I was inspired to write this piece in light of the Paris attacks. About an hour before I read about the beginning of the siege, I spoke with my mom and sister who were in Paris at the time as they were relaxing at a friend’s apartment getting ready to go out to dinner. They’re safe, as are all the people I know who were in Paris. With that said, my thoughts are with anyone affected by any recent acts of violence and oppression around the world. ISIS employed a nihilistically savage strategy in the attack, the aim of which was to create an environment of fear and panic.
What happened in Paris has released a torrent of sympathy and anti-ISIS anger on social media: Parisians offered support to those in need via the hashtag #PorteOuverte on Twitter and Facebook launched a feature allowing Parisians to “check in as safe.” While such a feature is totally valid and explainable, I can’t help but notice that no such feature existed in the aftermath of a suicide bombing in Beirut that killed and injured hundreds, as if to say that such an attack is nothing more than what’s expected — that no one is more or less safe than they were beforehand. The bloodshed comes with the turf. The day after the attacks, I saw Facebook had given its users the ability to overlay a watermark of the French flag on their profile pictures. Here I want to stress that I am not bashing the outpouring of sympathy on social media. Comparing tragedies is a road that I have no moral authority to walk down. Rather, the existence of Facebook’s French flag feature sheds light on the absence of the equivalent feature made to memorialize, among countless other acts of terror, the suicide bombing in Lebanon.
While many on this campus and in this country understandably identify more with Paris than they do with Beirut, the flag feature caters to the notion that this violence against in Europe is novel — that this is the beginning of violence we should care about. Again, my intention is not to subvert totally valid sympathy for a senseless tragedy, but rather to illuminate an underlying ideological prejudice in this country — an us vs. them mentality. It becomes less about standing with France and more about the West standing against radical Islam.
The profile pictures represent an aspect that gets transmitted implicitly: when ISIS attacks Anglos in Paris, safety is an international concern. We’re all there, attentively waiting for “safety” to be confirmed in a place whose peace we take for granted. But, when the attacks happen in that “other” region, when it affects the lives of those “other” people, there is no such concern. Almost to say that we expect ISIS to run rampant in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq because that is ISIS’s domain, that’s where this kind of terrorism belongs, where it is nothing more than a news headline to us —and sometimes, even that is giving it too much attention. The political rhetoric concerning millions of refugees, who are running from the same ISIS responsible for the Paris attacks, utterly lacks a sentiment of solidarity. In the aftermath of Paris there has been a collective anti-migrant kneejerk reaction. It is necessary to remember the vast majority of migrants that make up the current crisis have the same “them” as we do. Senseless violence by ISIS is not new to those fleeing their homelands and we ought to express sympathy, not exclusionary rhetoric, to men, women and children in search of nothing more than sanctuary.
We see this same “other” treatment in our own country, where people hesitate to stand in solidarity with their own peers, who cannot even walk to class without feeling the unfathomable weight of death threats, of generations of discrimination. Attacks in Paris? Better change that profile picture to you in front of the Eiffel tower and send prayers. But day-to-day oppression in this country? In your city? On your campus? Oppression and discrimination too often go unacknowledged, mostly due to what I perceive to be an insecurity about the who exactly the them is. The horror that is ISIS is far easier to blame than systemic racism, in which many students fear they may be complicit. I’m not saying Paris doesn’t deserve our prayers. I am saying that the people under attack both in and out of this country so far too often get categorized as “other,” and not worth our attention, our time, our concern, our solidarity.
