No Human Left Behind: Paris and ISIS moms

I couldn't sleep on Saturday night.  

I was doing that thing where I couldn't get off the internet and go to bed.  But like many people all over the world, on Saturday I was glued to the web because ISIS is systematically murdering people, and like many people in America, I'm paying more attention all of a sudden.

I have felt numb as this has unfolded because of that feeling of not knowing what to DO, when reposting an article and changing my profile picture feels ridiculous and infuriating in its inadequacy.  

I will not accept that this is the way the world must be, and will forever be.  I am firmly in the camp of people who have posted Martin Luther King, Jr.'s famous quote:  "Darkness cannot drive out darkness.  Only light can do that.  Hate cannot drive out hate.  Only love can do that."

But the path forward, through the pain of those grieving in Paris and the hate of the myriad voices on social media equating Muslims and refugees with terrorists and the thicket of statements of what the true problem is--let alone the true solution...  

All of it leaves me gutted, hunched over my kitchen counter while NPR details for me that my planet is in chaos.  

I was numb.  And then I broke down and wept when I read this article about mothers of ISIS recruits.  

These women have lost a child to ISIS's twisted ideology, but not in the tragic way families in Paris and Beirut and Baghdad lost someone on Thursday and Friday.  These mothers lost their children slowly, watching them transform from awkward teenagers to newly converted Muslims to radical extremists.  And now their children are dead.

"Since the Syrian civil war began four years ago, some 20,000 foreign nationals have made their way to Syria and Iraq to fight for various radical Islamist factions... [T]heir parents are left with a form of grief that is surreal in its specificity. It is sorrow at the loss of a child, it is guilt at what he or she may have done, it is shame in the face of hostility from friends and neighbors, and it is doubt about all the things they realize they did not know about the person whom they brought into the world. Over the last year, dozens of these mothers from around the world have found each other, weaving a strange alliance from their loss."

This article broke me not because I am a mother, though it would have on that front alone.  It broke me because it brought me face to face with the humanity of the group being almost universally demonized:  ISIS fighters.  

I suggest that, like the mothers of ISIS recruits, we "weave a strange alliance from our loss."

While France's president orders a "pitiless" retaliation, while airstrikes funded by our tax dollars kill civilians in Syria, while our political leaders respond to the fearful outcry of their constituents and close their borders to refugees fleeing from these terrorists, I suggest that we employ humanity's overdue solution:

Empathy.  

Radicalized, militarized empathy.  Empathy proportional to the single-minded fervor that ISIS demonstrates.  Empathy that contemplates training camps (and then writes the curriculum and books the venues).  Empathy that includes daily rituals.  Empathy that organizes on social media, that meets in cafes, that donates money, infects voting, calls senators, and meets the hatred in our Facebook feeds with reason and compassion.  

I am seriously suggesting that, like ISIS, we plan and organize to take over the world.  That we adopt the policy, in our personal lives and in our politics, of "no human left behind."  

I am not deflecting the rage we feel toward ISIS.  Their actions are despicable.  They have murdered thousands of innocent people and caused almost 2 million to flee for their lives.  They torture people.  They have drafted a pamphlet on their rules for keeping women and girls as sex slaves.  And I am not saying that there should be no military action whatsoever.  But I am saying we should seek justice, not revenge, and we should fight against any confusion between the two that leads to militarism.  


Militarism is the grown up, globalized version of two boys on the playground pointing at the other and screaming "But he hit me first!"  It is time we matured as a species, or we will extinguish ourselves.  We can hate this ideology, and we should.  But we won't defeat ISIS until we understand why they exist and what they want.  

I have also felt numb in the wake of the Paris attacks in part because I am ashamed.  

I'm ashamed because I participate in global racism.  I knew about Paris.  But I did not know about the ISIS bombings that killed over 40 and injured over 200 in Beirut on Thursday, or the bombing at a funeral that killed 18 people in Baghdad within hours of the Paris attacks.  Not until I went beyond the New York Times and started scrolling through my Twitter feed.  

As a western media consumer, I do not demand perspective from every part of the world, and I am slow to seek it out.  I am among the countless people blogging and posting now, when articles detailing why we should care about ISIS have been available and enticingly numbered like Buzzfeed lists for months.  And so I dehumanize with my distance, privilege, and apathy.  I make people feel as though it "does not make a difference if they die."  

Justice requires empathy, because it allows us to understand what is needed to achieve it.  In Bangladesh in 2003, Mukul--one of my English students--raised his hand and asked why my president was attacking Islam.  This is the perception our militarism has created all over the world:  that our wars and airstrikes and drones are intended to destroy their entire culture, and that our violence flows from an ideology that they hate and fear as much as we hate and fear theirs.  In the 12 years since I heard that striking question (it has never left me), we have not done enough to dissolve that perception, and we have done so very much to solidify it.

If we employ empathy, we will be willing to slow down and consider how drones create extremists, why ISIS was gestated in a US military prison, and how our demand for oil laid the groundwork.   
 
If we employ empathy, we can understand how to fight ISIS's effectiveness at recruiting through social media.  Empathy will keep people from vandalizing mosques and demonizing Muslims.  It will keep us from dismissing the fears of others when they are expressed as prejudice, from writing off our co-workers or family members, from unthinkingly vilifying anyone at all.  

Empathy will keep us from perpetuating the racism that allows us to ignore violence against people who are "not like us." [they are just like us]; ongoing attacks by Boko Haram in Nigeria; the April al-Shabab attack that left 147 dead at Garissa University in Kenya, which bizarrely resurfaced after the Paris attacks on social media in a flurry of white guilt; the deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of American police officers.  

Empathy calls us to be relentlessly kind.  It will help us to love our neighbors and our enemies.  It will allow us to honor the inscription on the Statue of Liberty--a gift from France--that welcomes "the huddled masses yearning to breathe free," and avoid repeating the mistake of excluding refugees that we made during the Holocaust.  It will move us to befriend our Muslim brothers and sisters in a country that is increasingly Islamophobic.  Kindness will train our hearts and our reflexes, so that we can be more like young Parisians calling for unity, the husband of a woman killed in the Paris attacks who refuses to hate, and the father in Beirut who tackled a suicide bomber and saved hundreds of lives at the cost of his and his daughter's.  
 
Empathy as a strategy is at a disadvantage.  Many of us who see its worth are comfortable.  Our urgency is suffocating under the busyness of lives filled with jobs, families, and leisure.  Extremism is sparked and grows to inferno where there is tragedy, injustice, and deprivation.  This means that we must fight harder, and be more devoted than ISIS.  Humanity is on the line.  

Empathy allows us to understand.  And when we understand, then we can be kind.  And when we can be kind, then there can be peace.  In Paris, and everywhere.