We Can Care About More Than One Tragedy At A Time

One of the strangest responses we see time and again when an atrocity occurs is from those people who seem to say that mourning one tragedy means feeling nothing about another.  “What about x, y, or z?” they will say, seeming to imply that we can only care about one tragedy at a time.  Worse, it is sometimes implied that because you mourn the victims of a tragedy that you therefore support any reprisals carried out using that tragedy as an excuse.

On Friday, Paris was hit by terrorist attacks killing 129 innocent people going about their lives.  On Sunday, the French government launched airstrikes against Raqqa in Syria.  We know such strikes can kill innocent people as well as the Daesh positions they claim were ‘precisely targeted’. 

Yes, the former has had far more coverage than the latter.  But paying our respects to the victims of the Paris attacks does not imply that we support the airstrikes carried out by the French state.

Many of us have friends or relatives in France.  We may have been there on holiday.  It is natural that we have empathy for the people there, sympathy for the relatives of the victims, an interest in what is unfolding across the channel.

My daughter lives in France, so it’s only natural that I take an interest in events there.  We exchanged messages over the weekend, and although she wasn’t in Paris at the time she does live near where several arrests were made.  But just because her workplace observed a minute’s silence today does not mean she or her workmates support the airstrikes.

Social media of course limits the nuances of feeling and argument to bare headlines, and tends to polarise debate in ways that might not be intended.  But we owe it to ourselves and to the future to take some time to think a bit more deeply about a topic than is allowed in 140 characters.

Kenan Malik wrote for Al Jazeera in the wake of the Paris attacks an article that I recommend we pay heed to.  He warns against assuming a simple causal relationship between French foreign policy and the attacks:

“The terrorists did not target symbols of the French state, or of French militarism. They did not even target tourist spots. They targeted, rather, the areas and the places where mainly young, anti-racist, multiethnic Parisians hang out.

The cafes, restaurants, bars and music venue that were attacked - Le Carillon, La Belle Equipe, Le Petit Cambodge, and the Jewish-owned Bataclan - are in the 10th and 11th arrondissements, areas that, though increasingly gentrified, remain ethnically and culturally mixed and still with a working-class presence.

The other venue attacked was the Stade de France, the national football stadium. France and Germany were playing a game there on Friday night, and French President Francois Hollande was in attendance.

But the Stade de France, like France's national football team, also has great cultural resonance. "Les Bleus" - as the team is known - are seen by many as an embodiment of multicultural France, a team consisting of "noir, blanc, beur" (black, white, Arab) players. It was in the Stade de France that Les Bleus, led by Zinedine Zidane, a Frenchman of Algerian descent, famously won the World Cup in 1998.

What the terrorists despised, what they tried to eliminate, were ordinary people drinking, eating, laughing, and mixing. That is what they hated - not so much the French state as the values of diversity and pluralism.”

I want to reiterate that message: what was deliberately targeted was ethnically and culturally mixed areas with a working-class presence.  Places where mainly young, anti-racist, multiethnic Parisians hang out.

It is often said that the refugees are also fleeing Daesh, and that’s true.  It’s often said that Daesh kill more Muslims than anyone else.  It’s often said that Daesh kill more in the Middle East than anywhere else.  All that is true.  But remember also that those places targeted by the terrorists in Paris are places where French people of North African descent hang out, live, relax, and mix with people of other ethnic backgrounds.  It is specifically the shared multi-ethnic lived experience that the terrorists despise.

The victims included people of North African descent, people born in Morocco, people born in Congo.  And that was deliberate. That was the reason those locations were chosen.  So imagining that paying respects to the victims of those attacks in some way means you necessarily support some sort of monolithic Frenchness is very wide of the mark.

I was in a bar in France a few weeks ago, and saw this sign hung on the wall by the owner opposing racism and saying it wasn’t welcome in her bar:

"Racism prohibited here!"

She has doubtless expressed her mourning for the Paris victims today and in the past few days.  Should we interpret that mourning as a unity of identity with the French state and its foreign policy?  I’d suggest we have no basis on which we could do so.

Of course it doesn’t help that many of those wishing to express solidarity with
Parisians have chosen to put French flags on their Facebook and Twitter pages.  While those people may simply have picked an easily identifiable symbol for France, it has for others muddied the waters and caused them to assume that all solidarity with Parisians is also support for the foreign policies of the French state.  It’s for reasons like that that I have been careful not to use the Tricolore in that way.  Indeed, I am suspicious of flags in general.

I’d also ask people to consider that while someone may Tweet a picture of a candle-lit vigil for the victims of the Paris attacks in one moment, they may in the past have posted about the Middle East, about Gaza, about their opposition to Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, about their opposition to the arms trade. I have posted about all these things, yet bizarrely found myself defending a tweet about the minute’s silence for the victims of the Paris attacks. Don’t just assume people have only one interest.  Do you have only one interest? 

For example, I exchanged messages with my daughter in France over the weekend, but just this morning exchanged emails with an old friend in the Middle East.  So while I have family connections in France, that doesn’t exclude me from having connections elsewhere in the world.

So don't assume that observing a vigil for victims of one tragedy means I didn't observe a vigil for victims of another.  As a matter of fact I have observed vigils for victims of other tragedies, including those killed in Gaza.  As a matter of fact, I have done concrete things to offer mutual aid and solidarity to refugees.  And no, that doesn't mean I've neglected local foodbanks.  But why should we have to justify ourselves to those who see the world as polarities, either on or off. Those binary arguments are as myopic as they are fallacious.  

That is the thing about humanity – we can’t be pigeon-holed into hermetically sealed monolithic cultures.  We cross cultures, we share various interests, we share this world.  And that is exactly what Daesh hate.  Don’t do their job for them by trying to limit us and to separate us out.