[LINK] "From Beirut, this is Paris: in a world that doesn’t care about Arab lives"

[rfmcdonald]

Elie Fares' despairing Open Democracy essay, contrasting the international reactions to the Paris and Beirut attacks of Daesh, notes that even Arabs do not seem to care about Arab lives.

Expect the next few days to have Europe try and cope with a growing popular backlash against the refugees flowing into its lands, pointing its fingers and accusing them of causing the night of 13 November in Paris. If only Europe knew, though, that the night of 13 November in Paris has been every single night of the life of those refugees for the past two years. But sleepless nights only matter when your country can get the whole world to light up in its flag colors.

The more horrifying part of the reaction to the Paris terrorist attacks, however, is that some Arabs and Lebanese were more saddened by what was taking place there than by what took place yesterday or the day before in their own backyards. Even among my people, there is a sense that we are not as important, that our lives are not as worthy and that, even as little as it may be, we do not deserve to have our dead collectively mourned and prayed for.

It makes sense, perhaps, in the grand sense of a Lebanese population that’s more likely to visit Paris than Dahyeh to care more about the former than about the latter, but many of the people I know who are utterly devastated by the Parisian mayhem couldn’t give a rat’s ass about what took place at a location 15 minutes away from where they live, to people they probably encountered one day as they walked down familiar streets.