by Melissa Aguilar |
The red, white and blue of France’s flag have covered monuments all over the world, in addition to an outpouring of prayers and support in the wake of last Friday’s terrorist attacks in Paris. Just a day earlier, another attack in Beirut, Lebanon, which killed 43 people and wounded 239 others, received significantly less international attention, leading some to blame the media, while others criticized Western audiences.
Both attacks have lead to increased discussion regarding national security and how we respond to loss of human life.
During his 10 years living in a town outside of Beirut, alumnus Philippe Boutros (2013) felt his school’s windows shake following the assassination of the prime minister and had to leave the country for several months for his safety. Boutros is now living in Portland and working for Cascade Insights. He shared his perspective on the most recent attacks with The Beacon.
What is your connection with Beirut?
I lived in a town outside of Beirut, about 30 minutes from the Syrian border and about 30 minutes from Beirut, called Bhamdoun. I lived there from the end of 1999 to 2010 in May when I came to UP.
My dad is Lebanese; my mom’s from Minnesota and they met in college, they both went to Notre Dame and they worked in the States for a while and in London for a while.They decided to sort of take an early retirement and move back to my dad’s village in Lebanon where he was originally from and sort of help the community and also let us be around my grandparents and some family that we have there.
Does your family still live there and what are their thoughts?
Both my parents are still there. My youngest sister, my two older sisters are in college now in the states.
They both feel very strongly about it, as do I, about how to approach it. It’s sort of a difficult issue. You feel a bit powerless because you’re so far away but then you also have to remind yourself that when you lived there similar things were going on, you don’t feel totally powerless.
How have people’s routines changed since this attack?
Something that needs to be kept in mind is it’s a unique event. It’s on a scale that hasn’t really happened in a long time. People are really surprised by it. I can’t really think of events that seem to target civilians, and that seems to be what this mostly was. So that’s sort of a different entity. But at the same time, you have to keep in mind that for a period of time between 2006-2008, we didn’t go to school once every three weeks because it was closed because of some sort of an assassination or bombing. In terms of changing routines, we had to live in Rome for three months because we couldn’t go home because we didn’t feel safe.
And then, in 2008, the roads in our village were going to be shut down so we elected to move to an area that had easier access to the airport. Does your routine change? Totally.
We lived on the top of a mountain and on your drive down, you can see the city, so when an event like that happens, when you’re heading to school, you can see the smoke and it’s crazy. When you hear something, you immediately sort of look to the skyline and tell how big of a deal it is.
In 2005 the prime minister (Rafic Hariri) was assassinated and I think that killed (around) 30 people. The bomb was so big, the windows shook at my school, which was far away. Windows shattered throughout the city.
What has the coverage of Paris been like in Beirut?
Lebanon was a French colony and I went to a French school and there’s a solid French culture in Lebanon. One of the official languages is French. Lebanon has an enormous diaspora, you have a lot of ex-pats living in the U.S. and Canada, and also in France. So Lebanon feels really strongly tied to France in a lot of ways. (In Paris) it was a bigger attack, and my Facebook feed is flooded with people who are Lebanese who are talking about what happened in France. It’s definitely covered in a similar way, in that regard.
(But) there’s an element of surprise to it. Deep down, and this is the sad thing, part of you is somewhat used to bad things happening in Beirut, sometimes. Although by and by large it’s a super safe city. The words ‘bomb’ and ‘Beirut’ fit together in a sentence somewhat more comfortably than ‘bomb’ and ‘Paris.’
What do you think of the discrepancy in the media coverage of the Paris and Beirut attacks?
People are also talking about Kenya in April and Beirut, and you had larger (attacks), in terms of human life, earlier in the past couple weeks, like the Russian plane that crashed. So the past few days, you’ve seen a turn in coverage and I’m pretty happy that we’re cognizant that bad things are happening all over and that something needs to be done. But initially, I think there was a bit of resentment that within the prior 48 hours, something pretty bad had happened in Beirut and the global community wasn’t talking about it nearly as much.
What do you think college students should know?
Awareness is great, but what’s the impact of awareness? I’m not totally sure. We were all very aware of Kony, but I’m not sure what the impact of that was.
I’m sort of worried about the perception of Islam and Muslims following the Paris attacks but that’s sort of in France. People here seem to be really tolerant and understanding and happy. I would say pay attention to what’s going on all the time and get a variety of news sources. I would be hesitant to just proclaim any opinion on things without feeling like I’m an expert on it.
How can Americans look at this event, coming from a different culture?
Things are not nearly as clean and black and white as we have a tendency to think they are. I lived in Lebanon for 10 years and I understand like one percent of it. Traveling around for a week or two is great to get so much insight, but there’s so much more thought that needs to go into something and experience and understanding before you can really form a picture of what the country is like.
So when you’re reading the news or seeing something terrible happen around the world it’s really rash to say this happens for this reason, therefore I think this. Or I read this one article that says this, and therefore this is my opinion. When really, there’s so much depth and complexity to it that you can’t begin to understand. I have no idea what’s going on and I lived there for 10 years. So to think “this is the plan to defeat ISIS,” or “this is why this happens...” There’s so much depth and complexity, I would caution everybody to be cognizant of that before they go ahead and proclaim a solution.
Changing your profile picture to a French flag… I absolutely laud the gesture and it’s really nice to see the world be in solidarity with Paris and it’s nice to see how that’s coming together too for Beirut and Kenya and Egypt, etc. But I worry about that going only so far and staying there. I’m worried that awareness is its own goal rather than a step on a path.
What do you think students can do to take action?
We all need to become better at knowing what’s happening before we can make a decision or have an opinion about something.
In addition to taking more time to learn, the best way for people at UP to help people who are impacted by such horrible things is probably to help the fundraising efforts of helpful organizations. I encourage the UP community — and anybody really — to utilize resources like Charity Navigator to find not-for-profits helping people in Paris, Beirut (and elsewhere).
Melissa Aguilar is a reporter for The Beacon. She can be reached at aguilarm16@up.edu.
