It becomes increasingly difficult to find ease and peace of thought, of late. The world seems to be turning itself inside-out and upside down with greater regularity. Ethnic conflicts, religious strife, refugee populations on the rise, influxes of desperate migrants attempting to escape the threats to human survival, all take the attention of the global news-watch.

Children, urged by their parents to leave the violent, drug-gang-ridden slums of poverty-stricken Central America, driven by the 'war on drugs', converging on the U.S. hoping to find a future for themselves there. Fearful people fleeing the conflicts in Syria, Somalia, Sudan and Nigeria, becoming fodder for people smugglers in dangerous journeys on the high seas, inundating Italy with their desperation.

The world's second-largest religious group breeding vicious jihadists, prey on countries from North Africa to the Middle East, Europe to North America, south-east Asia and beyond. The peace-and-mutual-respect-abiding sects of the Amadiyya and Ismaili Muslims are held by mainstream Islam to be heretics, abominations to Allah and the Prophet Mohammed, and destined for oblivion living where they are vulnerable, among the two largest sects, Sunni and Shiite, themselves in deadly conflict with each other in an attrition-war of conquest.

Significant parts of the international community grapple with the sinister threats brought to them by the Salafist, Wahhabist, Islamist strains of an Islam that has reverted to its roots, focusing on its conquest-martyrdom complex, seeking to avail itself in dominant control over all other religions scorned as inferior, an insult to Islam.

Western-type democracies have generously opened their doors to Muslims fleeing oppression in their countries of origin, others seeking economic advancement in their future aspirations, and in the process unleashing the passions of violent jihad from within their very own enclaves.

So, it is difficult to sleep well at night. A minor inconvenience, perhaps, in view of the ongoing merciless assaults elsewhere, against civilians innocent of any ambition but to live decent lives in security for their families and their societies.

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators wave Palestinian flags and chant anti Israeli slogans in Paris. Gone, now, the trifecta par excellence of 'liberty, equality, fraternity'.