YES, IT IS ‘US’ VS. ‘THEM’
The West and peaceful Muslims are ‘us,’ and the terrorists are ‘them’
Before the Brussels dead were numbered and named, even, the familiar ritual had already begun, and it is unfolding now in all its usual indecencies.
This just goes to show that Muslims are the problem and we should build a wall to keep the refugees out; this just goes to show that the problem is Islamophobia and the legitimate grievances of alienated Muslim youths need to be addressed. It’s all our fault, we had it coming: it’s all because of western imperialism, because George Bush invaded Iraq; no, it’s all our fault because of multiculturalism, because of political correctness.
On Tuesday morning, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told us what we already knew about what world leaders are supposed to say about how we’re supposed to feel: outraged, shocked and saddened. We condemn, we extend condolences, we stand with Belgium and our allies. Terror, senseless violence, innocent civilians and so on, the culprits must be brought to justice and so forth, there are no reports of Canadians among the casualties, amen.
Then it was back to the place in the ceremony where we turn in our hymnals to “Bombing them only plays into their hands and gives them what they want,” followed by a reading from the book of “You are more likely to die from falling in a bathtub than from a suicide attack.” Soon enough we’ll have returned to the eerie stillness of moral and intellectual paralysis in the face of atrocity campaigns by way of state terrorism — as in the case of Russia, Iran, Syria and Turkey — and the globe-girdling private sector jihadist terrorism of ISIL, the Taliban, al- Qaida, al- Shabaab, Boko Haram and their many and various sub-cults, franchises and offshoots.
And we’ll be right back where we started, just as incapable of getting ourselves sorted as the last time around, after Paris. It has not mattered one bit, all the bloodshed and horror between Black Friday, Nov. 13, 2015, with its 130 Parisian dead at the Bataclan concert hall and other locations around the city, and Black Tuesday, March 22, 2016, with at least 34 dead at Brussels’ Zaventem Airport and the Maalbeek metro station.
A week after Black Friday, al- Qaida massacred 20 innocents at the Radison Blu Hotel in Bamako, in Mali. A week after that, an Islamic State suicide bomber killed 13 passengers of a presidential-guard bus in Tunisia, then an “ISILinspired” couple gunned down 14 employees of the Department of Public Health in San Bernardino, California, and two weeks later a similarly inspired suicide bomber killed 13 people in Istanbul, Turkey. It has picked up to about once a day now.
True, if you live in Canada you’re more likely to die from some mishap during an appointment with your wellness counsellor than from a chunk of jagged shrapnel in a suicide bombing. Nothing to be concerned about, then. All we have to do is keep our heads down. The quieter we keep, the less we’ll have to worry about “blowback.” And yet, strangely, minding one’s business never seems to be enough.
Being a Jew walking along the Jaffa seaside esplanade in Tel Aviv or waiting for a bus on Shamgar Street in Jerusalem seems to be more than sufficient to provoke a terrorist maniac to plunge a knife into your neck. You will not want to be a Christian these days in Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Pakistan, or quite a few other places. A far surer way to be disembowelled by a jihadist is of course to be simply a Muslim, in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Without resorting to fashionably clever insinuations of base racism, it is worth wondering why Brussels should so easily elicit our sympathies, but not, say, Baghdad, which has had a far harder time of it. Part of it is simply the shock of a terror bombing in otherwise boring little Belgium, and we are no longer shocked when bad things happen in Baghdad.
But three weeks ago, two suicide bombers murdered 70 people and wounded more than 100 in a crowded Shiite market in Baghdad’s Sadr City district. Unsurprisingly, it was an ISIL job. Two weeks ago, another ISIL suicide bomber killed 33 people and injured more than 80 at a highway checkpoint south of Baghdad. On Monday, an ISIL suicide team killed six Iraqi soldiers in an attack on a checkpoint west of Baghdad. One of the suicide bombers was from Huddersfield, England, one of the thousands of Europeans and North Americans ISIL has recruited to its genocidal cause.
It is worth paying at least some notice, then, to the way we so casually slip into an unexamined usage of terms like “us” and “them,” and how this vice is as much a habit of the purportedly “progressive” among us as it is among the white ethno-chauvinists who more consciously traffic in it.
During the decade that the Canadian Forces participated in the United Nations mission in Afghanistan, the overwhelming majority of Afghans loathed the Taliban, yearned for democracy and wanted a leg-up from NATO. But it nonetheless became respectable for the NDP to insist that by coming to the aid of the Afghan majority, “we” were imposing “our values” on “them.”
After the January 2015 Islamist massacre of 11 journalists and staff at the militantly left-wing Parisian satire magazine Charlie Hebdo, it was commonplace among the anglosphere’s avant-garde to outrageously contend that the Hebdo crew was a pack of anti-Muslim racists. When the literary organization PEN America decided to honour the Hebdo survivors with a free-speech award at a New York gala, 32 celebrity literati beclowned themselves in an exercise of exhibitionist umbragetaking on behalf of Europe’s aggrieved and marginalized Muslims. “We” should not side with Charlie Hebdo in upsetting “them.”
Last month, the brave liberal Algerian journalist and novelist Kamel Daoud wrote a lengthy essay for the New York Times in an effort to explain the crippling misogyny that afflicts so many Arab countries, and the “sick relationship with women” that has emotionally disfigured so many Arab men. For his pains, Daoud found himself the subject of a manifesto drawn up by 19 French professors who damned him for the thought crime of “colonialist paternalism” and the dissemination of “orientalist clichés.”
With such faddish and parochial grievance hobbies dominant across the postmodernist left, it makes sense, then, that such a clear field in France has opened up for Marie Le Pen’s farright National Front, and it’s no wonder that the toxin of anti- Semitism has spread so deeply and obviously through Jeremy Corbyn’s laughingstock Labour party. It should be unsurprising as well that the “anti-establishment” momentum in the United States that might have gone largely to socialist-lite Bernie Sanders has been usurped by the Muslim-baiting demagogue Donald Trump.
Only last month, Trump, who is admired quite fervently by a loud gaggle at the far-right fringes of Canada’s Conservative party, earned the “Pink Badge of Courage” award from the far-left millionaire activist cult that calls itself Code Pink. Whose side are these people on, again?
This isn’t to argue for less of “us” and “them” in the aftermath of the Belgium atrocities, but for rather more of it, except by getting it right for once.
This isn’t to argue for less of ‘us’ and ‘them’ in the aftermath of the Belgium atrocities, but for rather more of it, except by getting it right for once.