I do not have a clue why more mainstream voices are not echoing Michel Martin’s devastating statement on NPR two nights ago, when she went down a list of Middle East victims of recent terror attacks and said that we need to care as much about them as we do the Paris victims. She dared to say explicitly that Middle East Lives Matter. Here is an extended excerpt of her stirring and creative commentary, which you should hear for yourself, as I did as darkness was falling Sunday night:
On Friday — the same day that Paris was attacked — a bomb exploded during midday prayers at a mosque in northwestern Yemen, according to Reuters, killing several worshipers and injuring others. Also on Friday, ISIS claimed responsibility for a suicide attack at a funeral in Baghdad, which killed at least 18 people and wounded more than 40. The funeral was for a Muslim man who had been part of a militia trying to get ISIS out of the country’s north and west.
There’s more: On Thursday ISIS also took responsibility for a double attack in southern Beirut, one that killed at least 45 people and wounded 200 others. The group said in a statement on Twitter posted by its supporters that their members blew up a bicycle loaded with explosives on a busy street. And when people rushed to help, a second suicide bomber’s explosives went off, killing and wounding yet more people. Eyewitnesses say there would have been even greater carnage if a Beirut man, out on a stroll with his little girl, had not tackled the second suicide bomber, pushing the attacker away and taking much of the impact of the second bomb onto himself.
And on Wednesday, nine people were killed in a terrorist attack in Egypt’s north Sinai. According to news reports, a group opened fire at a family home and then blew up a car bomb near it. Most of the victims were members of a single family, including two children under 3 years old.
There’s more I could add to this terrible list — an alleged attack on a village in Niger by the Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram on Wednesday, the murder of three Turkish police officers in a bomb attack on Tuesday — but you get the point.
Paris calls out to us because many of us have been there or wish to go. For many of us, it is the city of our dreams. But there is terrible violence being perpetrated all over the world, in places many of us will never visit, by some of the same people and the same ideology that led to the massacres in Paris.
But their lives matter. They matter because when we draw the line between those near and far, and those who look like us and those who don’t, those whose names we can easily pronounce and those which we cannot, we participate in the same kind of dehumanizing that allows people to do such awful things to each other in the first place.
How can anyone argue with this simple explanation of the negative impact of the racist valuation of people’s lives? Then Martin concluded by saying the name of that Beirut man who was killed saving others, Adel Termos.
I see that many of the commenters at NPR praise Martin’s wisdom. But why isn’t that wisdom contagious? In the era of #BlackLivesMatter, why aren’t pundits and politicians trying to make this point to help get us out of what really is an unequal cycle of violence that is being sold as a clash of civilizations? When in fact many people understand. Last night I asked a friend whether he was moved by any of the victims’ stories in Paris, those kids at the Bataclan just trying to enjoy life, and he said he was avoiding them, he felt manipulated because Muslim victims don’t get anything like this attention.
Surely some of the resistance to Martin’s argument is that so many in the mainstream authored or approved such violence, and so if the values actually changed, their reputations and careers would take a hit. They should take a hit (and I supported the Libya war; and I was wrong). The neoconservatives would finally be run out of town; but there is still a lot of power behind these bad ideas.
And do we need to point out that Michel Martin is a person of color? Yes: we are in an era in which many Americans are struggling to overcome ideas of entitlement; and black reporters just don’t seem to have as much trouble figuring that out. Yes I know, it is fun to mock the students who talk about “checking your privilege” at the door; but till the two-tiered system for the discussion of violence is analyzed in the astute manner that Martin did, our foreign policy is going to be cockeyed, too.
This is good as far as it goes, but notice the limit. She’s talking about victims of our official enemy (using Chomsky’s phrase) and so it’s acceptable to point that out among mainstream types. What if she went further and starting reading the names of Palestinian children blown up in their homes by American-made weapons, or the names of children in Yemen who died the same way? Now that would be brave. She’d be in deep trouble, actually, and I bet she’d lose her job.
Vox had an article, from Monday I think, where they raised this very issue. The reporter claimed that he and others have written much on the Beirut bombings but that there is a lack of interest in the “West” for black and brown victims. Simply put the “readers” of these news outlets are not interested in terrorism unless it impacts “white” people.
I had two problems with the article: he never addresses why people might feel this way (racism); or how the media contributes to the idea of worthy and unworthy victims. That’s the discussion we should be having about the media but we never do.
“He never addresses why people might feel this way (racism); or how the media contributes to the idea of worthy and unworthy victims.”
Does racism explain this? or is the press in part following Netanyahu in generalizing from ISIS to Islam to Palestinians, and excluding ISIS violence on Palestinians, ISIS violence on other Muslims, as inconsistent with his clash-of-civilizations narrative? Isn’t Netanyahu exploiting subconscious white racism to make ISIS’s attack against Paris the same as Palestinian violence against Israeli Occupying forces, and the press doing its usual ingenuous amplification?
Perhaps we need a concerted effort to draw the lines as between violent religious fundamentalists versus the secular and moderate religious. ISIS is violence in the name of God, as was Rabin’s assassination, as are the threats against Rueven Rivlin, and what would happen to Netanyahu if he actually tried to divide the land and make peace with “the Arabs.”
May I offer a salute to Mr. Termos. He was a REAL hero. Not one of those punks in the IDF would be fit to stand in his shade.
thanks for this article phil.
the first thought that ran through my mind when i heard of paris was “beirut”.