On 11th September 2001 I gave my one year old daughter her lunch and idly watched Neighbours. The short BBC News music came on with breaking news (for years afterwards that theme gave me chills) and showed footage of the World Trade Centre in New York. Over the course of 90 minutes I watched in horror as the towers burned plumes of smoke into the clear blue sky, while reports of planes crashing in Philadelphia and Washington DC’S Pentagon building came in. It was like an action movie but so real and seeing the twin towers collapse was unbelievable. This sort of thing didn’t happen before our eyes. The situation was worse because I knew someone who worked in the Pentagon and another who worked near the World Trade Centre and used that subway station. Calls for reassurance were fruitless because phone signals had gone with the towers.
I left that dark situation and walked to school to collect my daughters; it was the feeling you get when you stumble out of the side door of a cinema after seeing an involving film. The sun was out and parents milling about chatting and laughing. I remember an intense feeling of bewilderment; the world has just changed, how can you be acting so normal, don’t you realise what’s happening? The atmosphere around town was much subdued when Princess Diana died, but here it seemed like no one knew or cared that something big was going on and many people had died. By evening I found that my family members were safe, my uncle had been in the subway under the towers getting off a train and along with many others made his way out and to a shop for shelter until it was safe to walk up Manhattan and find a phone signal. In the following days the attacks dominated news coverage and people did talk about what had happened, but the surreal feeling outside on the afternoon of 11th September left its mark.
That feeling of bewilderment has returned.
When I go out, life is passing as normal, shoppers filling their baskets, browsing shelves, chatting in groups over coffee. A year and a half ago some people would talk about Ukraine, the flag flew outside our council offices and in some windows, neighbourhood sites mentioned opening homes to refugees. At the moment, however, life is continuing as normal.
On my social media the difference is stark as a combination of posts from people I follow, the algorithm and what is trending, is showing me devastating scenes from Gaza. Destruction of homes and livelihoods to accompany scenes of heartbreak; a child frantically looking for a sibling, men pulling bodies out of rubble, a mother clasping her dead child with silent tears – as a mother myself, this image breaks my heart. And it’s a constant bombardment of reports and images from many different sources.
I’m not disregarding the innocent Israelis also killed, all life is sacred and I feel for those victims too; but unlike many of our leaders and celebrities, my empathy and sorrow don’t end there. The retaliatory force has been completely out of proportion and children are by far dying and suffering in the greatest number. In the United Nations many countries either support a ceasefire or abstained from the vote for their own reasons; the Secretary General himself is constantly speaking out. In cities across the world hundreds of thousands of people are marching in solidarity with the innocent victims and calling for peace. So it’s not just my social media bubble which feels as I do.
I have found the friends and family part of my social media divided between those predominantly British Muslim and those who are non Muslim British and the silence from the latter group has become deafening. Some don’t post much anyway, others have continued their posts about work, about socialising, about their appearance, with no mention, bar one, that a genocide is taking place in front of their eyes. I assume they all know what’s going on, they are good people so I assume they wouldn’t just ‘not care’, so why are all of them avoiding the subject altogether? Are they uncomfortable in some way? Do they not care in the same way some of them cared about the Ukrainians? It’s such an enormous event that there’s no way of avoiding it without avoiding all media completely, and who does that these days?
The silence is deafening.
These questions colour my thoughts, mixing my sorrow with anger on social media and even in my local community. After the Christchurch shootings a friend I bumped into expressed solidarity and asked me to pass this on to the ladies of my local mosque. Despite the sudden rise in religiously motivated crimes in the past few weeks no one has reached out in any way to ask if everything is okay or to just express mutual sorrow or even knowledge of the events happening.
I understand that all people don’t want to get involved with or comment on politics but there are times when the situation becomes bigger than that, when innocent people are needlessly being killed with the support of our leaders, when a whole culture is in the process of being wiped out, when the leaders tell us this is what the people want. Whether it is condemnation or even just an expression of awareness which becomes a small unifying action, in however small a way, this is the time everyone should speak out.
This is when the silence is complicity.
quillandinkandparchment 