Samir Atallah – The Oscar slap and the massacre of supporters

There are three divisions in the world on three issues: the first is between supporters of Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine and those who oppose it. The second among Will Smith’s supporters for slapping actor Chris Rock while receiving his Oscar, after the latter made a joke about the winner’s clean-haired wife because she suffers from alopecia areata. The third is in the Lebanese town of Ansar, where a human monster lured a woman and her three daughters to a fake dinner, then killed them and, with the help of a partner, buried them under a layer of cement and stones.
It is clear, of course, that the issue varies between a comprehensive war, a slap and a horrific massacre, but the reason for the division is the same, which is the general view of these events. In the first case, public opinion is divided over profit and loss in the political sense, not in the sense of life, death and displacement. In the second case, a large group of people refuse to refer to the disease as an insult to its owner. In the third case, the responses on the communication sites showed that a large number of savages are looking for excuses for the killers. A greater number do not show any reaction to a death of this magnitude and in this way. As soon as a few days passed, people forgot what had happened, as is the custom in the revolting national crimes. And the issue in the media turned from a phenomenon that requires studying the freezing of the Lebanese soul, to small news that coldly violates the reputation of the family, and raises questions about the morals of the murdered, not the morals of the murderer: and more terrible than anything is the position of the judiciary, which tried to wrap the matter as mere An insignificant family crime.
The frightening phenomenon is not so much in the nature of crime as it is in the nature of people. Here lies the common denominator between the attitude towards the victims of war, or the contemptuous view of disease, or the hardening of hearts that afflict societies after they become accustomed to news of murder and crime and consider them part of normal daily life. From 1975 until now, the discourse of crime and mass and individual killings has not stopped. Some television channels depicted the mourning procession in Ansar, as bright-colored dresses and attractive pictures of the departed girls. It is the cruelty of the press, as well as the cruelty of societies, that it entertains with news of crime. Whoever enters any major British library will see the crime suite as the largest and most popular. But this does not mean that British society tolerates individual crime, or that the state does so, as the killer is always trusted at the end of the novel. Everything about Ansar’s crime is disgusting and shameful, not for the murderer, but for everyone who deals with its effects, or who turns his back on it as a natural result of emotional calcification.