The murder of the Palestinian /Muslim family in the United States stirred lots of emotions among the Palestinian society and the Arab word perhaps, stressing on the fact that when a Muslim is killed it is always a personal crime and when a Muslim is the killer it is a hate crime.
Even though it is a true fact, and the way media has been promoting terror under islam from one side, and the ISIS recent crimes all serve to put Islamic terror in the frontline of people’s heads each time a terror attack takes place. And like everything globalization served to unite, terror became a global issue that often doesn’t differentiate its victims.
But the mourning, the sympathy, the sadness for the loss of the innocent three young people proved that humanity doesn’t serve governments purposes. Americans went to the streets to pay tribute to the loss of the three lives regardless to their religion or nationality. They condemned the accident and the murder in the same manner any crime is received.
A sign we needed to see in the absence of justice and equality in this world. We needed to see the same sympathy we all share when people are lost in such matter.
But what was missing, and was the tragedy over this tragedy was the Palestinian official reaction. Abu Mazen was racing for his place in the first raw when the Charlie Hebdo killings occurred, and not a single word was heard from him was heard in the last few days.
I was wishing these victims were jews, if they only had the letter “a” falling from their last name and become Barkat instead (Barakat is a Palestinian family name and Barkat is Israeli (Nir Barkat is the mayor of Jerusalem). it would have made them jews and it would have made the state of Israel turn reactions into another worldly demonstration. Netanyahu would have left everything and flew to the United states (since he is there now); he would have made it the issue of the AIPAC commission and the Whitehouse speech.
But our president is out there collecting recognitions on a state that he has no sovereignty on. And people of a state that he doesn’t seem to also see.
The problem of the Muslim people is in their leadership. If these three people were Jewish, the world would have turned it into the first issue, not because the world cares more, but because the leaders of the jewish world care about their own people, even if it is for the purpose for using it to their own propagandas.
In the Muslim world, people loss of lives pass as if it is just a fact of life.
When we live in a world that our own leaders don’t value our lives, why do we expect the world to respect it?
And yet, the world showed more sympathy in a joined rally of real humanity that didn’t need to have world leaders to join a demonstration to protest murders.
There is something that is always stronger in real humanity, that somehow, no matter how simple it is, always wins.
The murder of the three young people remains an act of brutality that we all join forces in crying for it with sadness, because it is a crime that proves to us again and again, that terror doesn’t have a religion, and no one is safe, even in the haven of his own secured zones.
If three young jewish people were killed in America, I doubt anybody would notice. They probably wouldn’t notice if they were white christians; they certainly wouldn’t notice if they were black! 5,000 people were murdered in the US in 2013 alone; there are more than ten times as many hate crimes against african-americans as against muslim americans (and jewish americans are four times as likely to be victims of hate crimes as muslim americans).
People aren’t protesting about these three murders despite the victims being muslim – they’re protesting these three murders among the thousands that happen every year BECAUSE the victims were muslim.
Not that it’s wrong to protest – and maybe more than normal just in order to combat the pernicious fears that are spread about muslims, and to remind people of the dangers of whipping those fears up too far. But it’s worth bearing in mind that these are three killings plucked out of a great ocean of unnoticed killings for PR reasons.
Nadia, American law includes provision for enhanced punishment for legally defined “hate crimes”. The Attorney General’s office is conducting an investigation to determine whether prosecution of the murderer for having committed a “hate crime” is justified. According to media reports, that may be a complicated issue. The man who committed these murders is a member of a gang that is not focused on religious issues. It is like most gangs in American cities: Primarily focused on drugs and robberies of all kinds. Most of the violence related to the gang culture concerns violent rivalries between different gangs, not religious disputes. The Facebook pages posted by this murderer indicate that he is an atheist who is hostile to all religions. It also raises the possibility that he is just a dumb twisted misfit incapable of making rational decisions about anything. The murder of this family grew out of a dispute about parking places at the apartment complex where they and the murderer lived. That is a clue that he may be more likely a dangerous nut than a religious fanatic.