Deadly Rhetoric of Strongholds and Bastions: Burj Al-Barajneh, Gaza, Molenbeek and French Banlieues
►http://www.warscapes.com/opinion/deadly-rhetoric-strongholds-and-bastions-burj-al-barajneh-gaza-molenbeek-
“They called your apartments and gardens guerrilla strongholds.
- June Jordan, Apologies to All the People in Lebanon (1989)
On the evening of Friday, November 13, while the murderous attacks on Paris were still occurring, social media was already saturated with messages and opinions of all kinds. One recurring argument highlighted the great disproportion between coverage of the Paris attacks in relation the ones in Beirut and Baghdad occurring only a few hours earlier. Although this argument is undeniably well founded, it’s regrettable that much of the attention brought to Beirut, and later to Bamako (November 20), seems to have been brought in opposition to Paris, rather than with genuine care for and attention to the local contexts in which these other attacks happened – this despite the paradoxical selling point of the articles’ titles promising insight into “the thing that no one is talking about.” But talking about the fact that we are not talking about something does not make us actually talk of this thing, and it certainly does not address the terms chosen to talk about it.
Many of the Western descriptions of the double suicide bombing in the Burj al-Barajneh neighborhood in Southern Beirut systematically depicted it as a “Hezbollah stronghold” or “Hezbollah bastion.” Although the association of this neighborhood with Hezbollah can hardly be denied – Hezbollah is in charge of security in many Shi’a neighborhoods in South Beirut, which ISIS noted in justifying its decision to attack this specific area, and Hezbollah both participates alongside the Syrian regime in the war in Syria and fights ISIS in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon – such terminology is highly problematic for at least two reasons. The first is specific to the audience targeted in these articles: the immediate association of the forty-five victims in Burj al-Barajneh with Hezbollah implies, for these readers, an inherent connection between the victims and the typical Western image of a terrorist organization, rather than a multifaceted civil and military organization whose actual complexity does not make it much more likeable. The second major problematic aspect of the terminology used by much of the Western media is closer to the core of this text’s topic: the construction of an antagonizing, or hostile, image of certain neighborhoods in various cities of the world. The terms “stronghold” and “bastion” impose militarized characteristics to a residential neighborhood and, in doing so, deny the status of civilians to those targeted by these deadly attacks.”