Evil isn’t black and white
Azad Essa is a journalist at Al Jazeera. He is also co-founding editor of The Daily Vox
LAST week, the British city of Manchester found itself in the throes of chaos when a a suicide bomber attacked a concert. Twenty-two people, mostly teenagers, were killed and 64 others were injured in a massive explosion that sent nuts, nails and bolts tearing into the torsos of innocent civilians. It was brutal. Immediately, and predictably, the incident got the around-the-clock coverage it deserved. Some in the US were watching Jane the Virgin when a traumatic ticker appeared at the bottom of the screen alerting them to the attack.
The stories of 14-year-old Nell Jones, who was killed at the concert, or 50-year-old Jane Tweddle-Taylor, who came to pick up a friend’s daughter and was killed when she was hit by shrapnel, have spawned outrage about the actions of the attacker, identified as Salman Ramadan Abedi.
A day or two later, 106 civilians, among them 42 children, were killed in US strikes in eastern Syria. Of course, little coverage was afforded to these sons and daughters of “terrorists”, many of whom had escaped Raqqa, held by Islamic State, only to find themselves bombed by “the good guys”.
I’m not going to bemoan the lack of interest in the murder of Syrians or Iraqis; we are used to the asymmetrical care for human life. This is unlikely to change soon, given that most of us believe the UK, Europe and the US is where quality of life happens. The attacks take place “elsewhere”, where no one has a name, life is meant to be short, not sweet; a marshland where fathers don’t mind losing their young daughters to drones and where mothers give birth to suicide bombers.
Given our acceptance that some lives matter more, we are entitled to expect that the coverage would have a tinge of nuance.
The war on terror hackery has been going on since 9/11. Surely, by now journalists know what questions to ask and experts know what not to say? Well, I’ll be damned, the conversation has barely moved an inch since the twin towers fell with the reverberations of “Why do they hate us?”
First, the insistence on focusing on the attacker’s “national” background. He was a British citizen, but the focus was on his Libyan ancestry, to assert that this killer was an outsider. Then the discussion revolved around his faith. Was he a good Muslim? Was he one of those mosque-going Muslims or had he been estranged from the community? Did he pray and read the Qur’an regularly or was he one of those
When we treat some victims better than others and link background to culpability, we perpetuate a myth
– the pot-smoking, blonde-banging brown punks who had recently gone back to his faith and hoped for virgins in paradise?”
In other words, what role did Islam play in radicalising the young man and what can we do to stop this menace?
It is remarkable that analysts can talk about “faith” outside the toxic, militarised masculinity that gives birth to almost every mass killer – Muslim or not.
Abedi has a lot in common with Omar Mateen, the man who murdered 49 people in a gay nightclub in Orlando in June last year. He also has a lot in common with Adam Lanza who marched into a school in Connecticut in 2012 with a semi-automatic assault rifle and pistols and shot dead 26 people, including 20 pupils.
Likewise, Abedi is more like Anders Breivik, the white supremacist who killed 34 people in Norway in 2011 or Craig Stephen Hicks, who shot three Muslims dead in Chapel Hill in North Carolina in 2015. Last week, a man stabbed two other men to death after they stood up to him for threatening a Muslim girl and her friend on a train in Oregon. Abedi is part of his ilk, too. He, Mateen, Lanza, Breivik and Hicks are all products of alienation and superb grievance, spectacular glitches in the modern matrix.
And yet none of the white men mentioned here was seen as influenced by their faith or national origin. They were seen as misfits, mentally unstable, and unhinged. Why not – after all the attacks in London, Paris, Madrid – talk about what draws these killers to one another?
It is a travesty that each time these attacks take place, we pretend they are the result of a religious sect out to destroy the fruits of western civilisation. This is an easy way to explain the world and keeps dissent in check. It allows manufacturers of weapons to get their bonuses every year.
Men of all religions, cultures and ethnicities feel it is their right to commit mass murder, as part of a larger quest to “correct” a personal existential crisis or at times, mediated through a political grievance. It has nothing to do with one’s faith. To watch this charade play each time has left me gagging.
Why not interrogate the failings of our so-called liberal, secular societies, and ask: Why do people, be it a Muslim, Christian, Hindu, white supremacist, feel the need to rebel violently against the system? Why is the background – racial, national, religious – important, given all we know about alienation and isolation? Again, why is it that politicians are allowed to spew hate as reasonable fixes to the political, social and economic failures of the world order?
Each time we give some victims more airtime than others, link background to culpability and overemphasise a mindless adherence to faith and trees in the sky, we perpetuate the Reagan, Bush and Trump way of seeing the world in black and white, of good versus evil, when the truth is often within.