Responding To Paris: Take The High Road
It’s hard to avoid cynicism, but we should.
The attacks in Paris that killed 129 and wounded many more are an unspeakable tragedy. The overwhelming outpouring of love and support from people around the world has dwarfed the evil intent of the attackers and their supporters to take innocent lives. My heart aches for the victims.
And yet, in light of such an outpouring of support, it is hard not to wonder why our non-white brothers and sisters, slaughtered in Ankara (Turkey’s deadliest bombing ever), Beirut (the deadliest attack in Lebanon’s capital since 1900), Kenya (147 students gunned down Garissa University), and Iraq (19 dead in a Baghdad funeral bombing) this year were not mentioned nearly as much in special reports on the nightly news, or live blogs, or in the words of nearly every elected official in this country. It is hard not to wonder why the colors of those countries never lit up our major landmarks at night, or why the flags of those countries never flew above our state houses.
Where was the customized profile picture filter and the “marked safe” button on Facebook for those people?
It is hard not to wonder why our country’s outpouring of support is at is greatest when the victims have the same skin color, and the same culture, as we do. It is hard not to be cynical.
We must absolutely resist the urge to let the cynicism distract us.
I’ve seen too many “gotcha” posts all over social media teasing, even ridiculing Facebook and the profile-picture changers, the #PrayForParis hashtaggers, and really anyone who expressed their sympathies for the victims, all because the prevailing current is that those people willingly held back their compassion until they found a politically correct tragedy to express it.
Surely some of them did. Those who believe police brutality isn’t a problem, or who think the entire Islamic faith threatens the world (we’ll get to them in a moment), deserve all the cynicism they can handle, and then some. But I don’t think that’s how most people work. Creating lines of division among authentically compassionate people, who genuinely wouldn’t know about a tragedy like the Beirut bombings unless, like the Paris tragedy, it gets put on the front page of every major media outlet, hurts us.
Those people should be encouraged to develop a global awareness instead of demeaned for not possessing it, because they are some of our most valuable allies in the fight to make humanity, in every corner of the world, better. We should align ourselves with those people to press the real issue: why and how the systems which inform us in the 21st century predominantly feature tragedies in which the victims look and act like we do. That disproportionate coverage might in fact explain why so many know about Paris, but not about Baghdad and Beirut.
We shouldn’t be nearly as concerned with people changing their profile picture to the Parisian flag as we should be with people like this:
Along with the much-needed realization that Daesh (also called the Islamic State, ISIS, ISIL, etc) is an urgent global threat that must be taken seriously and neutralized, the Paris attacks have inspired a despicable response from a substantial amount of powerful people who have only become more racist, Islamophobic, and hateful.
That Islamophobia is dangerous, and it’s exactly what Daesh wants. It threatens millions of American Muslims. It threatens the safety of millions of Syrian refugees, fleeing the people and the violence that many ignoramus ass-hats now blame them for causing. Already after yesterday’s attacks, Poland has rescinded its commitment to take in refugees, and many more countries may follow.
This moment is a time for learning, not a time for dividing each other upon lines that should not be drawn. Most people know the Bible, in many places, condemns the killing of innocent people: “Cursed be he that taketh reward to slay an innocent person,” Deuteronomy 27:25. I would gather far less know that the Quran, in 5:32, says the same thing: “Whoever kills an innocent, it is as if he has killed all humankind.”
Most people know that Daesh, which claimed responsibility for the attacks in Paris, has waged a radical war on apostates who do not subscribe to its twisted, archaic brand of Islam. Most people don’t know that it considers the vast majority of Muslims who, like the vast majority of Christians, refuse to bring violence to a religion of peace, to be no better than the Christian victims we hear so much about. Many of the 43 people killed by the bombings in Beirut, which Daesh also claimed responsibility for, were Shiite Muslims, considered to be non-believing apostates just like Christians elsewhere.
In light of this teachable moment, it was hard for me not to be cynical until I ran into a panhandler outside my apartment this morning. As I handed him a couple of bucks and he asked me how my day was going, I told him I was pretty down about the attacks in Paris. He told me he had no idea what I was talking about.
In that moment, the different spheres of awareness in which we live were thrown sharply into focus. And I thought, just maybe, that the reason for some of those different spheres is a genuine (not intentional) lack of global awareness built by the systems that inform us. I’m not saying those systems deliberately hide or sweep away coverage of attacks like those in Kenya — you can find the coverage quite easily — but the networks sure don’t fly a team of reporters in for hours of live, round-the-clock coverage. There wasn’t a CBS special called “48 Hours: Kenya (or Beirut, or Baghdad, or Ankara) Under Attack.”
Instead of criticizing each other for genuine compassion, let’s focus our attention on two places. First, news and social media are consumer-driven products, where consumer demands inform the composition of the product. It’s not a perfect solution, and it certainly doesn’t feel like one, but with enough pressure from users, maybe there will be a Facebook profile picture, or a marked-safe app for victims of future terrorist attacks, wherever they are, and God forbid they happen. Enough attention, and maybe the news will take the atrocious violence ongoing in non-Western countries more seriously.
Second, let’s take issue with those who showed no genuine compassion for any victims by overshadowing their support for the victims in Paris with a hateful, bigoted view of the world. I take heart in the condolences, profile pictures and hashtags of so many on social media, even if those people didn’t do the same for less-publicized but equally heinous tragedies, because I know that when given the chance, those people will readily take up the cause against Islamophobia wherever they may find it.
