I was jarred to attention on an easy-going Friday night when I read the Times alert: 100 dead at Le Bataclan in Paris. Further scanning of the coverage told of six total attacks at various locations in and around Paris. By the end of the weekend, the confirmed count of victims stood at 129 dead and 352 hospitalized, 99 of whom were in critical condition.
My immediate reaction was panic. I thought of the attack two years ago in our city of Boston. On that beautiful April afternoon in 2013, no one thought that there was any reason for concern, including me. I had just crossed the finish line after four hours of running. I was on top of the world, feeling more accomplished than I ever had before.
I felt like this for about 40 seconds and 100 feet past the finish line. Then I heard the blasts go off in front of the Hancock building.
Having grown up in the post-9/11 era, I had no doubt that the explosions were an attack. I had watched the second World Trade Center building fall from my home in New Jersey, and my immediate reaction was that a building was going to fall. I ran as quickly as I could, making sure not to lose the two friends who had jumped into the race with me from Boston College at Mile 21. We would run or walk an additional five miles that day.
Luckily, one of them had brought a phone, and I was able to call my dad. Our plan had been for him to take the T from BC after I passed, and we were going to meet at the finish line. When he picked up, I was relieved to hear that he wasn’t at the site, but he was on a train heading that direction. I screamed at him to get off, knowing that public transportation was a primary target. The line cut, and I wouldn’t hear from him until we embraced at BC several hours later. Though a terrifying day, I was relieved we were both unharmed.
What cannot be questioned is the bond that we in Boston share with those in Paris, not because of these events, but because of the strengthened solidarity that these events demand.
So, I understood to an extent what Parisians are feeling today as they mourn their tragic loss and try to make sense of the chaos that ensued the night before. The sheer scale and coordination of the events is almost unfathomable, and today I am still questioning how or why something like this could occur.
What cannot be questioned is the bond that we in Boston share with those in Paris, not because of these events, but because of the strengthened solidarity that these events demand. No other city in the world shares our fundamental ideals of equality and liberty more so than Paris. The city is the pioneering force of our liberal project, and America owes much to France, as our greatest and oldest ally.
In the next few weeks, as events continue to unfold, it will be vital for us as well as our partners across the Atlantic to hold strongly to these ideals, which demand the open and compassionate treatment of the Muslim community among us and throughout the world.
We cannot let fear bring us to stigmatize and punish Muslims in Western countries, as many are already calling for. The problems that we face are immense, but the answer is not to exclude Muslims from the process of facing them.
We cannot let fear bring us to stigmatize and punish Muslims in Western countries, as many are already calling for. The problems that we face are immense, but the answer is not to exclude Muslims from the process of facing them. Particularly as Europe is faced with a growing population of refugees from Muslim countries, it must be remembered that the challenges that they have already faced, including attacks in their home countries, do not warrant further maltreatment and disregard, but rather mutual support.
I say mutual support because whenever such attacks occur in the West, millions of Muslims throughout the world offer their heartfelt condolences and prayers to those affected. I visited Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE for a month shortly after the Boston Marathon bombings, and in each country people spoke to us compassionately in support of our country as it faced this tragedy.
Just last week, I spoke with Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner, and her colleagues about their perspective on America. I commented that they seemed to love America more than many Americans do.
To some surprise, one of them remarked that the American people’s best attribute is our ability to love one another despite differences, and that this can be seen in the peace and compassion of our society.
This is something, she said, one does not find in the Middle East, and that this is the reason one sees so much trouble in the region today. People do not know how to love each other.
In these troubling times, let us not forget what makes America great: our capacity for love.
Featured Image by Steven Senne / AP Exchange
A beheading in Woolwich, a suicide bomb in Beijing, a blown-up marathon in
Boston, a shooting in the head of a young Pakistani girl seeking education, a
destroyed shopping mall in Nairobi – and so it continues, in the name of Islam,
from south London to Timbuktu. It is time to take stock, especially on the left,
since these things are part of the world’s daily round.
Leave aside the parrot-cry of “Islamophobia” for a moment. I will return to
it. Leave aside, too, the pretences that it is all beyond comprehension.
“Progressives” might ask instead: what do Kabul, Karachi, Kashmir, Kunming and
a Kansas airport have in common? Is it that they all begin with “K”? Yes. But
all of them have been sites of recent Islamist or, in the case of Kansas, of
wannabe-Islamist, attacks; at Wichita Airport planned by a Muslim convert ready
to blow himself up, and others, “in support of al-Qaeda in the Arabian
Peninsula”. “We cannot stop lone wolves,” a British counterterrorism expert
told us after Woolwich. Are they “lone”? Of course not.
A gas facility in southern Algeria, a hospital in Yemen, an Egyptian police
convoy in the Sinai – it’s complex all right – a New Year’s party in the
southern Philippines, a railway station in the Caucasus, a bus terminal in
Nigeria’s capital, and on and on, have all been hit by jihadis, with hostages taken,
suicide belts detonated, cars and trucks exploded, and bodies blown to bits.
And Flight MH370? Perhaps. In other places – in Red Square and Times Square, in
Jakarta and New Delhi, in Amman and who-knows-where in Britain – attacks have
been thwarted. But in 2013 some 18 countries got it in the neck (so to
speak) from Islam’s holy warriors….