Sean Thomas (Telegraph blogs) gives us a very sobering perspective on what is happening in the ISIS segment of the chaos in the Middle East. He tells it as it is. Is there anyone out there who can tell us what we can do about it? We are so cowed and neutered by the mismanagement of the unseating of Sadam Hussein that we are now likely to just keep doing too little and keep doing it too late.

Just now all we can say is God help the poor innocents facing this monster on the frontline. Tomorrow we will be crying to God for help ourselves. Thomas writes:

We’ve been here before, of course. No, not just with the Nazis. A better comparison for the evil of Isis is actually the Khmer Rouge: the only regime in my lifetime with an equal and obviously demonic complexion.

In many ways Isis are the Khmer Rouge with prayer mats. Both wear, or wore, black, as if to emphasise their nihilism. Both expanded – even exploded – from stupid wars engendered by the West. Both ruthlessly murdered any rival factions, ensuring that they became the sole standard-bearer for fellow travellers.

The parallels go on. The Khmer Rouge used hallucinatory violence as a technique and leitmotif – ripping foetuses from living women, smashing babies against trees – as do Isis, beheading anyone they fancy and tweeting the result, burying women and kids alive. Just as Isis are fiercely, fundamentally religious – slaughtering the infidels, the heathens, the Christians, the Shia, or even tribes of Sunnis who don’t cut the jihadi mustard, so the Khmer Rouge were fiercely, fundamentally atheist – promising to tear down every temple, and throw every single monk into the sea. Which they did.

The two forces are likewise similar in their aims and accomplishments. The Khmer Rouge managed to kill 2 million Cambodians (a third of the nation’s population), Isis will aim to kill many more than that, and they may well succeed, if they manage to get hold of chemical weapons, dirty bombs, nukes, and/or the lost souls of lonely young men in London, Paris, Moscow, and Detroit. As the KR despised and feared anyone outside their core, Isis believe we – by which I mean everyone on the entire planet who does not submit to their ideals, or convert to their deviant form of Islam – are at once a threat and an abomination, worthy of nothing but death, or grotesque servitude.

Read his full post here.

A Mass of Solidarity with the persecuted Christians and other religious minorities of Iraqwill take place at 5.30pm this coming Monday (August 18) in St Teresa’s on Clarendon Street, Dublin 2.