IAM AHMED As I hear mosques have been attacked, shot at and fire bombed throughout the night across France, all over Europe I see Muslims and their friends, barely having the chance to mourn the dead, who are already now grappling with how to respond to the imminent reaction of fear, blame, and hate towards them instigated by the #CharlieHebdo-attack. I read stories of young men walking into buses or stores as they are stared at with loathing and contempt, stories of young women at work wearing their hijabs as they are being told by people that they should be ashamed of themselves for wearing it, stories of children being bullied at school because parents or teachers told the children of the class that the bad men in Paris were of the same religion as theirs. I see a lot of resilient and eloquent responses from young people who are of a generation that grew up with having to respond all their lives to a society that problematizes their presence, having to respond when an act of violence perpetrated by individuals was generalized to their whole ethnic/cultural/religious community, having to respond to the one-sided media narratives that stigmatizes and criminalizes them and having to respond to the corresponding opportunist right-wing backlashes that reduce them to terrorists and turn them into scapegoats. Unfortunately I also see a lot of that kind of hysteria being internalized by some, associety imposes a certain kind of self-blame for the racism and Islamophobia they endure. Fortunately others keep their backs straight, rejecting the routine of having to distantiate from and apologize for acts they didnt commit nor condone, refusing to have to first say sorry for their religion or to have to praise racist satire and say they are also Charlie before they can sympathize with their losses. We have to be honest with ourselves here, Charlie Hebdo with its satire attacked the weak more often than the strong and defended the dominant in the guise of attacking convention. Condemning their murder does not require the embrace of their racism. The #JeSuisCharlie hashtag makes unanimity compulsory: i.e. we must all be Charlie, we must all agree, we must all be one. If you are not Charlie, you are not ours, you are alien. That is not a defense of freedom of the press, its an affirmation of us against them. Of most of those people I have never seen expressions of a similar angst to the massacre of press and civilians in thousand-fold numbers in far off places where people have brown skin like Iraq, Pakistan or Palestine. As a reminder, 17 journalists were murdered by Israel last summer in Gaza as well. Attacks that were sponsored by the US and UK governments. And its Western leaders like Cameron, Obama and Hollande who have led the assault on the freedom of press and protest under the guise of the Orwellian War on Terror, whose toll of human misery in drone strikes, invasions, torture, and occupations dwarfs the #CharlieHebdo-attack 1.000.000:1. One tends to forget this world that has been made into one giant battlefield, one that is expanding now also to the streets of Paris, is a result of extreme ignorant hatred, that is motivated by an enormous lust for money and power, founded by a global system that is degrading and abusing human life and putting humanity on a crash course to mass destruction. One tends to forget that those who are the real danger to civilization are not the immigrants and minorities, but the politicians and the businessmen who try to profit from this system and its crises. One tends to forget that the majority of those victimized by this system are generally not Charlie, but Ahmed. So I am not saying I am Charlie. I am Ahmed the 3-year-old Syrian refugee who froze to death because his homeland has been plunged into chaos by power hungry maniacs and foreign meddling. I am Ahmed the 10-year-old Palestinian who was seen as a threat and thus shot in the head and killed by an Israeli soldier. I am Ahmed the 17-year-old French-Algerian that faces daily police harrassment and has a bigger chance of landing in jail than finding a job. I am Ahmed the 35-year-old whose mosque or kebab shop has been bombed or will be bombed by racist extremists. I am Ahmed the 42-year-old police officer whose faith and culture was ridiculed, but died defending Charlies right to do so.
Posted on: Fri, 09 Jan 2015 19:13:33 +0000
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