This Is Not A Thinkpiece about The Paris Attacks

I’ve just spent the last seven hours live-tweeting translations of tweets from Paris. Though I’m not there, I am filled with raw mental images from inside the Bataclan, where hundreds of people attending a concert witnessed people being shot slowly, one by one, people too afraid to move lest they be the next to be executed. People desperately searching for lost loved ones — sound found, most not. People sending prayers, messages of support, and also insipid political commentary.

I’m not going to talk about politics. I’m not going to speculate on how the National Front is going to use the attacks to spur an Islamophobic backlash to advance its right-wing anti-immigrant platform. I’m not going to ruminate on selective outrage, the causes, or effects, what came before or what will come next.

In the next few days, these attacks will certainly be all over the news. The thinkpieces are coming. The events of today will be endlessly discussed, dissected and leveraged in service of any number of political arguments. Now is not the time to be polemic. Now is a time for mourning, reflection and awe — innocent victims of terror should be mourned and remembered from Paris to Beirut, as well as in Baghdad and Kabul.

The impression that I took from reading hundreds of Parisians thoughts in the moment was that people are simply in shock, and are not preoccupying themselves with who is responsible and how the threat will be rooted out and neutralized. They are not looking for a culprit, a scapegoat, or revenge.

November 13th is not the next September 11th. Sure, it’s an apt, readily available comparison. The logic that has become conventional among anyone who’s not a Fox News commentator is that an attack will inevitably trigger a backlash against Muslims locally and globally

This hasn’t happened yet, and it’s certainly not inevitable.

This hasn’t happened yet, and it’s certainly not inevitable.