On Earthquakes, Aid, and Human Fault Lines
Earthquakes that rattle the earth do not discriminate along lines of identity. But human aftershocks that rise from manmade fault lines that divide us across rifts of race and religion certainly do.
Two minutes.
An amount of time so negligible, so short, that its very brevity would seem to preempt it from having any kind of significance.
However, the very opposite was true in the early morning of February 6, 2023, when a massive earthquake violently shook southern Turkey and northern Syria for two minutes. And in the days that followed, brought both nations to their knees.
The first tremor came in the din of the night, when most of its victims were sound asleep. The earthquake spawned 2,100 aftershocks that ultimately left over 50,000 dead, hundreds of thousands injured and homeless, and unknown quantities of still living people buried deep under rubble. Those who evaded death were instantly forced to make sense of an absurd new life – disfigured like the landscapes surrounding them – who spent their waking hours relentlessly searching for loved ones, everywhere, between soil and sky.
The images of life and death instantly made their way to timelines and television screens. Living fathers gripping the hands of dead daughters crushed between slabs of concrete were shared and disseminated. Morbid portraits of elderly grandmothers grieving the discovery of limp baby bodies were ubiquitous, while the images of Syrian villages and citiesflattened by the shelling of war, flattened again by the shake of earthquakes, made their rounds on digital screens. For more than 6,000 dead Syrians, this earthquake – abetted by the walls of sanctions - were able to do what a brutal authoritarian regime could not: take their lives.
Two minutes. But what followed would seem to take an eternity to fix. Or, perhaps entirely unfixable no matter the amount of time.
Rescue teams poured into Turkey from every corner of the globe. South Korea and Pakistan, Japan and South Africa and nations beyond and in between delivered personnel and resources to help. As the number of lives claimed by the earthquake kept rising, and the window to rescue those still buried beneath the debris and rubble kept diminishing, the scale of damage seemed insurmountable. The estimated scale of damage approached $85 billion, an astronomical figure, only superseded by the unquantifiable cost of lost lives and lost hope for those still breathing atop unrecognizable Turkish cities and Syrian towns.
Two minutes. A flash of time about as long the modern attention span, where the news cycle shakes from storyline to storyline then rapidly shifts us to the next matter of the day. We are conditioned to scrolling past images of human tragedy that demand prolonged attention and protracted commitment, and that time sadly cut shorter when the subjects of concern are Arabs and Muslims, Turks or “Middle Easterners.”
There is this innate human impulse to believe, or at least to want to believe, that the identity of people accosted by natural disasters should not matter when coordinating relief efforts and dedicating news coverage. Certainly, the scale of the latter can materially shape the degree – and impact – of the former. However, reality has its way of cruelly rebutting that impulse and exposing its naivete. Particularly when the victims are rooted in the “Middle East,” and the faces are Turkish, Kurdish, and Arab; and the faith is Islam.
It took two minutes, or less, scrolling through my Instagram inbox – while steering a fundraising effort for earthquake victims – to uncover that rebuttal buried in between messages of scorn and support.
“GOD MADE The Earthquake happen to PUNISH U Muzlims,” the man wrote, and the capitalized words screamed off my telephone screen with rage, unhinged and unfiltered.
His words mingled with the images of head-scarved mothers weeping over their children shrouded in body bags, pictures of elderly men prostrating toward the very earth that shook their homes to the ground. Muslims, yes, but victims.
“GOD hates ISLAM motherf****g sandn****r.” He closed, directing his hate this time at me, a known Muslim figure most known publicly for his work addressing Islamophobia.
I moved from my inbox to my timeline, where the mental stain of his words juxtaposed with the images of debris and destruction, shattered lives and shuttered futures for a limitless number impacted by the earthquake.
Two minutes. Perhaps, or even less time to read that message. A short yet deadly aftershock that reminded me that, for many – and indeed, too many – that the race and religion of the victims mattered.
This message was no aberration. As I dug through the debris of hate mail, I discovered notes that pondered whether those in dire need of emergency aid “were terrorists,” and if “Muslims were getting their just due.”
In the days in between the initial earthquake and the 6.4 tremor that followed on February 20th, two London mosques received messages taking glee in the carnage. “The more Muslims that suffer the better,” one letter wrote, praying for more earthquakes in the region. While the second letter “mocked the death of Muslims in the earthquake and ‘wished’ for the death of more,” an utterly vile revelation that points to the scale of Islamophobia in the United Kingdom, and indeed, the entire globe around it.
Two minutes. A span of time that can fracture families forever, and permanently alter the landscape of ancient cities and proud nations. Two minutes; two insignificant strokes of the time’s long hand that, in this instance, significantly changed the course of life for millions of people dead, alive, and those trapped between that liminal expanse in between where life and death blurs into one.
Two minutes. The approximate amount of time it took me, and far too many more than me, to set aside that romantic notion that the color of human tragedy should not determine the character of global aid.
Earthquakes that rattle the earth beneath us do not discriminate along lines of identity. But those human aftershocks that rise from manmade fault lines that divide us across rifts of race and religion, certainly do.
Khaled A. Beydoun is a law professor at Wayne State University in Detroit and the Berkman Center at Harvard. He is the author of the forthcoming book, The New Crusades: Islamophobia and the Global War on Muslims. You can find him on his socials at @khaledbeydoun.