Anyone who thinks an attack on Paris is an attack on 'white people', while an attack on Beirut is an attack on people of colour, and that this is what explains the disparity in coverage by the mass media, doesn't know anything about either city. Go to Beirut, and you will meet a good number of people, 'Lebanese blondes' as the stereotype has it, who boast of being descended from Frankish crusaders; my neighbours in Paris, just a few minutes from Le Petit Cambodge on the rue Bichat where the carnage began two nights ago, come from all sorts of places and lineages, but definitely not from the Franks.
The attack on Paris in particular has as its direct aim the destruction of harmonious coexistence between people of different backgrounds (who sometimes have different skin colours, a point of difference of far more interest to American commentators than to ISIS). This is one of many reasons why it's particularly worthy of comment and analysis, free of the constant, compulsive invocation of the mendacious and shitty 'but' that seems to have been programmed into the minds of so many social-media users seeking and failing, like simple AI algorithms, to say something original. Should the public learn more about the causes and consequences of the Beirut bombing? Of course: so tell us about them. Quit wasting our time with facile whataboutism from which we learn about nothing other than your own strategies of self-representation.
As far as I'm concerned, anyhow, Paris and Beirut share in exactly the same struggle, and France and Lebanon are both Mediterranean countries with connected histories spanning millennia. When I was in Beirut in April I walked along the Paris Avenue corniche with a Lebanese friend who, for her own personal reasons, prefers to walk with bared shoulders. She told me that there are periodic acid attacks on women who make this choice. This made me nervous, but of course we kept walking. The attackers had they come would have been Hezbollah-affiliated, and thus, in comparison to ISIS, moderates. But the general point stands: it's the same threat and the same tragedy.
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