A video I made...
I'm a high school teacher in Brooklyn, New York. I usually make slowly scripted videos, but today I just want to talk about how I'm going to handle my students' questions about Paris on Monday. Maybe this is just for me and the young people I know, maybe it's for other teachers I know, maybe it's for you. I don't know.
Hundreds of people have been killed in the last 48 hours in terrorist attacks in Paris, Beirut, and Baghdad--and for what? For being innocent people enjoying their weekend or holiday in a country that militarily opposes their sick, murderous attempt to dominate the world?
We are en solidarité with victims and survivors in Paris, and their families and friends, and the same holds true for the Middle East—victims who are Muslim, Christian, Yazidi, Jewish, or identify as none of that.
The attackers are sick people with a murderous ideology that are attacking metal concerts and mosques. The terrorists are not a religion or a sect or a culture, a race or a skin color. Westerners feel, as a society, more for Paris, because of personal networks and deep networks of shared experience. We all know Paris.
A couple hundred million of us have been there. I've walked past Le Bataclan and guest lectured in St Denis, with the fellow teacher who asked me to write this. Facebook lets Parisians check in safe and lets all of us temporarily adorn our profile photos in blue, white, and red. We and our children go to football games and concerts on Fridays and feel like it could have been us. It could have. In Japan, Paris hashtags were trending as the country faced a tsunami.
Terrorism thrives. It grows with any kind of fear and with any kind of reordering of our lives. That's how it works. It sets up an us and a them, and divides the world in such a way that we see 'them'-victims and 'them'-enemies' as more like each other than they are to 'us'-victims and ourselves. We feel for Paris. We should be similarly at one for the rest of the world. It is understandable why we aren't. Cultural difference is emphasized in the way we humans mentally organize each other. It's how social studies is taught–this group, that group. It's how religions and nations are set up. It's equally true in the Middle East. Without the logical fallacy of stark divisions between people, Daesh (the so-called ‘Islamic State’) could not exist and it would not have the power to destroy human empathy on both sides. It would not exist because an us/them ideology, plus the desire for dominance, is the only thing that can turn a teenager at a concert or a Russian family vacationing in Egypt into a "Crusader" to be slaughtered... or a mother buying bread into the "Safavid" /sɑːˈfɑːwiːd/ enemy. Both of these terms that Daesh uses are references to medieval war. Such ideas could have no power because without an us/them worldview we would increase our compassion for all people (rock fans AND refugees) and multiply our resolve to identify, struggle against, and defeat this inhuman slaughter... and everything like it—murders, rapes, and other acts of dehumanization worldwide, no matter who does it.
Whether you think that this us/them worldview is because of Islam or in spite of Islam does not matter to this particular question. It matters, and I'm sure I'll talk about it later, but it doesn't matter today. What does matter is that we know that the victims are global, the threat is global, and our response to this garbage must be global—in solidarity, en solidarité, fī t-taḍāmun. Us/them worldview is 100% of Daesh's worldview and it should be 0% of ours.
By the way, Gaia, thanks for asking me this question, and yes, you should still go to Paris.
As my favorite British/Egyptian/Belgian/Moroccan singer, Natacha Atlas, has said:
Let us stand together and awaken ,
Let us question, learn and study;
Listen, understand and think.
Let us understand,
Permit us to know-
Permit us to know freedom.
Let us know there is a land
where words are the purveyors of truth,
heads are held high,
And human will is regarded above all.
Where the world is not split into a thousand fragments,
Under siege, forgotten, or lost
Let us perceive of it,
Let us know that place.
Let us know our land,
where words are the purveyors of truth.