N.O.R.F Posted January 16, 2009 How much is your life valued? Check your passport… The other day I remembered something one of my relatives had said to me when I was heading to one of the war zones in the Middle East: “Go as a Canadian, don’t go as an Arab. If you get kidnapped or killed, the world will care more if you are a Canadian than an Arab.” That was many years ago but that statement bothers me to this day. And unfortunately it rings true. As a single woman working in the Middle East, I can’t remember how many times the Canadian passport came to my rescue whenever a situation came up – especially a dangerous one. With certain nationalities, dare I say it, your worth just doubles. Each week, when I meet with my group of friends, I like to throw a controversial issue on to the table for discussion. “Do you think the world values the life of an Arab in the same way as everyone else’s life?” I asked. In response, everyone spoke at the same time and almost everyone blamed the Arabs themselves. “It is a sad reality of our region that certain Arab states treat other Arabs with little respect and treat their own people even worse,” said one of my Jordanian Palestinian friends. She told us how before her family finally obtained their Jordanian citizenship, they would have a hard time travelling around the region, with Arab states turning them away at the airport. “The world takes its cue on how to treat us from the way our own people treat us,” she said. Others blamed this state of affairs on Israel, because the world still feels a sense of guilt about what happened during the the Second World War. Being half Polish, I had relatives killed in the Holocaust. They were not Jewish – they were Catholic, one of them a writer – but they suffered like everyone else in that dark time of human history. It was horrible that based on your nationality or your religion, your fate was predetermined. No wonder people want to have multiple nationalities, sometimes using up their whole life savings to get that second passport as a protection against being judged and penalised for being from this or that country. As we were talking, one of my friends received an SMS message from a friend telling him that the number of Palestinians killed in the Gaza conflict had reached 900, with thousands injured. The numbers have risen since that time, but however many get killed, would the bigger numbers change anything on the ground? Everyone took a moment to reflect on how their own life would be judged, and what its value was. The Arabs with western citizenship felt more protected, given that their wills would be respected as well as their property, while those with Arab citizenship felt a bit more vulnerable, except those from the GCC countries. “Our government takes really good care of us and our future is secure,” said my Emirati friend, and my Saudi friend agreed with him. I remember during the Lebanese summer war of 2006 how citizens of certain western countries were higher up on the list to be evacuated, and would be taken out of the country first. The rest had to wait their turn. That’s life, I guess: who is on top today could be at the bottom of the pile at another time. Of course, we were all under the same great risk of getting killed as Israel and Hizbollah fought on, but it didn’t matter. Your nationality or country of origin determined when you were evacuated, and if you were killed, then you became just another number. One of my contacts in the Lebanese government told me that it was difficult to tally numbers during the war as sometimes the person killed would be from two countries or would have no ID and how all these little things would mess up statistics. It all got too complicated and way too impersonal for me. In one of my psychology classes, the professor conducted a quick study on us students. He showed us two photos, separated by a few minutes, and asked us to rate them according to which was the more effective. One of them was of a single starving African child, crying, in torn clothes. The other was of a group of five starving African children, crying, and in similar torn clothes. In a sample of 100 students, almost 70 per cent rated the single child photo as more “sad” and “worse off” than the other children. The professor explained that somehow the human brain reacts less empathetically to larger numbers, as if it can’t deal with or “identify” as much as it would with a single other person. I think that shed a little bit of light on why people react the way they do to places of constant conflict. Until I understand it all better, I will follow my relative’s advice. http://thenational.ae/article/20090114/OPINION/333 384607/0/FRONTPAGE Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Faarax-Brawn Posted January 16, 2009 ^Very Interesting. very thought provoking. Very true L0L. P.s, I have not read the(long article) yaa North,ok,maybe i read thru the Jordinian's "thought" and i lost interest after that.(yawn). that was it. I dont plan on reading some more either.(no thanks,no really thanks ) And only reason i came in the first place was to "mark the topic" i always find it hard to see a post with no one replying to it.Dont want to see this thread be that 'lone lonely post with no replies" on it. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
N.O.R.F Posted January 17, 2009 ^LoL. Thanks Waar people are reading and agreeing with it hence the no replies. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
