I was torn about what to write today. I was thinking about writing about my new job, or about doing some gardening work for my friends Elly and Eddie today. Or about Danusia’s new career as a Moth storyteller. Yes, that can happen. But the one thing that happened this week that can’t be ignored is what happened in Paris Friday night.
I was working a piece for my writing class Friday evening, and I had turned the sound on my TV off as I wrote. Then on one of the occasions that I stole a glance at the TV I saw men with guns and helmets and bulletproof vests in front of ambulances and police cars. Flashing lights and people running back and forth. A glimpse of bodies on the ground and people running past them. I turned on the sound and found out it was something going on in Paris, France. A terrorist attack.
The big news this week was that “Jihadi John” had been “taken out” by a drone strike somewhere in Syria. That we use phrases like taken out to describe someone’s death speaks to how we as a society have trivialized death.
I’m sure the ISIS media are reveling in “taking out” 129 or so Europeans. So where does it end?
I guess it’s been like this since man separated into different tribes and races. Mine is better than yours. Tit for tat. And we though we were civilized.
There has been a great outpouring of support for the French people, a great show of solidarity between the western nations.
But what of the hundreds of thousands of dead Muslims in the last 14 years of war in the Middle East, killed by western bombs and bullets?
Don’t get me wrong, what these jihadists did is abhorrent, I don’t condone it in any way, but looking for revenge always comes back to bite you in the ass.
George Bush invaded Iraq not because they were behind the downing of the twin towers in 2001, because they didn’t do it; most of the 9/11 plotters were Saudi Arabian. He invaded Iraq because they had dissed Poppy. Almost as an afterthought Afghanistan was invaded because that was where Osama-Bin-Laden was supposedly hiding. Tit for tat, it looks like.
So now, 14 years later, 13 years after George Bush declared “Mission Accomplished” from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln people continue to die on both sides. The war rages on. Hatred breeds more hatred. Mess with me and I will mess with you.
The ISIS media is likening this war to a modern Crusade, and have identified France as the primary leader of the Crusades. They are right. The French kings used the Crusades to remain in power and expand the influence of France in the world, and to become a world power. Let’s not forget that the word Crusade means carrying the cross.
So this is a religious war, as far as ISIS is concerned, and as they see themselves as the righteous, and the underdog, anything goes.
We in the west see ISIS as fanatics, crazy people. Probably the same way King George thought of the American Colonists who rejected the Royal way.
They are people too, with an agenda, and with true belief. But since they are people, they have desires and feelings and dreams just like the rest of us, so there must be some room for negotiation, for dialogue, I hope. I just wish the killing would stop. I felt just as bad when the U.S. Air Force bombed the Doctors without borders hospital in Afghanistan last month.
We are all the same; one person’s death shouldn’t weigh less because of that person’s race and religion. But how do we get that across to the powers that be? The people with the money that should be building schools and hospitals instead of bigger, better drones. Building bridges instead of planning revenge. Too bad we are only human, because we are going to keep making the same mistakes and pointing our fingers over and over again.
Donald Trump supposed aloud in a speech the other day that if the people in the audience at the Bataclan Theater were armed there would have been a different result. He got a wild round of applause for that. I could only shake my head as to how ignorant we as a people can be. Just as ignorant as the men spraying AK-47 rounds into the crowd at the Bataclan.