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| So many mosques ... so little crime copycats. |
SIZZLA KALONJI compelled, “Dance a yard before yuh dance abroad.” I’m listening.
I did promise to expound on the New Zealand massacre for a week – a week on blood, the shed and the kind that supposedly binds. But I’ll get to the butcher
soon enough. Instead, I made sure to look at myself first. Now, I am going to look
at people in my country.
Wherever we are, when
observing atrocities, we cannot just ask, “Who was wrong?” We must always also
ask, “In this moment, in the aftermath, in our reaction, are we doing right?”
Natural-born copycat killers?
After the butchery
in NZ, the instant cry came from some in our local Islamic community about
religious oppression and:
“Trinidadians are copycats! People will want to
attack us, too. Post police outside every mosque to ensure that doesn’t happen
here! ”
Where do I start?
With the
practical: it would be impossible to post police force of any weight outside every
mosque in TnT. There are so many. The fact that there are so many evinces that
Islam is alive, kicking and highly practiced here. So please, define
“oppression.”
Now then ...
Copycat?
Yes, because there
were copycat acts of violence committed on Moslems in TnT after every attack on
Moslems perpetrated in other part of the world.
No?
But, there has
been at least one mass-murder by gunfire each year here in TnT after killing "sprees" elsewhere.
No?
But gangs of
non-Moslem gunmen have often staged coups against the elected government in TnT,
as has been executed in other parts of the world.
No?
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| I was stopped from taking photos of this rebuilt primary police building, in case I had plans to launch an attack equally destructive to the 1990 coup. |
So what’s this
talk of Trinis are copycats, and all Moslems should fear for their lives. Where
do you live?
Trinis are
copycats with clothes, music and other easy things to adopt. There are the restless
few who try to emulate the shoot-em-up “culture” American movies very
surface-like portray of gansta’ life; but the facts can show that more than a
few of those are what TnT calls Black Moslems.
Hmmm...
Import slaughter
If such a thing
happens here, chances are, just like in NZ, it will be at the hands of some
foreigner raised on “values” like those expressed by a senator in his nation:
That it is “only fair” to reach out and kill what you claim to fear.
If a true Trini
did such a thing here, anywhere (let’s not overlook the DC Sniper), I will not
say, “Ah, they told me so!” I would be shocked, because that is NOT the
Trinidad & Tobago I know.
I’d be as shocked
as by, say, a coup being staged here. As shocked as by, say, if those who
staged the coup got off scot-free, and even got “compensated” by the government
they tried to oust via violent means, with dollars from the same tax-payers they
claimed to have staged the coup to serve.
Yes, I’d be as
shocked as I was over that.
However, I DID NOT condemn an entire group of people by calling Trinis copycats,
thus, inferring a bunch of other Trinbago Moslems were going to try to stage
coups, and we needed to protect against them by posting police in force outside
every Mosque. Some people did ... and it was rightly deemed prejudice.
Want to be
vitriolic about something, dearhearts? Go out and publicly protest against
Australia allowing its senator to verbally cut your people while they lay
bleeding. Make demands of that
country. Namely, for an apology on behalf of all of Islam and any decent human
being respectful of life.
Finally, when you
see people who are actually suffering, weeping, mourning, terrified and angry
with cause, is it logical, at such a time, to make out that you are in a
position as tenuous or deserving of extra care and protection as their own?
Better to expend
energy on ensuring that our TnT remains the kind of place where anybody – you, I
– has at least freedom enough to speak our mind even as we insist that we are terribly
afraid and oppressed.
Come Good
Next Post: Politician lacks politic
Link to look back at my earlier Media work: The Jhaye-Q Brew Archive
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