
Unmournable Bodies - kareemm
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/unmournable-bodies
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mynameishere
That article's reasoning is just all over the place. Conflating a satirical
magazine with Pvt Manning, who knowingly and _flagrantly_ broke the UCMJ? Come
on. That guy knew he could have been put before a firing squad as a spy--he
wasn't drawing pictures of fairy tale characters sodomizing each other.

And this howler:

 _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_

...wait a minute. What's wrong with censuring whoever the hell I want? Oh, you
assumed your readers would read that as "censoring", which never actually
happened. Well, even if it had, I'm not sure if the "breaking of slaves" is
comparable.

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't ignoring them. The
difference is, see, the recent French attacks were "terrorism" which is
specifically designed to attract attention--it'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.

......................[to avoid double posts]

xnull2guest commented:

 _Breivik[2] slaughtered over 70 innocent Muslim people_

They were Muslims? Where did you get that information from?

------
xnull2guest
Powerful and well written.

"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."

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.

Breivik'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.

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.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_Goldstein](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_Goldstein)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Behring_Breivik](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Behring_Breivik)

------
mariodiana
Excerpts from the piece:

"But the suggestion that violence by self-proclaimed Jihadists is the only
threat to liberty in Western societies [...]"

"[H]ow easy it is in Western societies to focus on radical Islamism as the
real, or the only, enemy."

Who has suggested that radical, "Jihadist" Islam is the "only" threat or enemy
of Western society? I'm sorry, but this piece is a bit of propaganda. Do a
little googling. The writer was raised in Nigeria, and, as he's said, "half
[his] family is Muslim." There is nothing wrong with these things, per se, but
taken together with his lousy reasoning and outright straw man arguments, I'm
accusing him of having an axe to grind.

Personally, I think "satire" of the type that appears in Charlie Hebdo is
obscene and puerile. I don't like it -- and I don't subscribe to any religion.
But terrorist attacks are worse by a couple of orders of magnitude. There is
no comparison.

This piece is trash.

