Beyond Selective Mourning: We Will Never Be Safe Until the Global Village is “US”
Dearly beloveds,
Watching the world react to Paris and reaching out to friends I made there and in Beruit, which was bombed the day before, I am reflecting on how the value of human life is messaged to us in the Western media. I performed in Beirut and Paris and made many good friends there. I know the faces and streets and skies of both cities. Ironically, Beruit is called the Paris of the Middle East and is very Westernized and full of people who dress and live “like us.” It is not a war zone. It is a beautiful Mediterranean city where people go to work, and socialize in clubs (it has one of the most cracking nightlifes on earth) and go to the beach in bikinis. But, there is no option to change my profile picture to a Lebanese flag.
It is not possible for my friends there to let the world know they are safe using the Facebook safety check which was activated for the Paris attack. How about the attack in Kenya a few months back, do we even remember it? More people were murdered there than in Paris, if it were about sheer numbers, sheer scientific data of human suffering, then surely that should be a bigger concern. Does it become a date which we can reference which we will all understand the implications immediately like 9/11 or 7/7? No, nobody remembers what date it happened. Why not? Why do we not see the colors of the flags around the world projected on Western monuments and government buildings when atrocities are carried out in non-European countries day in and day out?
I’m a White man in California and I just listened to Black and Brown (and White) Muslim women express their fear about walking outside in their head coverings in the aftermath of the Paris attacks. I live in a predominately black neighborhood and I hear the people here every day concerned about walking the streets or driving a car in a black body in America.
I count among my friends people from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Palestine, the First Nations of these lands, and the descendants of African slaves who don’t even have the luxury of knowing which countries their ancestors are from, and many other countries which have been enduring tragedies and atrocities day in and day out for years or decades.
It comes down to this one thing: White Western society doesn’t value all life as equal. We don’t see all people as “us.” The French are clearly “us.” The British are “us.” The Israelis are “us.” But the Kenyans and the Iraqis and Lebanese and Pakistanis and the Palestinians aren’t. And the real point here is: we will never be safe until everyone in this global village is our family. Until everyone is “us.” ISIS only exists in a world where there is “us” and “them.” They thrive in that world. They only thrive in that world. They are the products of the people and places we Westerners treat as the wretched of the earth. Where we value the natural resources of those lands more than the people of those lands. They can’t exist in a global village that treats everyone as part of the village. Let me explain,
I have been watching the way this ISIS nightmare has been presented since its inception… I wish I could say in disbelief. But actually it doesn’t surprise me that the context is totally missing.
Where was ISIS formed?
The leaders of ISIS met in a US prison in Iraq. ISIS was born in a US prison. How often do you hear that reminder on the nightly news? These prisoners were fighting against an occupying army. From my country. Baghdadi was a neighborhood preacher with no history of violence before the U.S. invasion and occupation of his country. Obviously this dude is a terrible person. Maybe he was then. Maybe he became so in the midst of the insanity of war. He’s a horrific nightmare of a person who would like to kill me and the vast majority of Muslims if he could. I’m the last person to ride for him. That dude is the enemy of me and everyone I love. But what context created a place where thousands of people would find his radicalized voice the most appealing? It’s definitely not a place where people have stability, security, and a future for their families. It not a place where people are included in the global village. You can’t destabilize an entire region and remove entire governments and armies and install your own puppet leaders, kill hundreds of thousands of people, and have your Vice President’s company rebuild it for billions of dollars and expect them to thank you and then act surprised when shit goes haywire and then blame the chaos on Islam or on sectarian strife, and not even mention the context when the power vacuum you created gives rise to blood thirsty extremists.
That is peak whiteness. That is the definition of hubris. Imagine if we would have done that to France or Britain. You can’t, right? How come? Because they are white. They are “us.”
And every time some Muslim blows something up I see millions of Muslims tripping over themselves to apologize and express their outrage. They are scared for their lives and their children. But you don’t see that in the news, they don’t air those voices, cause it doesn’t fit their agenda. They say “where are the moderate Muslims!” Oh, you mean the 99.99999999999% of the 1 in 4 people on earth that you don’t want to put on TV. Ok.
How bout this though. I’m a white man. I’ve never once been expected to apologize for George Bush leading my country into an occupation which killed half a million civilians. I never once had to apologize for the police officer that killed Tamir Rice or countless other black boys and men. For Hiroshima or Nagasaki. For the extermination of the indigenous people. For slavery. For colonizing almost every country on earth. For anything. It’s probably never even crossed the mind of most white people that these acts were done in their name. In the name of keeping them safe. In the name of their religion. The religion of white supremacy. The religion of “us” vs “them.”
This brings me to the point which is lost in the Western discourse: The religion/ideology with the most blood on its hands in human history is the religion/ideology of White Supremacy. Which is defined as seeing white people, institutions, ways of being and knowing, history etc, as better than and more important than people we deem non-white. All this can only be understood through the lens of White Supremacy. We have called some lives more valuable than others, based largely around the triviality of skin pigmentation for 500 years. We don’t mourn all lives equally. We don’t love all lives equally. We don’t see all people as “us.” And guess what, Black and Brown people don’t have the luxury to not notice that. It’s not lost on Black people that the people who wrote the Declaration of Independence had slaves. That they have to pay their rent with bills with the faces of slave owners who believed they were 3/5 of a human being and owned their grandparents. It’s not lost on the Iraqis that the country that occupied theirs, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, and decimating the infrastructure, considers itself the harbinger of freedom and democracy around the world and actually had the nerve to initially call the invasion “Operation Infinite Justice.” Excuse me? What kind of twilight zone Orwellian dystopian novel are we trapped in? It’s not lost on Black people that White people can’t even bring themselves to say “black lives matter” without countering “all lives matter” and silencing the discourse about our unresolved racial oppression.
If you want to understand ISIS imagine that “them” is “us.” Just imagine for a moment if instead of us attacking Iraq in the wake of 9/11 the tables were turned and it was another country. Say, 9/11 never happened to us, but happened to Iraq. Say, on September 11 Norway attacked a country in the Middle East, like Iraq, and knocked down the towers of their financial center. And in response Iraq launched an all out war on America (which had no relationship to the actions of Norway) — removing our president George W Bush and dismantling the entire government and armed forces and installing puppets loyal to the Iraqis in all those positions. What would happen? Well, I’m 100% sure all those crazy ass right wing white patriot groups that are armed to the teeth would be fighting to the death.
A lot of average Americans themselves would take up arms and join them (not necessarily because they agreed with them but because they preferred them more than a foreign army), our armed forces which had been dismantled would form militias, and others would take up arms just to defend themselves from the chaos. Black and brown people in the inner cities would take up arms too, as much to defend their neighborhoods from an occupying army as from the right wing white militias who are roaming the country setting up their own biblical courts. And guess who would come to power in the insane anarchy and occupation of our country? I’m willing to put my money on the most extreme violent right-wing racist militias. Because they are militant and united under a very myopic frightening apocalyptic world view, and believe themselves chosen to do God’s will. They live in a black-and-white world of pure good and evil. And they are already strapped and already trained. And all the anti-NRA nice peaceful Christians who work in IT wouldn’t pose much of a resistance.
So, when Bill Maher or Sam Harris smugly assert that “you can draw a straight line between ISIS and the Koran” they are obfuscating the entire context. Sure, there is a straight line to Rumi and Hafiz and the Koran too. Just like there is a straight line between the Bible and the KKK on the one hand and a straight line between the Bible and MLK on the other. You can make a text mean whatever you want it to mean. But the real question is — why were the conditions ripe in Iraq/Syria for the voices of ISIS to come to power as opposed to the compassionate preachers, charity workers and mystical love poets? Many of the greatest mystical love poets are Iraqi after all. Because as we say in America, desperate times call for desperate measures…. And hellish circumstances give birth to demons and devils. But we still hear on the news, “Why do they hate us?” “We don’t understand their evil.” “What is it about Islam?” Is it possibly because they were born out of horrific acts done to them in the names of freedom, justice, democracy and world peace? You don’t see Muslims in Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country on earth, blowing people up.
Only the veil of white supremacy, a willful ignorance, could cause one to lump 1.5 billion people into the same camp. When ISIS represents .00000000001% of that population. Why don’t we associate the KKK with Christianity when they are quoting the Bible left and right and claim to be acting in God’s name? Because they look like us. And we “know” we are “good”. We are “us”. So even liberals like Sam Harris can sit on TV and actually say with a straight face that our atrocities are just mistakes of the pure and good intentioned “us”. While all the evil that “they” do is a product of their evil natured intention. To put it in philosophical terms: our essence is goodness, our evil is an accident. While their essence is evil and as such they must be eradicated. That’s a pretty medieval theological argument for an atheist.
All I’m really saying is that this “us” vs. “them” has got us in the situation we are in. We have to see everyone as “us” and we have to start with “us.” If we blame “them” we have already lost. We will never be safe until everyone in this global village is our family. Until everyone is “us.” France is us and Palestine is us and Ferguson is us and Mali is us. I believe in us, and I love us, but I weep for us for what we do to us in the name of us.
