In the middle of a meeting this week, my phone let off a rogue ping: BBC News: Kayla Mueller, American hostage, confirmed dead by ISIS
A tragedy. Many of us had been following Kayla's story; we shared in the heartbreak and devastation of her loss at the hands of a nebulous adversary. News platforms everywhere talked about her story on a daily basis, and rightfully so. I'm a great believer in the importance of remembrance, because every life should be taken to be equally precious and any loss of that life deserves the respect of grief and memory. Kayla's loss is one that affects the global community, not simply because she was an innocent casualty of war but because she was a person, an individual. She existed.
Terrorism is not 'Muslim Terrorism'
Do you know the names Deah Shaddy Barakat, Yusor Mohamad Abu-Salha, Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha? No? Until this morning, neither had I. Their names didn't come up on my news feed, no cursory browse through Twitter produced their story and, when I typed in one name into the search engine of a major Maltese newspaper, my request was met with, 'Sorry, nothing was found. Please try again!'
They existed too, they were massacred and this was an act of terrorism.
The people of Chapel Hill, North Carolina woke up to the news that an execution-style murder of a young family had taken place in a home nearby. A self-proclaimed 'gun-toting anti-theist' Craig Stephen Hicks was responsible for what his soon-to-be ex-wife termed, along with the police, an 'isolated incident' over a long-standing 'parking dispute'. He shot them all in the head at point blank range. Hicks' actions were not attributed to a "targeted campaign against Muslims". There was no wider conspiracy behind his actions, meaning he wasn't part of a web of raging islamophobes, so this must have meant that it was a one-off summary execution. Meh, no biggie.
How deeply and woefully absurd is it that their lives did not merit the same ping of remembrance on my phone, a viral hash-tag or lapel pin at an awards ceremony, the art of collective remembrance or even a global news trail? We need to ask ourselves why these people were just footnotes. And to be perfectly honest, I cannot come up with any other response but this one: because they were Muslim. They are nameless because the loss of Muslim lives is not met with the same revulsion. Muslim lives do not matter as much. Even typing that out fills me with shame and disbelief. Taking this into account, how can we expect Muslims to treat us with respect if we cannot do the same in kind?
The shootings in Australia and the mass slaughter of the Pakistani school children in December were another case in point. The school children remain, in most cases, nameless and faceless. Yet, I know that Katrina Dawson was the young mother and barrister who lost her life in that Lindt shop. I know what she looked like, where she worked and how many children she had. I could identify with it. Part of this is the scale of the tragedy maybe, it is hard to personalise something so unimaginable, unquantifiable and terrifying. We could identify with Katrina, we could imagine inhabiting her life, but perhaps it is a bigger leap to place ourselves in the shoes of the Pakistani children who were senselessly butchered. Is the problem a lack of imagination and interest or are we sub-consciously dehumanising the 'other' to the point of neutralisation?
A really interesting article I came across in the New Yorker sums up the sentiments I want to convey perfectly: "...to understand the Chapel Hill murders better we need to imagine how it would be playing out if it were the other way around-if some gun-toting Muslim, with a habit of posting hate messages about secular humanists, took it upon himself to execute a defenceless family...in their home" (Philip Gourevitch).
This is fast-becoming the greatest, most divisive malaise of our times. When we start to measure the value of life by creed, skin colour, sexual orientation, class status or whatever dire excuse we can conjure to categorise human lives neatly and hierarchically, we are losing our humanity in arbitrariness. In calling acts of terrorism 'parking disputes' the message we are sending to those indifferently culling the innocent is that, no matter the death toll, unless the lives 'they' take are 'ours', they do not matter. All lives matter. All lives deserve millions taking to the streets in remembrance and protest and behaving otherwise does a great disservice to those who have died safeguarding our rights and freedoms.
Pick 'n' Mix Pluralism
Our freedoms are also the casualty of these hypocrisies. We have to ask ourselves of the extent to which we are also to blame for this state of affairs. Our freedoms and rights were designed to protect and they are not there to do so selectively. Ending this state of affairs is our responsibility as much as it is that of our 'adversaries'. This is not about being the bigger person but about recognising that we are in this violent dance together.
So, don't argue for and question the beginnings and ends of freedom of speech or the right not to be offended in a state of selective humanity because it ridicules that freedom. Don't say, ''Oh, Charlie Hebdo depicted Christ unfavourably too'', because that is a banal way to shut down the conversation. Freedom of Speech is there to protect the voiceless and marginalised too, in fact, it was inherently designed to prevent the silencing of those who are oppressed by the stronger. We cannot hope to communicate the 'righteousness' of our freedoms if these only protect the majority - they cease to be universal and start to be subjective.
The point of pluralism is not just the celebration of diversity but also an active understanding of these differences. However, this is not the be all and end all of the matter. There is a second part of this exercise that we seem to be neglecting: Relativism. It is in relativising our own culture and identity, in engaging in self-reflection and tempering our perspectives, that we will be able to fully understand the meaning of real pluralism and the notion of shared humanity without in-groups and out-groups. Maybe then we'll be able to name the nameless and face the faceless.