Count
the days.
In three weeks' time, maybe a month, facebook profiles will shed the tricolour filters and normal transmission will resume. Passions will subside. The bitter residue of shock will linger and perhaps manifest in sideways sympathy at a thing we called Islam and a people called Muslims. They are our community but we will look at them differently. We won’t remember, or even bother, to ask why. Because if we bother to ask why, we will be confronted by the weakness of our own ideologies. In three weeks from now we might not realize that the “terrorist” has struck us hardest and worst by changing our view of things, by changing the way that we look at “others”: our neighbours, our colleagues, our classmates - the friends who move amongst us but persist in not looking like us.
In three weeks' time, maybe a month, facebook profiles will shed the tricolour filters and normal transmission will resume. Passions will subside. The bitter residue of shock will linger and perhaps manifest in sideways sympathy at a thing we called Islam and a people called Muslims. They are our community but we will look at them differently. We won’t remember, or even bother, to ask why. Because if we bother to ask why, we will be confronted by the weakness of our own ideologies. In three weeks from now we might not realize that the “terrorist” has struck us hardest and worst by changing our view of things, by changing the way that we look at “others”: our neighbours, our colleagues, our classmates - the friends who move amongst us but persist in not looking like us.
In three weeks, the tricolour filters will fade and go the way of the #jesuischarlie. Bombing of all varieties will continue silently in those other places whose names suggest a heightening awareness of the world: Kobane, Mosul, Kirkut, Fallujah, Baghdad, Beirut. In Aleppo and Tal Abyad the Turkish government have a historic opportunity: tacitly using ISIS to get rid of the Kurds once and for all. Turkey will have to choose her enemy wisely: the one with morals who can’t be bought or the one who can be bought but with no morals at all. But the bombings and and the beheadings are not the ends. They are the means. The ends are to make us fearful, watchful and hateful, to make us . . . un-neighbourly. The media-backed terrorist will defeat most of us without firing a single shot.
In three weeks the tricolour filters will fade and we should ask ourselves this: at what cost do we budget our moral indignation to spend only on our traditional allies. Because the people of the world are being savaged and if we continue to ignore those other victims, that same savagery will come to visit us in evermore fierce and frequent measure.
In three weeks, after the tricolours have faded, the Angels of Paris will go on to teach the world it's most important lessons. If they leave a noble legacy it will be in teaching "us"
to mourn the unknowns and the unsung, those who have shared in similar horrors - from Paris to Pakistan, from Syria to Sudan, from Nairobi to Nigeria. The Angels of Paris will teach "us" that we are soldiers in a war against ideology, extremism, hatred and violence. They will teach us that the only useful weapons in a war of this kind are the ideas we plant in the minds of our youngest. They will teach us that many of us don't know yet know which side we are on.
Three weeks. Count the days.
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