I was a little less than three blocks away on West 26th street when I heard the blast. Twenty-two years of living in Beirut had taught me to wait for the sirens before becoming concerned. And they came, distant at first, and then louder, followed by the clatter of a helicopter. But the New Yorkers enjoying the pop-up food court in Madison Square Park on that balmy Saturday night didn’t appear to be panicking.
Neither for that matter was CNN, which was covering the Black Caucus Foundation in Washington, attended by both President Barack Obama and the Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. It would be an hour before it broke the news that an improvised explosive device (all attention seemed to focus on a beaten up pressure cooker lying in the road) had detonated in nearby Chelsea at around 20:30, injuring 29 people.
An hour later, I went out to grab something to eat and to see what was going on. But there was no mood of shock; no clusters of distraught friends, hugging or making reassuring phone calls and so I didn’t wander down to Chelsea, where I assumed the cops would be moving people on. ‘Nothing here folks. Let’s go!’
By Sunday morning, all the ‘victims’ had been discharged from hospital but the story was just warming up. Terror had visited New York, as it had in Paris, nearly a year before. Really? I went to the crime scene. The area was cordoned off. Anyone who hadn’t known what had happened might have assumed there’d been a fire. Only the handful of agents in ATF T-shirts hinted at something more sinister.
When I got back to London on Monday, Saturday night’s incident was still the lead story at the top of the hour. The Daily Telegraph website even had a live feed. We were told there had been other devices, made by a terror cell operating out of New Jersey and that that there was a link to a stabbing attack in Minnesota, also at the weekend. Then, after an ‘intense manhunt’ and a gun battle, the authorities told us that they had arrested one Ahmad Khan Rahami, 28.
By this point, I was telling concerned friends that it wasn’t really a proper bomb and yet at the same time, what was clearly nothing more that an act of vandalism had been elevated into a global event. Was this going to be a ‘Je suis Chelsea’ moment? You’d be forgiven for thinking it might be.
People in the Middle East must laugh at all the fuss. Since 2003, nearly 200,000 civilians have died in Iraq as a result of sectarian violence. Many are the victims of random bombs a thousand times more deadly than Saturday’s. And yet not one has merited the same sustained global media attention.
Ditto Syria where – and here’s another random statistic – 25,000 women and children alone have died since 2011 and where 11.5 per cent of the population has been wounded or killed in the same period. Even in Lebanon – which in recent years has been spared the barbarity of its neighbours – we are regularly reminded of what it’s like to see body parts strewn across the street.
So, if terror, proper terror, comes to the streets of the US, there will be little sympathy from an Arab world struggling with the fallout from US foreign policy of breathtaking incompetence and cruelty. First in Iraq, where it dismantled an admittedly brutal, but functional regime and then stood back as fitna, or civil war, broke out between Islam’s two dominant sects. And then in Syria, where Western indecision has thrown the region into even greater chaos, allowed medieval extremism to flourish, and created a humanitarian crisis that threatens to engulf Europe and summon up the spectre of rightwing nationalist politics.
On Sunday afternoon, as I waited for the subway train to take me to JFK, a black man in his late 40s dressed in a black t-shirt, black shorts, black socks and carrying a black bag, came onto the platform and delivered an impromptu, angry and chilling sermon.
‘You worried about a bomb? That ain’t shit. I’m waiting for the next one. And the next one. Hell it may even be on the train that coming. You people all ready for that? They say black people killed white cops in Dallas. I say bring that shit up here. I say bring it on. This nation is sunk in sin.’
He was on a roll and people began to drift further down the platform. ‘We’re telling the Arabs and the Muslims who come here not to hate us and yet we bomb their countries.’ He stared bug-eyed at a young white couple. ‘This can’t carry on. Something’s gotta give and when it does, we all gonna know about it.’
I couldn’t help but think he may have a point.
Michael Karam is the former Executive Director of Now Lebanon
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