On Friday, I will become an American citizen. At this
ceremony, I will take an oath where I promise to “bear true faith and
allegiance” to our constitution and government. Written in the Declaration
of Independence, the Founding Fathers explain that often times throughout
history there comes a time in which people must dissolve their previous political
alliances and assume the “powers of the earth.” They wrote that Natural Law is “self-evident”
and that the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” is an inalienable
right defined by God.
Our Founding Fathers believed in a new possibility but at
the very moment they wrote those words, our Founding Fathers also denied those
inalienable rights to many. There is an enormous gap between what the Declaration
of Independence says about the rights of man and how America has treated its
people, and this is a tension that is still reflected in our current political
discourse.
It is from this tension that I am writing today, because I believe that it is a citizen’s most important responsibility to speak truth to power when a person’s inalienable rights are threatened.
On Friday, there was a heinous attack on citizens in France
by a few seeking to accomplish their vision of justice and faith. Within moments, our world leaders came out swinging
calling this act of violence deplorable.
President Obama called it “an attack on humanity and the universal
values we share.” French President
Francoise Hollande called the attack a “horror.” But in the same breath, both world leaders said
they were planning on using military force, with Hollande saying “this time,
this is war.”
Since the attack, the media has aided Obama and Hollande by
choosing to divorce the events in Paris from a very complicated web of political
and economic realities. These political
and economic realities include American and French intervention in global
politics, Islamophobia, and a refugee crisis where 60 million worldwide are
displaced from their home.
I cannot pretend that I have the ability to determine
effective policy, or that I could possibly be a world leader dealing with a national
crisis – but as a citizen it is my responsibility to question whether or not our
culture, which reduces stories like this to a sound bite on the nightly news,
is acting in accordance with the rights we deem to be inalienable. As a result,
Americans have been debating our responsibility to help those in crisis, and have
been asking whether or not that responsibility comes at a cost to our safety
and livelihoods. I believe this to be a
necessary debate, but the results that come from that discourse is an affront
to justice that will only harm those who are already without protection.
Since the beginning of the crisis in Syria, our government
has debated on how to intervene. It has
transformed from a regional crisis to an international crisis with over 9 million
Syrians displaced. There seems to be no “good
guy” in this fight, but the United States still feels compelled to intervene.
Often when we examine terms of intervention in global conflict we are blind to
our own historical involvement. As Ben
Norton said while talking about our “double standards” on terrorism, “Western imperial policies of ravaging entire
nations, propping up repressive dictators, and supporting extremist groups are
conveniently forgotten [when awful attacks on citizens happen in our own countries].”
In a study led by Conflict Armament research for instance,
the weapons used by ISIS to harm civilians are acquired through a “vast arms watershed, with tributaries extending to distant corners of the world.”
The origins of these weapons read like a “roll call of arms-exporting nations” including
the United States, Belgium, Russia, China, and France. In other words,
terrorism does not exist in a vacuum and no matter our intention when sharing
our weapons technology, these weapons do not solely end up in the hands of our
allies. With humanity’s “shared values”
on the line, it becomes less morally comfortable to imagine our government and
our allies handing anyone weapons,
even if we only share weapons only with those who share our values.
When the news hit that one of the attackers potentially was
a Syrian refugee, it has become fashionable for us to believe that we should
then wash our hands of responsibility for this crisis, and that we should not
open our doors to people impacted by the Syrian crisis. Interestingly enough,
this plays into the values espoused by ISIS as it supports their assertion that
there is a western war against Islam. In addition these refugees are also the
people who “face the indiscriminate violence and cruel injustice in lands controlled by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.”
If the refugees are running way from ISIS while ISIS uses
the pain and suffering of the refugee for political gain, it no longer seems
morally allowable to not house refugees in the name of American “protection.” While we cannot guarantee that every individual
refugee has benevolent intentions, the threat of terrorism exists for civilians
in America (or France) whether or not refugees are allowed to immigrate.
Additionally, our understanding of this devastating attack
on innocent civilians is also divorced from the complex political and economic
realities of life within our own countries. In France for instance, the
National Front political party is posed to make political gain because of a growing
anti-immigrant sentiment that has been adopted by many French citizens because
of “record high numbers of jobless people and [a] fear of terrorism.”
Taken from an article on Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Front party: “the hard line taken by the populist leader [is not unusual]: France’s Muslim immigrants are an alien force threatening French values.”
Unfortunately, a political party that uses anti-immigrant
sentiment to win votes is only the tip of the iceberg. A little over fifty
years ago, French police killed over 200 people who were protesting in support of Algerian independence, which at the time was a French colony.
French police threw bodies into the Seine River, and it took over forty years
for the French government to acknowledge the tragedy had occurred. Today in Parisian suburbs (which culturally
represents the same space as the American ghetto), reside both the literal and
metaphorical descendants of these protesters.
While comprising about eight percent of the population, approximately
60 percent of people in French prisons are Muslim (exact figures are not known because it is illegal in France to survey citizens on race or religion).
Lastly in 2004, French politicians also passed a law forbidding Islamic religious
dress in public schools citing a commitment to secular values in public spaces. Essentially, as stated in the New Yorker's article "The Other France," both the average right-wing National Party supporter, and the radical Islamist are alienated in France today.
I am not saying these things to make the recent violence in
France seem justified, in fact I want to say the opposite. Our understanding of
global conflicts and terrorism is not nuanced enough to know when it is right
to say “this time, this is war.” Taking
a different spin on a famous phrase from Dr. Martin Luther King, violence anywhere is a threat to peace
everywhere.
I believe that the world can be a better
place and I believe in the inalienable rights of man. But mostly, I believe in the possibility of
the world where these two things are not in conflict. To borrow from our
Founding Fathers one last time, we have come to that very moment they spoke of
in the Declaration of Independence.
This is the time where we must dissolve our political
alliances so that we can all live according to the “powers of the earth.” The philosophical
tension (and trauma) left behind by a group of Founding Fathers who proclaimed
our rights “self-evident” while denying those very rights to many, is the same
battle we fight today. But if we truly take their words seriously, we will be
left with no choice but to question our leaders the next time they say “this
time, this is war.”
