Above: A Syrian refugee child sleeps on his father’s arms. Photograph: Muhammed Muheisen/AP
Some want to exploit the Paris attacks in order to justify seizures of power to meet their own political ends. We should not let that happen.
In Canada, the plans to exclude unaccompanied male refugees from resettlement make me fear – in addition to the broader problems of severing young people from their existing support systems– for those queer and transgender folk who are fleeing from being hunted down and murdered indiscriminately.
In the US, federal lawmakers and dozens of state governors have called for the US to stem the flow of those seeking asylum from Syria, culminating in the quick passage of legislation in the US House making the approval of Syrian refugees into the US administratively difficult, if not impossible – even though approvals of such refugees numbered less than 1,700 in 2014.
The CIA director, James Brennan, described the ongoing controversy over the intelligence communities’ mass surveillance and bulk record collection of US citizens and non-citizens as “a lot of hand-wringing over the government’s role in the effort to try to uncover these terrorists”.
However, what the intelligence community and law enforcement authorities in the United States and Europe failed to acknowledge is the fact that even before and following the attacks in Paris and Beirut, none of their agencies had lost any of the capabilities that they had previously or that the reformed USA Freedom Act had not even taken effect.
The demands for more power by the powerful were described by Naomi’s Klein “Shock Doctrine” principle: people and organizations often exploit crises in order to justify seizures of power to meet their own political and economic ends. The inevitable xenophobic and pro-surveillance responses of the US, EU and Canadian governments were likely, as other analysts have pointed out, part of the strategy calculated by the very organization (Isis) that perpetrated the ghastly atrocities.
The leaders of Isis are canny strategists with a solid understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the west. They expect politicians and military leaders in the US and Europe – particularly in the case of France and the United Kingdom – to overreact in response to successful attacks in the US and Europe and territorial gains in Iraq and Syria, and they use those responses to recruit Europeans and Americans in their call to arms.
Like many other attacks, the attacks in Paris were tragic, horrific and coldly calculated. They may or may not have been preventable – it’s simply far too soon to know, assuming that we ever will. However, stoking the fears about a shadowy wave of terrorists coming from everywhere that there is warfare and strife is a disturbing, alienating and disproportionate response.
The people of France were the ones who delivered the Statue of Liberty to the US nearly a century and a half ago. Beside the statue for many years was a massive immigration station on Ellis Island. Describing the site of the statue as it was erected, the American poet Emma Lazarus wrote that the statue silently demands:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
It is a poem that defines America – and we and the EU would do well to remember it, especially in such turbulent times.