Michael Pennacchio, Contributing Writer
France, France, France. It has been the host for parasitic press these past few weeks, reliably profiting on misery since the printing press and continuing to provide us with many shades of yellow. At the “height” of the story, the script of CNN read “At least 153 dead.” Fast forward less than an hour and that script changes: “At least 140 dead.” It drops again. It drops, yet again. Those pesky facts knocking another 18 from the tally before CNN counters with a wounded count to keep up with the industry standards of “horrific.” Followed with a classy aside of “seriously wounded,” an “in-case-you-were-wondering” moment that neatly saves their posteriors, they really did a wonderful job of adding to their hours of circular banter.
It is, after all, all about numbers. Numbers watching, numbers dead, numbers who could be dying, and numbers they’d get to etch in the left and call “awful, awful, awful.” The event had to have a product worthy of being called, “France’s 9/11,” and any number would do. After all the backbone of French society, is there any more reasonable way to do so than counting? And is there not some sufficient reason in counting wrong for the “right” purposes. That “right” purpose, of course, being numbers. The ability to quantify agenda; to be able to engrave the names of unsuspecting souls into an iron wall around our borders; to equate the tally, in some faux-benevolence, for an anti-gun legislation; to create measures that will send us to war.
It would be incredulous to believe the media would actually describe any of the history that would clarify ISIS’ “reasoning” for choosing France. Though some may know of Burqa Laws, the thread runs deeper. Most of the French population whom are Muslim in the first place are in that country because of involuntary recruitment of North African Labor. After moving their colonial subjects from areas such as present day Algeria and Tunisia in the early twentieth century, Georgia State University student Anne Roberts notes in her theses “Veiled Politics: Legitimizing the Burqa Ban in the French Press”, they and their children were revoked of their citizenship in the ‘50s and ‘60s after their native lands were annexed from colonial rule. With their every move monitored, Muslims were subject to scrutiny for just leaving their home. When finally recognized as citizens, they were asked to assimilate to the ‘secular’ values of the state, their ties to tradition sparking the French xenophobia to creep up again in ’89. This was when the Burqa controversy began in what is Europe’s highest Muslim populated country. The religious fashion was painted as a threat to the state, Roberts explains, while masking the face to dress as Santa Claus is not considered a threat to their secular notion, of course. With forced citizenship, these Muslims couldn’t flee back to their countries of origin. Muslims in France became an unwanted faction of a society that veils its own marginalization of its minority population.
This is not an attempt to sympathize with the actions of the Islamic State soldiers, nor to empathize with their cause, but it does need to be mentioned in order to understand the cause of an evil that extends far beyond an agenda of a marginal few. ISIS has no borders and neither does any form of terrorism. We see it day after day in school shootings, church shootings, and mall shootings. The U.S. wants to take guns away from its own citizens, but finds no qualms with deliberately placing them into the hands of foreign and local threats. Guns are not the problem; people are the problem. If guns were a problem, we would need to justify our military bases in all but six countries. Please, be wary of a government that is asking to take away your chance at obtaining the weaponry that will set you on equal ground. If the U.S. was willing to arm Osama Bin Laden to end a socialist agenda, what makes you think they will have boundaries in quelling one here in our own country? The U.S. is the largest terrorist organization on the planet, killing in one drone strike more innocent people than mass shootings have killed in the past year. Why? For money and oil! We are all up in arms about the people that buy their way into power, and marginalize our own poor population, but then want to let those very same violent people have the final say in who can and can’t have guns.
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