Shock. Awe.
Rinse and Repeat
(Or, If a
terrorist drops a bomb in the middle of the forest, does it make a sound?)
Stupid shit is dangerous. I woke up with a friend's phone call this
morning who told me about the attack in Paris. "Oh fuck these ISIS
people", I muttered instinctively, not entertaining the possibility that
it could be someone else. Perhaps the lag between waking up as a person and as
a supposedly objective left-liberal is about twenty minutes. Before that, it is all a festival of untainted prejudice. Still half asleep, I opened the web browser on my
phone and logged on to a news website. The headline proclaimed 120 dead. 120.
Paris. A famous city and a three digit casualty figure. This was something to
give a fuck about, my still half asleep brain concluded. Somehow 120 dead in
Paris evokes a response that 90 dead in Turkey (who cares about which city)
doesn't. Unless of course, it says 'Almost 100 dead in Turkey'. Almost 100 is
respectable. The decimal system is the most surreptitiously evil hegemony that humankind
conjured.
The 'terror attack follow up' is a synchronized dance routine the world
has perfected over the years, and I am no exception. So, having read the
headlines, I was on Step 2: Twitter. #ParisAttacks was 'trending'. The news of
the attacks had prompted an out pour of banalities of the haters and the well
intentioned. But since I don’t have any hope or patience with the former, it is
the stupidity of the latter that annoys me. So for the remainder of this rant,
it is them I speak to. First tweet: "Terrorism has no religion". Wrong.
What you want to say is that terrorism doesn't have a religion. It has
religions. And why just stop at religions? Add states, ethnicities and tribes
too. Does anyone say that the shell that landed on a Palestinian farmer's house
does not have a state? Or that crusaders did not have a religion? And as long
as terrorism has religions, it has your religion, and mine too. Another
tweet: "This is not my Islam/another religion". Thank you for making
a presumably correct, though ultimately a
narcissistic and pointless distinction. It was the gunman's interpretation of religion
that motivated him to fire at people in the middle of a concert. And what you
are doing is just a secularized version of apostatizing, for you are
privileging your interpretation of religion over his, and presuming that yours is
the objective truth. There is no pristine, detached, true religion that exists
beyond the practices of the believers. This is a misconception that you share
with those you despise the most.
Finally, number three: "These people aren't humans." Well, they
are, and humans are fucked up. Deal with it. In many ways, this is the ultimate
form of apostatizing, which throws inconvenient persons out of the species, and
not just the community. And it is necessary, for without it, we will soon
realize that asking someone to behave like a human being is probably the worst
advice we can give them
Amit
Julka
