Unmournable Bodies

That article&#x27;s reasoning is just all over the place. Conflating a satirical magazine with Pvt Manning, who knowingly and <i>flagrantly</i> broke the UCMJ? Come on. That guy knew he could have been put before a firing squad as a spy--he wasn&#x27;t drawing pictures of fairy tale characters sodomizing each other.<p>And this howler:<p><i>and these ideas extended into American history as well and took on American modes, from the breaking of slaves to the censuring of critics of Operation Iraqi Freedom</i><p>...wait a minute. What&#x27;s wrong with censuring whoever the hell I want? Oh, you assumed your readers would read that as &quot;censoring&quot;, which never actually happened. Well, even if it had, I&#x27;m not sure if the &quot;breaking of slaves&quot; is comparable.<p>And then it talks about Gaza and Nigeria and Yemen and Mexico as if the world is ignoring them. Actually, New Yorker, the world isn&#x27;t ignoring them. The difference is, see, the recent French attacks were &quot;terrorism&quot; which is specifically designed to attract attention--it&#x27;s violent propaganda. The trick there is to ignore it, not to attempt to spread our attention evenly on every act of violence in the world.<p>......................[to avoid double posts]<p>xnull2guest commented:<p><i>Breivik[2] slaughtered over 70 innocent Muslim people</i><p>They were Muslims? Where did you get that information from?

Powerful and well written.<p>&quot;The scale, intensity, and manner of the solidarity that we are seeing for the victims of the Paris killings, encouraging as it may be, indicates how easy it is in Western societies to focus on radical Islamism as the real, or the only, enemy. This focus is part of the consensus about mournable bodies, and it often keeps us from paying proper attention to other, ongoing, instances of horrific carnage around the world: abductions and killings in Mexico, hundreds of children (and more than a dozen journalists) killed in Gaza by Israel last year, internecine massacres in the Central African Republic, and so on.&quot;<p>I can do one better. American-born Abraham extremist terrorist Baruch Goldstein [1] massacred 29 unmournable Muslim bodies. Christian extremist terrorist Anders Breivik[2] slaughtered over 70 innocent Muslim people, most of them children. We will call these a tragedy but there was no Western solidarity; we will not dim the lights of a tower for Christian terror victims, as though one religious radicalism and terrorism were preferable to another.<p>Breivik&#x27;s actions did not invite peace or fairly parsel human rights - nor did the Hebdo killers. But neither do our drones, the Mahmudiyah Killings (and cover up), the Baghdad Nisoor Square Massacre, the Haditha killings, the Ishaqi incident, the Mukaradeeb wedding party massacre, the Deh Bala wedding strike, or any human rights violations associated with Western leviathan force.<p>This article gives us a good moment for pause to think about what real solidarity means. Real solidarity means standing for the rights of innocent well meaning people to live lives uninterrupted by violence, oppression, or other harm without first applying a filter. Selective solidarity is not solidarity but a disguised and mistaken costume for identity politics.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_Goldstein" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Baruch_Goldstein</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Behring_Breivik" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Anders_Behring_Breivik</a>

Excerpts from the piece:<p>&quot;But the suggestion that violence by self-proclaimed Jihadists is the only threat to liberty in Western societies [...]&quot;<p>&quot;[H]ow easy it is in Western societies to focus on radical Islamism as the real, or the only, enemy.&quot;<p>Who has suggested that radical, &quot;Jihadist&quot; Islam is the &quot;only&quot; threat or enemy of Western society? I&#x27;m sorry, but this piece is a bit of propaganda. Do a little googling. The writer was raised in Nigeria, and, as he&#x27;s said, &quot;half [his] family is Muslim.&quot; There is nothing wrong with these things, per se, but taken together with his lousy reasoning and outright straw man arguments, I&#x27;m accusing him of having an axe to grind.<p>Personally, I think &quot;satire&quot; of the type that appears in Charlie Hebdo is obscene and puerile. I don&#x27;t like it -- and I don&#x27;t subscribe to any religion. But terrorist attacks are worse by a couple of orders of magnitude. There is no comparison.<p>This piece is trash.