In the Al Jazeera article you link, Nazry Bahrawi refutes the misconception that Muslims have failed to denounce acts of violence such as that committed by Man Haron Monis.
Bahrawi calls our attention to how mainstream media outlets don’t use ethnic or religious profiling to depict similar attacks committed by non-Arabs and non-Muslims such as the shooting spree in Pennsylvania by Bradley William Stone.
But Bahrawi does not draw from the I’ll Ride With You Twitter campaign itself to provide us with any examples of a colonialist, good Muslim-bad Muslim mentality he claims blemishes the well-intentioned effort.
Without seeing such examples of White or Western condescension, one might ask. Why let the perfect be the enemy of the good ? The Twitter campaign was a tool for solidarity in defiance of the logic of hatred (‘they’ attacked ‘us’ so now ‘we’ must attack ‘them’ ).
The twisted logic of hatred often involves people being harmed because they are perceived to share a racial, ethnic, religious or other feature with a wrong-doer, whose actions they probably don’t condone. For example, what did the murder of the two cops in NYC last week contribute to addressing the injustices of racist police brutality?
The I’ll Ride With You Twitter campaign is encouraging. Calling hatred for what it is when we see it, and advocating love, clearly and consistently, is important to helping to build a global justice movement.
I’m not clear on what some Christians mean when they talk of loving one’s enemies, but I am certain that it’s defeating to our communities when we allow hatred to motivate us, whether it pertains to a genuine enemy or someone whom those in power would like to depict as ‘the other.’
Advocating love and opposing hatred is relevant to waging nonviolence. Attempts to cohere communities by hating ‘the other’ with appeals to nationalism, religious intolerance, racism, or heterosexism are short-sighted, but they can do a lot of damage to human freedom and cause a lot of unnecessary suffering in that short period of time. Consider Hitler’s hateful narrative for explaining away Germany’s glitches with capitalism and its frustrated attempts at colonialism.
Hating ‘the other’ enables abuses of power, dividing-and-conquering social justice movements, while generally undetermining our political freedoms. I don’t even know what it means to ‘dismantle capitalism,’ but I’m fairly sure that the abuses of capitalism are global, and that a global solidarity is vital for correcting those abuses. Rising above xenophobia, racism, ethnocentrism, religious intolerance and other forms of prejudice is vital if we want to build global solidarity. Therefore, advocating love and opposing hatred is key.
If we base our actions on love, those abusing power will have a harder time dividing and conquering us, as we form alliances that are nontraditional and otherwise hard for those in power to anticipate.
Love also reduces egotism. If the leaders and other participants in social movements are motivated by love, and are thereby more humble and unselfish, it will be harder for the mainstream corporate media to coopt and fetishize our movement, and harder for police to use petty intrigue to infiltrate and manipulate us.
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