Estimates on the exact size vary, but millions of people marched in Paris yesterday to show support for freedom of press and opposition to Islamic extremism. I guess.
I mean, I don’t doubt the motives of the vast majority of the people who participated in that march. It was an inspiring show of strength in the face of inhumanity, of resistance to the ideals of groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda (both of whom are now tied to the Charlie Hebdo attack and its aftermath; Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has claimed responsibility for the attacks, and Cherif and Said Kouachi apparently received training and indoctrination in Yemen, but their alleged collaborator, Amedy Coulibaly, declared allegiance to ISIS in a video he published online before he was killed in Friday’s grocery store hostage taking). It was embarrassing that the Obama administration couldn’t figure out how to send somebody more important than Victoria Nuland to participate in such an event.
But the thing is, if we’re marching in opposition to Islamic extremism and/or terrorism, why isn’t anybody marching on behalf of the ~2000 people whose bodies are still strewn around what used to be the village of Baga in northeastern Nigeria? Are they not equally victims of a jihadi extremism? Were they not also killed for having the gall to assert their freedom in the face of violent intolerance? Why isn’t anybody marching for the 132 children who were massacred by the TTP at the Army Public School in Peshawar, Pakistan, last month, or for their classmates who bravely returned to school today? Why is one of these stories dominating news coverage today while the other two are mostly confined to a small group of people, like me, who are asking why nobody is paying any attention to them?
The answer, of course, is tribalism; France is Like Us, Nigeria and Pakistan are The Other. But if we stopped treating places like Nigeria and Pakistan as The Other, then maybe we’d also stop treating Muslim minorities in Western countries as The Other, and maybe groups like ISIS and AQAP wouldn’t have such an easy time finding disaffected French Muslims to train up and then send home to commit atrocities.
Also, if we’re marching in support of press freedoms and the freedom of expression, then what the hell are these people doing participating in the march?
There’s hypocrisy and there’s hypocrisy, and then there’s the phenomenon that LSE student Daniel Wickham pointed out yesterday on Twitter (he listed 21 hypocrites; I’m just giving you a few here):
That last one isn’t quite accurate (Holder wasn’t at the march, and Washington’s assault on press freedom goes beyond Ferguson), but you get the idea. The Saudis sentenced that blogger, Raif Badawi, to 1000 lashes, 50 every Friday for 20 weeks, plus 10 years in prison, for writing in defense of freedom of expression inside Saudi Arabia. Nobody in that government should be participating in a “freedom of the press” march unless it’s in the front, in leg irons, while bystanders throw stuff at him. Luke O’Neil is absolutely right; politicians love freedom of expression when they can demagogue it, but most of them loathe it when it’s actually being practiced.
The Foreign Exchanges Companion 