agic love story of Roseanna McCoy and Johnse Hatfield and you have the kind of lusty eastern Western romanticized by 20th century Hollywood. But what is romantic about the brutality and violence those clans perpetrated for almost half a century?

On a grander scale, is the slaughter o

Rugged as the Blue Ridge Mountains of the American East were those roughhewn giants that settled on opposite shores of the winding Tug Fork River. The Hatfield’s of West Virginia and the McCoys of Kentucky turned their backs on the genteel society of their Virginia homeland, and set out for the freedom of the untamed Appalachian wilderness.

From the moment those two clans took root in those mountains, the Hatfields and the McCoys never stopped hating and slaughtering each other. Granted their visceral animosities are a remote microcosm of Islam’s war between Sunni and Shi`a sects. Yet, like the Protestants and Catholics of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the Palestinians and Israelis, Sudan’s Muslim lighter-skinned Janjaweed slaughter of Sudan’s Muslim black-skinned people—and sundry racial, religious and ethnic dogfights—humanity’s rose is a rose is a rose.

The legendary blood feud between generations of Hatfields and McCoys belongs to 19th century American history. Gunfights, murders and spit-in-your-eye lawlessness dominated their lives while a lethal American Civil War served to divide their families even further. Add the tragic love story of Roseanna McCoy and Johnse Hatfield and you have the kind of lusty eastern Western romanticized by 20th century Hollywood. But what is romantic about the brutality and violence those clans perpetrated for almost half a century?

On a grander scale, is the slaughter of

r the freedom of the untamed Appalachian wilderness.

From the moment those two clans took root in those mountains, the Hatfields and the McCoys never stopped hating and slaughtering each other. Granted their visceral animosities are a remote microcosm of Islam’s war between Sunni and Shi`a sects. Yet, like the Protestants and Catholics of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the Palestinians and Israelis, Sudan’s Muslim lighter-skinned Janjaweed slaughter of Sudan’s Muslim black-skinned people—and sundry racial, religious and ethnic dogfights—humanity’s rose is a rose is a rose.

The legendary blood feud between generations of Hatfields and McCoys belongs to 19th century American history. Gunfights, murders and spit-in-your-eye lawlessness dominated their lives while a lethal American Civil War served to divide their families even further. Add the tragic love story of Roseanna McCoy and Johnse Hatfield and you have the kind of lusty eastern Western romanticized by 20th century Hollywood. But what is romantic about the brutality and violence those clans perpetrated for almost half a century?

On a grander scale, is the slaughter o

Shi`a sects. Yet, like the Protestants and Catholics of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the Palestinians and Israelis, Sudan’s Muslim lighter-skinned Janjaweed slaughter of Sudan’s Muslim black-skinned people—and sundry racial, religious and ethnic dogfights—humanity’s rose is a rose is a rose.

The legendary blood feud between generations of Hatfields and McCoys belongs to 19th century American history. Gunfights, murders and spit-in-your-eye lawlessness dominated their lives while a lethal American Civil War served to divide their families even further. Add the tragic love story of Roseanna McCoy and Johnse Hatfield and you have the kind of lusty eastern Western romanticized by 20th century Hollywood. But what is romantic about the brutality and violence those clans perpetrated for almost half a century?

On a grander scale, is the slaughter o

s a rose.

The legendary blood feud between generations of Hatfields and McCoys belongs to 19th century American history. Gunfights, murders and spit-in-your-eye lawlessness dominated their lives while a lethal American Civil War served to divide their families even further. Add the tragic love story of Roseanna McCoy and Johnse Hatfield and you have the kind of lusty eastern Western romanticized by 20th century Hollywood. But what is romantic about the brutality and violence those clans perpetrated for almost half a century?

On a grander scale, is the slaughter o

agic love story of Roseanna McCoy and Johnse Hatfield and you have the kind of lusty eastern Western romanticized by 20th century Hollywood. But what is romantic about the brutality and violence those clans perpetrated for almost half a century?

On a grander scale, is the slaughter of millions of Native Americans by white Anglo Saxon immigrants a romantic story? Is there a difference between the 1,400-year-old Islamic sectarian butchery of innocents, and the ethnic cleansing policies of President Andrew Jackson two centuries ago? “Jacksonian Democracy” with its greed and racially motivated hatred advocated total annihilation and/or “relocation” of Native American Indians. Only when the dirty deed was done, did the American government bury the hatchet.

Sadly, maybe today’s awful truth is that Islamic zealots, the extreme fundamentalists within Sunni and Shi`a sects, can only bury the hatchet in each other. Foreign military forces cannot decide the Sunnis’ and Shi`a’s place in modern society. Only they can. If they continue on their present path they will be left behind in the dust of 7th century ghosts, doomed to a Fourth World economy, doomed to fight on for all eternity like a scene from an old Star Trek movie. I doubt whether the Prophet Mohammed had that in mind for his followers.

In the hopes that Allah will forgive me for this oversimplified primer, the religion of Islam started by the Prophet Mohamme