This past Friday a number of terrorists conducted a series of shootings and suicide-bombings in Paris, claiming the lives of 129 people from over 26 countries. I was getting dressed, readying myself to work the night shift when I heard about it. The death toll was still estimated to be around 16. On my way to the L train, I passed an old friend and coworker on standby at 16th and 1st. He was listening to the radio broadcast of the very event, and told me that the city had been issuing high situational awareness alerts.
The reaction of the western world was predictably somber, but stoically so. The lights on the Empire State Building reflected the Blue, White, and Red of the French flag, the UN condemned the attacks, and people took to social media to vent their distress. This blog post isn't about mourning or politics, it's a response to what I've been seeing in the aftermath of the events. A few days later, as with most tragic events of the modern day, friends galore were posting article after article about who to blame, why everyone sucks, and why you suck most. Wanting to avoid inciting unproductive arguments limited to facebook message-length comments, I figured it'd be more constructive (and better for my health) to write about it here. The two particularly aggravating types of articles (or rather, misuse of articles) I've encountered are along the lines of: Western countries are hypocritical for mourning the Paris attacks and ignoring the Beirut attacks a few days prior,(1)(2)(3) and Why Islam is the problem.(4)
So instead of doing my Chemistry homework, here we go:
1.) Why it's not hypocritical for the West to pay more attention to Paris than Beirut
Mourning is subjective. It always has been, it always will be, and that's okay. Would you mourn a friend's death more than you would a strangers? Of course you would. I'm not saying a strangers death isn't tragic, but it's just human to be selective with who you care for. Historically, France has been a close ally of the United States (cue Mel Gibson at the end of The Patriot). And I'm willing to bet the average U.S. citizen couldn't tell me what country Beirut was in, much less point it out on a map. I know it sounds awful, talking about tragedies as if I'm comparing nothings, but the awful truth is that you can't mourn for everyone.
During my rotations in healthcare, I had the misfortune of treating a woman who had miscarried. She was crying, and understandably so. But did any of the doctors call her a hypocrite, citing that miscarriages are even more common in 3rd world countries, and thus shame her for mourning? No. They sympathized with her, because that's the right thing to do.
Yes, what happened in Beirut was a tragedy. But don't stand on some self-made moral platform and call out people for being a hypocrite while they're mourning. On top of that, if you want to treat tragedies like some statistical competition, you would never find an end. Why stop at Beirut? Sudan is still a vortex of fighting, suffering, and death. There are an estimated 293,000 U.S. children that are used in sex trafficking.(5) Why aren't you mourning for them as well? My point is that suffering in this world is unending, mourning is subjective, and that's 100% understandable.
2. Why Islam is not to blame
An interesting statistic is being thrown around. According to journalist Brigitte Gabriel, 1.2 billion people are Muslim, and of those people, 15-25% are extremists.(4) That comes out to a staggering 180-300 million extremists, roughly the entire population of the United States. Yes, that's an eye-opener of a statistic. Therefore, something must be wrong with Islam right?*
My answer to this is a resounding, "um...Wtf..no?"
An interesting tidbit, coming from journalists interviewing ISIS prisoners is that a staggering amount of them know very little about Islam. As Lydia Wilson writes about her interviews with such prisoners, "They are woefully ignorant about Islam and have difficulty answering questions about Sharia law, militant jihad, and the caliphate."(6) So how is it that Islam is to blame if many of the extremists, at the core, have nothing to do with Islam other than the name? I can call myself African, but that doesn't make me any more African than all my pasty Asian relatives.
It's reasonable to speculate that these "Muslim" extremists then, might, maybe, just a little bit, kind of, somewhat, be using Islam as a face for something else (that something else, according to Erin Saltman, senior counter-extremism researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, is a combination of "adventure, activism, romance, power, belonging, [and] spiritual fulfillment").(6)** My point is these people very well could have used something else to justify their destruction. Just like the Nazis masked their destruction with genetic right, and the Army of God justified their terrorism with Christianity, and the People's Liberation Army rationalized their genocide in Tibet with geographical sovereignty.
*Now, just for the record, Brigitte Gabriel never claimed that something was wrong Islam. Her argument regards the pointlessness in trying to be politically correct. My response is against the people I see using and subsequently misinterpreting her speech to bash Muslims.
**Saltman refers to spiritual fulfillment not as it is according to the Salafi form, supposedly demanded by the Islamic state, but as a fulfillment of each individual's romanticized idea of it.
(1)http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/culturebox/2015/11/the_media_covered_the_paris_attacks_more_than_the_eirut_bombing_the_problem.html
(2)http://www.huffingtonpost.com/halim-shebaya/from-beirut-to-paris-selective-grief_b_8279676.html
(3)http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/11/16/world/middleeast/beirut-lebanon-attacks-paris.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur&referer=https%3A%2F%2Ft.co%2FPbaOMXytkz
(4)http://qpolitical.com/someone-said-muslims-bad-woman-delivers-amazing-response/
(5)Richard J. Estes and Neil Alan Weiner report in
Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, University of Pennsylvania (2001)
(6)http://www.thenation.com/article/what-i-discovered-from-interviewing-isis-prisoners/
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