By Richard O’Brien
“France drops 20 bombs on IS stronghold”
Sometimes saying stuff is hard. Like when you see a depressingly predictably headline like this, and you want to say “it’s not France, it’s their government”. You want to say that each of those 20 bombs carries a destructive power roughly equivalent to the Bali bombing. You want to say that even with laser-guidance systems, each of those bombs has, at best, a 50% chance of landing within 10 meters of its target. You want to say that according to the estimates of a number of NGOs, the casualties from those bombs will be 80-90% civilian.
And you want to say that the “IS stronghold” is otherwise known as the city and district of Ar-Raqqah. You want to say that the city has stood since 300 BC, and was Syria’s sixth largest city when the civil war began. You want to tell people that although it’s an IS stronghold today, last year it was a stronghold of the al-Qaeda affiliated al-Nusra front, and the year before that, the Assad regime. You want to say how unbelievably terrifying the atrocities carried out on the citizens of Ar-Raqqah by all three of those occupiers have been since 2011. You want to say that those 20 bombs are part of a $10 billion a year industry, whose biggest customers until recently included Iraq and Syria. You want to say how that industry has made France one of the top 5 weapons exporters today. And you want to say that before the war Ar-Raqqah’s only significant export was cotton.
You want to say that before the war Ar-Raqqah was a district of close to one million Shia, Sunnis and Christians, and that today there are less than 400,000. You want to say how some of those people fled the terror of Assad, al-Nusra and IS, and the retaliatory airstrikes they called down upon them. You want to say that they fled because they couldn’t tell the difference between having their lives, limbs or loved ones taken from them by a bomb that was laser-guided, and one that was strapped to a person.
And you want to say that those people are the asylum seekers that so much hatred and blame is now being levelled at, by the same pissants who lead us down this path after 9/11. You want to say we’re making the same mistakes that created monsters like IS, and laws against our freedom that do nothing to protect us from terrorism, and everything to protect those lawmakers from us.
Sometimes saying stuff is hard. It’s hard because even if you can find a way to say all those things, you’re not sure anyone’s going to listen. Because sometimes saying stuff is easy. Stuff like “all terrorists are Muslim”, or “we should close our borders”, or “France drops 20 bombs on IS stronghold”.
