Which is worse: Ebola or IS?

All right, it's a pretty stupid question. I pose it because it is easy to see IS as a kind of force of nature, like a hurricane, tsunami or, a plague. I had a whimsical thought earlier this week when it was announced there would indeed be boots on the ground, and British ones at that, in the fight against Ebola, while we and the Americans are fighting shy of putting troops in to fight the fundamentalist threat. Fair enough at one level: the boots on the ground should be from the vastly wealthy Arab nations that are under direct threat: Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the other Gulf states. They have more than enough resources to counter IS, but will they act? I doubt it. They're more concerned with amassing wealth and maintaining their own power bases to organise a really meaningful opposition to the threat on their own doorsteps. In other words, they are weak, and I suspect they will actually fall when faced with the ultimate test. Their leaders will flee with their gold, leaving their people to their fates.


I like to think the Human Race should be constantly looking forward to improve itself; to live up to their name: Homo Sapiens- "Wise Man". This should involve working towards everyone achieving their full potential as well as learning to live in harmony with the environment. Therefore few things make me more angry than seeing human beings going in the opposite direction. The Amish people decided to stop moving forward at a time midway through the 18th century. So horses and carts and some tools and farm implements were allowed, but nothing new, no innovations were permitted. IS is worse: they want to hark back to a pre-medieval period- the 7th century AD to be precise, when Mohammed, peace be upon him, wrote down the Koran.


And UKIP, God bless them, they also want to turn the clock back to a mythical time when Britain didn't need Europe, when we were the most powerful nation on Earth and everyone did our bidding (even China) and God help them if they didn't. Someone should tell them, and the misguided people who support them, that that time disappeared long ago and we are now living in a much more complex, inter-dependent world. A world where a virus formerly confined to the forest primeval of the Dark Continent can now cross the world in a matter of hours and with the potential to cause mayhem just as effectively as any suicide bomber. It won't take boots on the ground to defeat it. It will take the combined efforts of all the world's cleverest immunologists and physicians to create a vaccine. We eradicated smallpox- we can eradicate Ebola too- but only if there is sufficient will out there to do it.