Wow, time really does fly when you’re having fun. I’ve spent the last couple weeks traveling to see some friends and family (and watching a lot of women’s soccer – go Canada!), but I’m back in a blogging groove, and there’s definitely lots that has been going on in the world. So here’s what I’m reading today:
- 2015 is ‘year of fear’ for children worldwide, warns Gordon Brown
- I don’t even know what to say about this, except for the fact that these numbers are tragic and incomprehensibly large. The world has record numbers of internally displaced peoples (IDPs) and refugees – 38 million and 16.7 million respectively – and half of those are children. That’s 27.35 million children who have been uprooted from their homes, and the implications of this are staggering. These children are at risk of being trafficked, sold into slavery, into forced labour, child marriages, not to mention being unable to go to school. We are going to have a huge population bulge of young adults in the coming years who will be struggling with the fallout of witnessing war, and all the stresses that come with fleeing homes and trying to find safety again. This is really an unprecedented time in global crises, and it’s somewhat understandable the donor fatigue that first-world/western countries are feeling, but man – this problem isn’t going away anytime soon. We seriously need to inject huge sums of money into humanitarian support for these crises, and we need to focus on providing education and psychological support for these children.
- Hate crimes against Muslims in Britain spike after ‘jihadi’ attacks, study finds
- This kind of report is really disheartening. It’s sad to read that people cannot distinguish the actions of an individual from the actions of a group. Whenever some white man goes off and kills a person/people, you don’t see other groups of people committing crimes against white men. Now, obviously, that’s because of the entrenched position of privilege that they hold, but I think the thought experiment is valuable – by turning the reaction on its head, we can see how really absurd the thought process is.
- It’s also really important to note this quote: “Findings also suggest that where the media stress the Muslim background of attackers, and devote significant coverage to it, the violent response is likely to be greater than in cases where the motivation of the attackers are downplayed or rejected in favour of alternative explanations.”
- The Story of a Hate Crime
- Speaking of what happens when a white man shoots and kills people….. This really is a long-form story that you must read. It details the story of the Chapel Hill shooting in which three young Muslim Americans were shot and killed – allegedly over a parking spot. But really, we all know (or we should know) that this was a racially/religiously motivated hate crime. And it makes a very poignant point – “Bloggers complained that the Chapel Hill killings weren’t getting enough media coverage, and that if the roles had been reversed—Muslim shooter, non-Muslim victims—the incident would have been labelled terrorism.” It is undeniably unjust that the definition of terrorism is inextricably bound to the race/religion of the person committing the crime. This act should be labeled terrorism – if terrorism is the act of committing a crime that instills terror in a group of people, then racially/religiously motivated crimes should be labelled terrorism – because the family and friends of these young people felt threatened and unsafe in their own communities and homes after this shooting took place. I haven’t read a follow-up to this story as to what is happening to the perpetrator of these killings, but I really hope that has been charged and convicted of a hate crime. And I hope he serves his sentence in prison. But more than that, I hope he has the opportunity to meet and get to know young Muslims like the people he killed, and really and truly understand that what he did was incredibly stupid and wrong. And I hope he lives with that for the rest of his life.
megldavenport 