Daily Archives: November 15, 2015

News

Will Charlie Hebdo play the Paris attacks for laughs? Or isn’t mockery suitable for French suffering?

So the question is: how will Charlie Hebdo make satiric sport of these executions? With the same light-spirited joie de vivre they did when Syrian refugee baby Aylan Kurdi washed up on the beach in Turkey? With the same ebullience they did about the Russian airplane crash? How much blasphemy will they work up over all this misery? Or is human suffering not quite so funny when they’re French people?

News

Je suis Lebanese, Kenyan, Palestinian, Yemeni, Afghan, Iraqi, Syrian, Kashmiri, Somalian, Pakistani

So many people are pointing out the glaring, even horrifying distinction between how French (presumably mostly white) victims of terrorism are being mourned & the indifference toward Lebanese, Kenyan, Palestinian, Yemeni, Afghan, Iraqi, Syrian, Kashmiri, Somalian, Pakistani, & other victims of state & paramilitary terrorism.

We don’t have to imagine the resentment of people from those regions at this distinction since they are leading the chorus of outrage–not for one moment to insult the victims in Paris but to put the “Je suis Parisienne” crap in perspective. White people’s lives are not of greater value. Human life is to be valued whatever the ethnicity, nationality, or religion.

This is the same distinction Zionism plays on when it insists the Jewish holocaust was the most atrocious crime ever visited on humanity. It was beyond atrocious but it was a seamless whole with European & US colonialism whose crimes for centuries against colonized humanity, including the slave trade, cannot be studied without gut-wrenching horror. The Nazi holocaust of Jews, disabled, Roma, liberals, socialists, communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses was colonial violence perpetrated in the metropolitan centers of Europe.

Those pointing out this ugly distinction are not trying to minimize horror at what happened in Paris. They are striking at the ideological roots of colonialism & war, at the racism that rules this world–& they are challenging us to recognize it & oppose it & thus to end it.