Good Grief

UPDATED: Nov. 16, 8:41 p.m.

The turmoil in Paris had barely ended before the upswell of well-meaning solidarity and well-wishing was met with a backlash of equal velocity.

By now, we have all the details memorized: the horrific attack at the Bataclan concert hall that left 89 dead, the suicide bomb at a soccer match that François Hollande was himself attending, the 39 restaurant-goers murdered.

“This is an attack not just on Paris. It’s an attack not just on the people of France, but this is an attack on all of humanity and the universal values that we share,” President Barack Obama said.

Less well known are the details of a terrorist attack in Beirut, where two suicide bombers attacked during the evening rush hour, killing at least 43. Two weeks ago, more than 200 Russian citizens were killed in a plane explosion in Egypt that Western intelligence agencies have stated to be the result of a bomb.

No similar outpourings of grief or solidarity were seen, though the very same Islamic State claimed responsibility for the barbarism.

To critics, the different reactions meant something sinister: a crisis of selective empathy, the systematic valuation of white, Western lives over others. “It is not Paris we should pray for. It is the world. It is a world in which Beirut, reeling from bombings two days before Paris, is not covered in the press,” began a widely-shared poem written a few hours after the bombing.

I find moralizing of this sort ultimately incoherent.

Amid the anger and denunciation is a kernel of truth—media coverage of horrific terrorist acts is apportioned based on many factors, like death toll, geographic proximity, and how recurrent the events are. Terrorists striking in Baghdad, which has been sadly repeatedly victimized, garners less attention than a suicide bombing in Beirut, where bombings are less frequent, and even less than the events in Paris, which has not seen such an attack since World War II.

After all, media coverage does not just mold their audience’s interest—audience’s interest also molds media coverage. Who among us was not stricken with fear after more than 100 people were murdered while enjoying concerts, sports, friends, and food on a Friday evening? For as much time and space as news organizations were willing to devote to the Paris attacks, readers and viewers were just as willing to read, to learn, to try to understand how this could happen.

Acknowledging the many factors implicated in the supply and demand of media coverage is a valuable discussion, and there is no guarantee that today’s equilibrium could not be improved.

But where the critics go wrong is when the complexities of the discussion are elided, then conflated and weaponized into a tool of judgment, as sympathy policing, where bad intent is assumed of all well-wishers no matter how little we know of them.

“Where were the vigils over Beirut and Baghdad?” they ask. “Why didn’t Facebook offer a Russian flag filter after the charter plane exploded?”

The critics impose the impossible standard on their fellow man that grief and empathy be exactly apportioned in the proper ratio of casualties, a standard that ignores the legitimate subjective determinants of grief, a standard which no one could possibly meet.

Variants of this contrarian argument crop up even in unrelated debates: partisans on each side of the Israel-Palestine debate frequently accuse the other of insufficient grief when civilians die. The self-importance of these critiques only furthers the intractability of the larger conflict.

Perhaps not everyone draping the French flag over their Friday-night-out pictures is an astute observer of geopolitics. Does that mean that they value the life of a Frenchman over that of an Arab? Probably not.

The specter of sophisticated terrorist attacks, planned under the noses of intelligence officials, with massive casualties in our most secure cities rightly terrifies Americans. To me, what the French are suffering evokes our own grief after September 11, with their new bombing campaign over Syria even resembling the buildup to the American invasion of Afghanistan.

And if Americans want to mourn that with their French flags, so be it. Mourn the French. Mourn the Lebanese. Mourn the Iraqis. But, most of all, let the people mourn how they want.

Idrees M. Kahloon ’16, a Crimson editorial executive, is an applied mathematics concentrator in Dunster House.

This op-ed has been revised to reflect the following correction:

CORRECTION: November 16, 2015

An earlier version of this column misspelled the name of president of France. His name is François Hollande.