Supplied – Pierre SelimI don’t remember September 11, 2001. I don’t know what I did that day, I don’t know where I was or who I was with, and I don’t remember hearing that New York City was under attack.
I remember the days after, though. I remember traveling to the airport with my family because my mom was scheduled to get on the first flight out of the Edmonton International Airport after the lockdown was lifted. I remember bawling my eyes out while visualizing her plane crashing into the ground.
I had no concept of what had happened. I obviously knew nothing of Al-Qaeda, the tension in the Middle East, or American foreign policy. All I knew was that a group of people — people who were different both in the way they looked and they way they lived — wanted us dead. And for that, I hated them.
The attack on Paris last week has provoked a similar response from many. Masked shooters barging into a concert and shooting innocent people with machine guns is a sickening image that elicits both fear and anger. We feel powerless, without an ability to intervene in such events and without a target to direct our anger.
While there’s a commendable amount of love and respect being paid on social media, there’s also a tremendous amount of hatred. This hatred shows not only an ignorance of the unknown, but also a fear. It’s a hatred of the unknown, or to those whose differences we fear will eventually hurt us.
I understand the fear. Dozens of young adults — people just like us trying to have a fun Friday night at a concert — had their lives stolen from them with the pull of a trigger. What I can’t understand is the hatred.
I can’t understand why this tragedy would lead people to demand Canada to close its borders to refugees and immigrants in search of a new home as they try to escape the exact same hell that we just witnessed in Paris. I can’t understand why people are suggesting we be more skeptical of Muslim people because their faith inherently promotes hatred and violence. I can’t understand why anybody would suggest Western military forces bomb and murder millions of innocent people in order to wipe away a problem.
The purpose of terrorism is to make people afraid. It seeks to tear us apart from the inside, as we live our lives in fear not only of the unknown across the ocean, but the unknown living next door. They want us to react with anger and hatred. They want us to show the world that we’re violent, self-absorbed animals who know no other way to handle adversity than becoming monsters ourselves. They want us to validate the disgust they have for who we are as a society.
We can’t put an end to terrorism by fighting it with force. The only thing we can fight is the negative and violent response to terrorism. The right-wing, radical, emotionally-driven reaction that seeks to divide us as a people and build fear to a point in which we not only validate but demand action through “wars on terror” that only sink us deeper into the problem.
Let’s learn from the mistakes we’ve made in the past. We need to remember the way we, and our governments, responded to the 9/11 attacks and where that’s landed us nearly 15 years later. We spent billions of dollars on a war with no possible victory that saw thousands of unnecessary deaths pile up, bringing us nowhere near a solution. We alienated a massive group of people and created an undeserving common enemy that lives among us.
Now here we are, back again at square one. Sitting and shaking our fists in rage at the idea that a shadowy group of militants hate our way of life enough to shoot up a concert, while we shake in fear that we could be next, and the best way to stop it from happening in our own backyard is by rejecting refugees and telling Muslims they don’t belong.
There’s nothing we can do about terrorism. A boogeyman that seeks to destroy us from the inside with violence and fear will always lurk in the shadows, pushing us to abandon our rationality and show the world that we in fact are the monster. If we put an end to ISIS, there will be somebody else to fill its place.
All we can control is the way in which we respond to terrorist acts and the way in which we let it affect our values. We can be foolish and let them win by abandoning our morals and projecting our hate onto another group of innocent people, giving our enemies more ammunition to warrant what they view as resistance. Or we can act rationally and with compassion. We can treat those who are different than us with respect, avoiding ignorant blanket generalizations about their beliefs, while offering compassion to those in need.
If we respond with hate, all we’ll be doing is playing into the trap like an angry child.
