By: Corey Savard
To turn on the nightly news and see people frantically running for their lives, clothes bloody and ripped, faces pale with fear, it’s enormously apparent the world shares in the grief of the 34 killed and the hundreds wounded in multiple bombings in the Belgian capital of Brussels.
It’s a global grief that resembles the outpouring of mourning and memorials for the November bombings in Paris, but the Mar. 13 ISIS terror attacks in the Turkish capital of Ankara, where at least 32 were killed when cars laden with explosives approached city buses carrying commuters on their way home from work.
Brussels has shown again the divide that exists between the world’s richest nations and the tertiary Muslim countries we rarely, if ever acknowledge in our day-to-day. Despite the tragedies in Turkey and attacks last year in Mali and Lebanon, their flags do not drape Facebook display pictures of Europeans and North Americans, as has been the fashion for our allies France and Belgium, but tend to forget Turkey is a full-fledged member of NATO. Yet, people still stand in disbelief and wonder “why do they [Islamic extremists] hate us?”
The ignorance of Western nations towards innocent people in empoverished and war-torn countries has grown rescentment in ethnic communities like Molenbeek, a multicultural working-class neighbourhood rife with radicalization. A hate that comes out of living in a segregated society such as Belgium’s, where the Muslims of Molenbeek often speak Arabic rather than the dominate French and feel like second-class citizens.
American influence is undeniable around the world. Whether it be Coca Cola available in every country (except Cuba and North Korea) or the fact that the American flag is mounted on the moon, as if NASA accomplished the feat as separate from the entirety mankind. You hear the fear-mongering rhetoric from Kim Jong-Un’s Korean Central News Agency of the “imperialistic American pigs,” but we choose to laugh at his threats of nuclear destruction, where an attack on the U.S. or its allies in South Korea and Japan is routinely thrown around because of the suspicion they have nuclear weapons, while we huddle around the TV in fear to watch young mentally ill Middle Eastern men with nothing more than some Toyota pick-up trucks, guns (which any Texan arms enthusiast would put to shame) and pressure cookers stuffed with rusty nails. North Korea and ISIS are two enemies that exist on a house cards, but thrive off the same message that America is a ‘cancer,’ although both were born out the military’s over stepping in foreign policy, straying far from the touting of isolationism at the turn of the last century, but two presidents would eventually be forced to reluctantly go into two world wars and thus have reshaped geopolitics as well as global security still to this day.
ISIS is a grassroots movement that is as angsty and anti-establishment as voters in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, only these religious extremists have nothing to lose because they already lost their homes and families in U.S. drone strikes. Radical religious extremism born out of a radicalization vacuum created after the overthrowing of Saddam Hussein and the Syrian Civil War, both of which created by a American neo-conservative Congress that chose to forgo what could have been tremendous diplomatic milestone with a joint effort with regional powers Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Turkey, which current presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders advocated for, but the majority opted instead to carpet bomb Iraq as well as Yemen and Libya to assert military dominance over a an extremely complicated Middle East. However, these wars masked their true purpose, to assert control over the world economy and it’s financial markets through securing of the oil supply and opium fields in Afghanistan.
The media continues to fail us in presenting all the terrorism around the world and have been very successful in making the ISIS flag a target for which to aim our paranoia. The fear of Islamic terror groups are uneven, the atrocities Boko Haram continue to commit in West Africa are not as ingrained in the Western collective enemies repertoire because they are black and cannot simply be separated as an “outsider” in the U.S., but if they were to move closer to Lagos, Nigeria, one of the largest cities in Africa, and the nearby oil-rich Niger River Delta, then you would see media narrative similar to the Ebola scare.
ISIS knows their plight to establish a caliphate in the Middle East free from American influence is a doomed crusade because they are false prophets and fervently condemned by almost all 1.6 billion followers of Islam, the world’s second largest religion, but through unspeakable violence ISIS exposes the gross contradictions of western democracy. National governments hastily folding on its values of Liberty and free speech with recent calls for closing the border to Syrian refugees fleeing the same enemy it swears to protect the world from and U.S. presidential candidate Senator Ted Cruz advocating for a police state-like monitoring of Muslim communities, giving legitimacy to extremist propaganda.
We see ISIS as a threat to freedom and “our way of life,” but in reality, our leaders and our xenophobia gives these psychopaths the satisfaction that they have made us cynical, cruel, hard and unkind.
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