Ankara, Beirut, Paris: Why do European lives matter more?

Gloomy day. Late at night in unusually windy Oxford as if to add eeriness to the gloom on purpose, way too late for my tired brain, which however is too busy to let me go to sleep, I am trying to make sense of the news. As if any sense can be made of over a hundred people killed while enjoying a Friday night out in Paris in retaliation for bombs thrown into the distant land called Syria.

So distant is that part of the world to the average European, and unfortunately to many who were blessed with an education well above the average, that when two suicide bombers blew themselves up in Ankara last month, leaving over another hundred people dead and their compatriots like myself devastated and sleepless for many nights, hardly anything seems to have moved in English, French or German souls. Of all my colleagues in Oxford, I am grateful to two for asking whether my husband, who every one of them knows is in Ankara, was fine. Not a word of sympathy from any of the others. Most of them earn their living through historical research and teaching on the Islamic world at an institution that prides itself on being the country’s best in this field. I wondered, at the time, whether it was because the history we teach is full of bloodshed that they acted as if nothing significant had happened on 10 October? I even wondered further with vague pity whether they had become so immersed in their work that they had turned into research and teaching machines incapable of feelings for things beyond their personal lives.  Now I realise in bitter relief as, for all the wrong reasons, the French get the attention that we and the Lebanese have been denied recently, that this was not because my colleagues do not have heart and soul. The problem must be that the heart and soul they have is biased and conditioned by media channels that decide what is important and what is not. The unbalanced approach of British media – and I’m sure much of the rest of European media – to the recent atrocities in Ankara, Beirut and Paris is a reflection of deeply ingrained assumptions that European lives matter more. This is a horrible thing that I believe every educated European should contemplate and try to remedy. That is, if humanity is to have a relatively peaceful future.

I write this as a naturalised European as much as a born Middle Easterner – a citizen of a country so divided that even officers highest up in the government ranks failed to express solidarity with the victims of the Ankara attack and social media users went as far as to suggest that the victims, attacked during a peace rally organised in protest after the government reignited war with the Kurds, found what they deserved. So strong is the hatred that divides our society in that distant land. If anything good will ever come out of all this mayhem, it will be the acknowledgement that all lives matter the same, and it looks like we can only count on Europe for making this happen.