“It’s alive!”

Yes, it’s alive. But 148 Pakistani schoolchildren and teachers are dead. That’s what happens when you help to create monsters. Monsters just aren’t reliable. You can’t depend on them to attack only your enemies. Sometimes they attack you – even your children. The horrific results are unthinkable, yet we must think about them:

Blood was still splattered on the floor and the stairs as media were allowed inside the school a day after the attack. Torn notebooks, pieces of clothing and children’s shoes were scattered about amid broken window glass, door frames and upturned chairs. A pair of child’s eyeglasses lay broken on the ground.

Even more ironic, if that is possible, is the fact that the school is run by the Pakistani military. It is unclear whether the students were children of military officers, but that would be the supreme irony.
You see, the atrocity was committed by the Taliban. And for decades, the Taliban has been tolerated, and was reportedly supported – and perhaps was even created – by the ISI, Pakistan’s Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence. It is impossible for us laymen to know how many of these allegations are correct, but the allegations are too frequent to be totally fictitious.
The allegations of collusion with terrorist organizations gain further credence from the general reaction of the Islamic world to this and other terrorist attacks – that of feeble condemnation at best, more often apathy and silence, and at worst justification of terrorism. After all, the terrorists have “legitimate grievances.”
Yes, but who doesn’t? We all do. Yet somehow we manage to restrain ourselves from murdering schoolchildren and teachers, or bombing buses and commuter trains, or exploding nightclubs and prizzerias, or beheading hostages with dull knives, or crashing airliners filled with passengers and crew into office towers filled with workers. It’s really not that difficult to restrain ourselves from mass murder – all we need is a minimal supply of ethical values.
The fictional Dr. Frankenstein had the hubris to believe he could create life, and the stupidity to believe he could control it. He was correct in the first belief, but dead wrong in the second. Pakistan’s ISI, as well as officials in other Muslim countries, are offering tacit – and sometimes overt – support to terrorist organizations. They have the arrogance and foolishness to believe that they can control these terrorists. But like Dr. Frankenstein, they are discovering to their sorrow that their creation has turned on them.
They have sown the wind, and now they are reaping the whirlwind.

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