are less than human and so their death is irrelevant.

It's a mind set that thankfully has no place in domestic western society but it makes sense to the religious mentality of the area. 

The schism between the two branches of Mohammedanism runs so deep that an act of succession in 632 AD provokes blind enmity, suicide bombings and killing on an industrial scale today in 2016. 

How are we to make any sense out of it, especially coming from a largely non sectarian society where the power of religious belief has been largely frustrated.

It shows the hidden down side to any religious system of governance where the mind is crippled with supposition, and superstition. Where men and women can be controlled by religious leaders, irrespective of training other than religious observance, who's image of society is distorted by first asking the question "which sect do you belong to" ?