Dec 04, 2024
Dec 04, 2024
The HIV virus like other retroviruses is a vestigial remnant of the history of evolution, which still retains its genomic inheritance in the language of primitive RNA. It also bears the handicap of its primitive apparatus for reproduction, which is poorly equipped to correct errors. This bestows on it the phenomenal ability of frequent mutations, leading to its ability to resist drugs meant to stop its survival and bequeaths a possible curse that it could mutate itself to extinction. The last is a fervent hope of many evolutionists, yet waiting to be fulfilled.
One of the historical analyses of all pathogens is that with time and evolution, they all get less virulent to accommodate their own survival, by not being lethal to the first host before finding a newer second one. This is why the rabies virus, which does not need to attenuate its virulence locates in a part of the brain that leads to hydrophobia, excessive salivation and aggressive biting behavior, to allow the victim destined to perish, to pass on the virus and ensure its survival by biting other potential hosts. There are other parasites which lodge in the brain of the victim host, to make it alter its behavior even to the detriment of its survival, to ensure its consumption by another predator to facilitate the survival and propagation of the parasite to its next stage of life and assist in the parasite's survival and flourishing.
Islam, which has become the current scourge of humanity, is at the crossroads of evolutionary strategy. It can seek to be less virulent and more accommodating, to its human hosts or persist in its virulent destructive attitudes, till good public health measures succeed in dumping it into the dustbin of extinction. The West, which has not always been right or decent, now has the wherewithal of mass destruction to use for fumigation of the world to eliminate this pestilence. The United States already is acting on it without overt acknowledgement and the European states, while ambivalent desire it on the basis of their insecurity and xenophobia.
What is even more critical, is that Iran which had Islam thrust upon it and reformed it to a less inequitable atrocity, now has the torture of an Islamic theocracy unable to deliver material progress for the masses, partly due to the conspiracy of the great hegemon, but nevertheless to the disillusionment of the young and educated, looking for mundane material progress and the poor who are historically destined, to be cheated by all forms of government. It is the foolish shortsightedness of American policy of propping up corrupt crooked regimes, which fuels the fires of the otherwise destined to die, flames of militant Islam. Far from learning a lesson from the dastardly atrocities committed by middle class, so called Western educated Saudi Muslims on September 11, we due to the retarded, uneducable policies of the current administration sow more seeds of terrorism in Central Asia and nurture this virulent virus in Afghanistan and Iraq. If there is a need for using our overwhelming superior military might and economic muscle, it is to coerce these societies into free ones, even if their first proclivities to extremist Islam with the inexorable fire of time melt like wax under their inability of failure to deliver and are then attenuated to the level of co-existing commensals, or perish by their own virulence by internecine conflict and our military and economic quarantine, which embellishes their inadequacy to foster a just, decent and viable society. These are the natural and realistic constraints of Islam, which will lead to its destiny of attenuation or extinction!
27-Jul-2003
More by : Gaurang Bhatt, MD