The Urgency of Brotherhood
Yesterday, at least 143 people, including 15 children, have been killed, and 187 have been wounded in two Muslim-targeted suicide bomb attacks launched by IS in Baghdad, the capital of Iraq. The victims were out shopping and celebrating the end of Ramadan in a central district lined with clothing and jewellery stores, restaurants, and cafés, much akin to those of the bustling cities of the West with which we are so familiar. At the sudden strike of multiple thunderous bombings, dozens of innocent civilians suffocated, burst apart, or violently burnt to death. At its wake, groups of women were left crying over the burnt wreckage and charred bodies of their loved ones, once teeming with life, love, and endless promise.
This is one among far too many stories of violence, loss, and suffering that are happening in our shared home today. Yet, though painting as violently sensationalist as possible of an image, it goes unheard of in social media and otherwise, with no mention of the destroyed lives of the innocent victims or of the cruelty of the violence enacted upon them. The 143 people — each with a long and complex life as vivid as our own, with all the things they have accomplished, the dreams they have dreamt, the lives they have touched and loved, and hearts they have broken in their passing, multiplied by 143 — were tragically and violently lost. All the while, they will be fleetingly remembered in our media narrative as nothing more than the number 143, only to be quickly forgotten once again.
While it is understandable that we naturally feel much more for those with whom we share geographical, racial, and cultural similarities, that we are shaken more by incidents that happen on familiar soil, the whole enterprise of human accomplishment and progress had never been from the basis of easy, instinctive reactions. It is only when we rise above our vices — when we work to overcome our bad habits and inertia, our biased cognitive distortions and prejudices, that we progress and evolve as human beings and as a collective species. It is only by rejecting our instinctual selfishness through hard spiritual and mental work that we can live up to our virtues of compassion and justice for all, and evolve towards a fairer, more peaceful society. The harder this work is, the more necessary it is.
We do this by stepping up to cognise the incredibly damaging effects that such a biased and tribalistic Western media coverage has on the state of the world. Firstly, by viscerally erasing the fact that Muslim-targeted violence is being enacted by IS overwhelmingly more so than Western-targeted violence (up to 97% of terror victims are Muslims), it feeds into the Islamophobic narrative that IS is motivated by Islamic justifications, and that Islam must therefore be held accountable, further contributing to the slew of Islamophobic terrorism enacted by Westerners all across the globe. But moreover, and perhaps even more damaging, by endlessly focusing on Western victims while erasing Middle Eastern victims of terror, creating a gap between the way we treat the two, we bolster the distortive image that the world is made up of “Westerners” and “the other, Brown-skinned people,” who apparently do not deserve as much mention as, or are not of equal worth to, Western victims. It further divides us psychologically and politically, insidiously perpetrating violence against innocent civilians on all sides. It turns us into passive observers, ultimately desensitising us and diminishing our ability to empathise with people who are different from us. This is very, very dangerous.
As consumers of an inevitably biased and propagandistic mainstream media, as messengers and perpetuators of its psychological, cultural, and political effects (including the engendering of further violent attacks), we each have the responsibility to fight back against this bias, to rewrite the ways in which we collectively respond to such stories; ultimately, to restructure the problematically euro-centric narrative into one that tells the story of one human family, with equal love, empathy and respect for all of our fellow beings, no matter where we come from. The power of the people to do this, through social media, is now greater than ever. And as with great power comes great responsibility, it is critical that we use this power for the greatest good that we can manage.
Share and consume stories that matter, speak of the victims of unimaginable violence so they may be remembered and honoured for who they were, speak up against injustice far and wide, use social media to spread awareness to one another of the sufferings of our brothers and sisters in faraway lands. If we treat them like family, as we do our Western fellows, “they” will begin to feel like “us.” Little by little, we can bring them that much closer to us at heart, so we can all begin to shift our collective worldview into one where we will one day instinctively and intuitively empathise with them as much as we do with those who share the same skin tone or speak the same language. We will naturally be as horrified about Middle Eastern suffering as we are about Western suffering; our cognitive distinctions between “us” and “them” will disappear, and the destructive powers of division will no longer engender violence and war. In a time where hatred and xenophobia seems to be truly poisoning our lives, we need to learn to take the effort to love each other that much harder more than ever. After all, each other is all we’ve got.
Today we mourn the more than 330 human individuals who have died or been traumatically injured in ways we cannot begin to comprehend. Today we hold them in our loving thoughts, and extend the greatest possible condolences to the families and friends of those affected. Today we#PrayForBaghdad. May the world one day know peace.