Since I was 16 years old, I have seen the US, my country, kill brown Muslim people by the millions. First in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, then in Pakistan, Yemen and Syria with drone strikes. Hundreds of thousands of these people were civilians – people simply living in their towns and communities, working, struggling, supporting their families, like any other people in any other country. Largely poor and rural people who have no power or means or even the desire to harm Americans. 

I remember rallying passionately against the Afghanistan and Iraq wars through my teen years and into college. I was driven by the injustice being done to innocent people thousands of miles away that were the direct target of the US war machine. It was undeniable that this so-called "retaliation" for the 9/11 attacks was anything but that. While a weak case could be made for the war with Afghanistan, the war with Iraq was undeniably launched under false pretences and even outright lies. Every reputable analysis of the situation made it clear that this was a war for control over the resources (oil, etc) and to further Western interests in the region. My blood boiled and my heart ached at the thought of innocent people being killed for nothing more than the US asserting its imperial power. 

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I can't remember when the number of those killed became incomprehensible. When a human being kills another human being, it is horrifying to comprehend. If the killing is intentional, the perpetrator is vilified and punished by the justice system. Serial killers are largely thought of as the worst human beings of all – sociopaths meant to be locked up and studied for their grotesque crimes. But when hundreds, thousands or millions of people are killed by the state, we cannot comprehend the enormity of the scale of tragedy. We lose sight of the fact that it could mean that a person loses their entire family in a matter of seconds. That schools and hospitals are bombed. That entire cities that have stood for hundreds of years are obliterated. That the effect of destruction at this scale lasts for decades and results in generational trauma we cannot fully comprehend. We, as Americans living in this time in history especially, have never experienced this scale of death and destruction firsthand. We can't imagine our neighbours being blown up or our loved ones being seized and tortured by soldiers. To see the places where we played and shopped and gathered be razed to the ground. If we actually understood it within our own context, we could never turn a blind eye to it or be complicit in it. 

State violence has always been sanitised, dehumanised and considered a "necessary evil." But the differentiation of perpetrator is key to whether it elicits your sympathy and rage, or your justification and indifference.

Today, I am seeing the outpouring of support by the US for the Israeli victims and hostages of Hamas. I am reading thousands of posts and comments on social media from politicians, celebrities and news outlets crying out for the pain of the Israeli people. Our own President Biden unequivocally damning the perpetrators, Hamas, and condoning swift and brutal retaliation. Suddenly the scale of the tragedy, despite also being thousands of miles away, is fathomable and something that requires a magnitude of response that in recent times was seen only for the war in Ukraine. And the horrors of these violent acts committed by Hamas are not being sanitised the same way state-sanctioned violence is. They are being called out explicitly and broadcast widely, in some cases even without substantiation. The tragedy befalling 1,400 Israeli civilians is being exploited so blindingly fast that the public doesn't see that this war against "Hamas" is actually being waged against the 2.3 million people living under occupation with no military, no food, water or electricity, and no means of escape.

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The question that rings deafeningly in my mind is: where was this outrage for all the horrific acts continuously perpetrated by Israel against the Palestinians for more than 70 years? Where is the 24/7 media coverage for the thousands of Palestinian children killed and injured just since 2000? And where has the public outcry been for the thousands of civilians slaughtered and tortured by US troops against brown Muslim and non-Muslim bodies all over the world? 

For more than two decades, I've watched countless videos and documentaries, read articles and position papers about the systematic killing and decades-long oppression of the Palestinian people since 1948. I've researched and written college essays about the abduction, torture and killing of Palestinian children by the IDF and shared with anyone who cares to know more about the everyday reality of the region. I had to seek these resources out myself because none of the material was readily accessible or publicised in mainstream US media. I've been absorbing this information all while witnessing the ongoing wars in the Middle East and facing discrimination and Islamophobia from my adolescence into my adult life.

So how does it feel to be born and raised in the country that has committed and condones countless atrocities against brown Muslim people? Against innocent civilians that are no different than me, just living in another country? It makes it clear that to the US and other Western imperial powers, our lives are disposable. That if by chance I was born in Pakistan, where my mother lived for several years, I could have been just another casualty of a US drone bomb. That if I ever found myself on the wrong side of a border, my life would not matter. This is the insidiousness of the rhetoric used to justify unimaginable violence against brown bodies like mine. It numbs the White Western world from our immeasurable grief and pain.

Naveen Khan is a Bangladeshi-American working in social justice grantmaking and philanthropy in the US.

Views expressed in this article are the author's own.

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