Connecting some dots: Terrorism, Racism and Gendernization.

So I was sitting at a chocolate cafe at the Dublin Airport before I boarded my flight this week, reading the book THEM: adventures with extremists which a book about different kinds of extremists — Islamic Fundamentalists, Neo-Nazis Ku Klux Klansman all sharing one oddly similar belief: that a tiny, shadowy elite run the world from a secret room. I then transited through one of the most peaceful and developed parts of the Middle East, I didn’t need to walk much through the airport to encounter the misogynist attitude in the air. And I’m writing this somewhere between the Middle East and Asia about 20,000 feet in the air. Eerily enough, flying these days is metaphorically similar to the way many of us feel about the state of affairs in the world today, i.e. being in a locked environment, void of control and with a bunch of strangers all wanting to safely arrive at one destination, but there’s also the possibility of hijackers, hijacking this whole mission and creating an eternal destruction for us all.

There is is also abundant clarity and resolution at this altitude and I’ve been trying to process everything I’ve seen on my Facebook and Twitter feed over the past week (which I didn’t get to actively check because of final exams). At this altitude, for all those who think the world revolves around them, you see how insignificant we all are. We are part of something bigger, a race, nature, a cosmos and as Chief Seattle put it “we are merely a stand in the web of life and what we do to the web we do to ourselves”. I know he was referring to the environment and nature, but the metaphorical meaning of this sentence seemed to surpass its literal interpretation.

This week has felt like an episode of Homeland. Now couple that with adverse poverty, drone strikes from foreign countries or “them” and a misconstrued interpretation of a faith I call my own, and you will reach the headlines of today. 100s of children killed in a bomb at a school. On the other side of the world, there is a racial epidemic in the country that calls itself the most powerful country in the world. And they didn’t even need to leave their backyard to have their own citizens killed, and astounding as it sounds the President would be more likely to be killed for his colour than in another country. And in Australia, a hostage in a chocolate cafe. I was just at a chocolate cafe. It could have happened here.

To bluntly put it, the world is one big mess and no one has their shit together. No one. I’m not sure this is the world I want to bring my children into one day. So I decided to type this out.

Firstly, there is no double standard in tolerating terrorists. And whether they claim to follow the same faith as you or whether they were responsible for a backward button in the development of your own country, one does not negotiate or tolerate terrorists. And as a Muslim, this is a constant double edged sword that you have to battle against; one side being defending to the world that Islam is inherently peaceful but misconstrued by some rotten apples which together with media propaganda on Islamophobia leaves the moderate normal Muslims with an uphill task. The other side of this sword is reacting (or more so not reacting) to these religious extremists within the faith who just spoil it for the majority. This together with the lovely amalgamation of political games on a chessboard full of states and terrorist groups only leaves the common person at risk of harassment, prejudice propelled with a fitting description of what these group of followers are as always so eloquently illustrated on cable news networks.

Secondly, the pervasive nature to stereotypes and racism in society is astounding and has been documented many a time in the field of social psychology (google it, don’t take my word for it). And this issue is prevalent regardless of social class, creed or socioeconomic status so it takes a conscious effort to not stereotype black against white, or brown as terrorists. And so there is a tremendous need to rewire this whole concept in our brains and as the amazingly stand-up comedian Hari Kondabolu puts it on the Late Night Show with David Letterman, “I hate intolerance to begin with. It’s 2014, we should be at acceptance and love. What’s this tolerance business, what are you tolerating? Back pain?”

Thirdly, I say gender has a role to play in this daily conundrum of misfortune because the results of all these doings are undoubtedly what “masculine qualities” hope to portray; strength, so called bravery, aggressiveness, protection of one’s people etc as opposed to the more soft power qualities associated with feminism; empathy, tolerance, compassion, intuition and peace. As evolutionary biologist Elisabet Sahtouris and writer and friend Nicole Schwab concur, competition“Species after species, from the most ancient bacteria to us, have gone through a maturation cycle from individuation and fierce competition to mature collaboration and peaceful interdependence. The maturation tipping point in this cycle occurs when species reach the point where it is more energy efficient to feed and otherwise collaborate with their enemies than to kill them off.” Thus, “competition corresponds to the ‘juvenile stage’ of the evolution of our species. Nothing more. Like many other species before us, we now have the potential to shed off our old belief systems, for in Elisabet’s words: “We know there is something obsolete, something hopelessly immature, about the competing and fighting and grabbing going on at the highest levels of human society.”

I’m not theorizing a social theory against men, as in my lifetime I have witnessed the results of female suicide bombers in Sri Lanka’s civil war, but for a majority of the cases, whether it’s in the east or west this destruction of human life has to be blamed on what the male reproductive system symbolically portrays. It’s about “having balls” or “growing a pair” or “being a pussy” if you’re not “being a man”, this is where we are going wrong. As depicted in the documentary The Mask You Live In which explores the issues in society due to this gender centric notion, you see how pervasive this epidemic really is. And the gender neutralization needs to start from kids. I have heard way too many times the phrases “don’t act like a boy” said to girls and “don’t act like a girl” said to boys, and this by far is the most pervasive notion across all cultures. And if anything progressive as a race would be following some of these so called “feminine characteristics” And for all those people who think the world has no good people in it, I say if you can’t find one, be one. Because if these perpetrators had some compassion or empathy they wouldn’t massacre tiny humans who can’t even discern the reasons for why they were attacked at the light of day. And for those who thought extremist groups only targetted Malala’s, think again. And if you learn the theories on Terrorism in Political Science and International realtions, you will k now that terrorists are not rational actors; one day it will be against girls going to school, and the next it will be an attack against a random school.

And so, if we don’t condemn these cowardly attacks that take place across the world, whether we belong to the same faith that these perpetrators claim to be from, we are undoubtedly condoning it all. As Dan Brown writes in Inferno, “The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.”

And so, if we keep on going the way we are, women will anyway not be in positions of political power or authority, and even if they are they won’t be get equal pay and we will keep giving them Barbie’s so that they can later remodel their bodies to suit that size zero and forget about any ambition beyond reproduction (which is a blessing to be a woman, but should be based on the woman to make that life choice, not cultural pressure), and we will give boys toy guns and cars to play with and these boys will grow up to do and result in what we have today.

At least I know what games I’m going to be giving my kids to play, regardless of they are a boy or girl, it will start with chess and Lego. Because critical thinking, strategy, creativity, those are the qualities we need to have as pervasive as we have the Coca Cola brand recognition in FMRI scans of people. These are the qualities that will push us as the human race forward. And the change needs to come from the smallest and most powerful unit to society, the family. Because families make societies. And societies make countries and countries make the world.

And so, if we tolerate racism, we will be fine with human lives being lost because of the colour of their skin we will be not too far from sure doom. Because by tolerating police brutality because one day it will be your black friend who’s arrested for no apparent reason and the next it will be your sibling who’s detained for having a Muslim name and being brown (although so many white hipsters will get away with a beard).

RIP to all children children killed in the recent suicide attack in Pakistan (among the many others that don’t even make it to the press), the owners of the Sydney chocolate cafe hostage and the countless black men (whose names we don’t even know) shot by police.

I’m not talking to the baby boomer generation or the ones that followed them. I’m talking to you millennials, the only generation so far to be connected to the globe on a way that the human race has never been. The only generation that has information at their disposal with the click of a button. A generation that in engrossed in the culture of others without an intersection of country boundaries. I’m talking to the generation that I believe has the potential to do something which starts from firstly recognizing the issues, talking, protesting, and if you’re not heard, create your own contingency plan with your personal and professional life and make sure that you don’t repeat the mistakes of the previous generations that weren’t lucky enough to be exposed to the world like we have been.

So terrorism, sexism, racism….This is just a mere correlation that links several existing events to underlying issues in society, using evidence from Biology, Social Psychology and the theories of International Relations. I couldn’t agree with Nicole when she says, “At a time when global humanitarian and environmental crises keep multiplying, I can only hope that we become conscious of facing this tipping point.” It may sound ridiculous at the start, but one is for sure: Peace is possible, if there is a global will and attitude. It’s first a state of mind. And you have no excuse not to practice it daily.