The Grinches who Stole Eid

As Muslims around the world celebrate Eid this week, the restaurants in Dhaka’s “elite” Gulshan area are devoid of festivities. Streets normally crowded with locals dressed in holiday finery (some people change clothes up to eight times a day over a three day of period) are now filled with heavy police presence and army vehicles. The usual blasts of fireworks that accompany the largest holiday in the Muslim calendar, now horrify Gulshanites. Some wonder if the sounds are blasts like those that shook the country’s diplomatic epicenter last Friday, when the Holey Artisan Bakery was attacked by terrorists.

As one friend so aptly put it, the terrorists are “the grinches who stole Eid” from the rest of us. People around world who lost loved ones in the attack, are morning, as our those who feel they have lost their city. For the loved ones of killed Muslims, each family marks every death by four days of intense mourning followed a longer 40 day period. 

Expatriate Facebook groups, once open by invitation, are now secret. Liberal Muslim parents have spent the week sharing articles  on social media about early telltale signs to prevent children from radicalization. Meanwhile, enraged elites report of “vapid girls,” who declare that the terrorists – mostly from privileged backgrounds “are so cute I would marry them.”

The veneration of criminals by nincompoops is well recorded as a global phenomenon, and Dhaka is no different. But these attacks are unlike any others in the country. Though Bangladesh has become fragmented for harboring Islamist terrorism – with targeted killings of intellectuals in the last four years- this past week has shed light on a new turn for the country with the first escalated targeting of foreign individuals.

The latest attacks were committed by young men who attended Dhaka’s best English preparatory schools, presumably a sign of their elitism. They were not poor, desperate, destitute members from the margins of society. They had access to the diplomatic epicenter. No one suspected they would fall privy to terrorist myopia and reductionism precisely because the country conflates economic status with intellectual status — and the latter needs far more finessing before the country can claim its progressing in any way. The government is ignoring the dangerous fanaticism that is taking place and a generals rise in socioeconomic status is not helping.

Bangladesh’s wealth has been steadily growing with garments factories providing much disposable income over the country’s wealthy, but this has not been met with the worldliness that one expects of such growth. In fact, the government has been allowing intellectual elite to get murdered, while the illusion of progress and freedom is maintained by the lifestyles of the wealthy masses. But to assume that the growing ranks of the upper echelons of Bangladeshi society is inductive of cultural acumen is vastly limiting, and in fact, wrong. Affording a private school does not buy one the intellectual depth necessary to institute lasting pluralistic democracy and foster progressive growth. Institutionalized government reform needs to actively reflects such values as well. What good is financial wealth when it’s not buttressed and supported by intellectual riches?

When people talk about the elite, they assume that education equalizes, and money negates, because all those who are educated are reflective. For those of us enraged by this perversion of our religion by those who have attended schools like us we quickly distinguished that money can always buy the artifacts of privilege, but rarely does it buy pedigree and culture.  One has to look no further than Donald Trump to discern this.

Dhaka University, another of the country’s most elite schools  has long housed the student wings of each political party, and violence is commonplace for the every day Dhakaites, who are unable to escape these daily extremists. Additionally, embracing capitalism with the ideologies that accompany liberalism has a long way to go in Bangladesh. Wealth rarely denotes liberalism as a parallel to economic growth.

The largest error of us liberal Bangladeshis in making this assumption of worldliness is now apparent, but the larger truth is that in recent years there have been many instances of Bangladesh’s government driving out any pluralism to the point of enraging impressionable and identity seeking youth into such standards: Bangladesh’s government has throttled the space for expression, for democracy, and even held a non-election on all leadership levels. This appears to have angered budgeoning extremists into committing despicable acts of terror. This must be addressed, alongside revising the ideal that the reach of education as an equalizing mechanism is pathetic, if there is no ensuing mechanism to carry these messages out in life.

Bangladesh’s government and some of Dhaka’s social elite have blamed Israeli propaganda, Indian and Pakistani destabilization efforts, and opposition parties. What kind of rationale is this? Meanwhile Islamists have gone online to spread propaganda attempting to mutilate the legacies of the murdered victims. The victims themselves are global citizens with Italians, Japanese, an Indian, an American and Bangladeshis amongst the murdered. The victims include a five month pregnant woman, humanitarian workers and engineers, a global arts producer, police personnel, budding economists and businessmen, and students, all of whom were murdered and then hacked in the largest massacre the country. However, the national media claimed that hostages were being held with demands for the leader of an illegal local Islamist leader to be released. Despite this news, a high ranking police officer confided to the New York Times that there were absolutely no demands made during the  hostage taking standoff that gripped Dhaka for 12 hours.

We believed we were safe in our gated communities, despite the post-apocalyptic feel of Dhaka, whose buses resemble battered aluminum foil. We followed the unwritten rules that guaranteed this illusion: practice caution on New Year’s Eve, and avoid Dhaka University during political strife, because “cocktail” bomb blasts are frequent at this educational hub.

The current Hasina regime has previously banned YouTube and Facebook for several months in the last four years, apparently to appease extremist groups. The fact that extremists are using these very engines to propel fear and intimidation follows parallel to the fact that there has been no recent demands by these factions to propel their deep seated terrorism.

Ansar-al-Islam, a banned militant outfit and self-proclaimed ISIL affiliate, announced their murderous intent on Twitter ten full hours before the Holey Artisan attacks. In May, a university professor received Facebook death threats for asking a female student to remove her veil, so he could identify her face for roll call. LGBT activists Xulhaz Mannan and Mahbub Rabbi Tonoy’s murders were captured on video and circulated on Youtube and Ansar-al-Islam’s “Salauddiner Ghora” Facebook page.

In a country where a meal costs as little as 25 US cents, the 19 million dollars the Bangladeshi government has pledged, to perform surveillance on online activity, is clearly ineffective at the least, or dangerously misdirected at best.

So far, Bangladeshis have had to re-register phone SIM cards with fingerprints that match their national identity cards- an interesting idea for a country where deplorable birth registration practices insure that even the country’s population count of 160 million is an estimate. After eleven months of filing for a national identity card, I was told that my application was never received. My cousin and I applied together. Hers was honored.

Two weeks ago, 12,000 were rounded up as “terrorists” by the reigning Awami League government. If this roundup was effective, there would not have been two successful extremist attacks in one day. Mere hours before the heinous hostage situation occurred, a Hindu priest was murdered while picking flowers for his morning prayers.

When expression is so heavily truncated with intimidation and murder, without adequate state support and protection, what hope is there for the country’s future to remain free from regressive, reactionary shackles? Scores have been murdered, while Bangladesh’s government has blamed everyone but itself for the crisis today. What good is a country, if you are not guaranteed freedom to walk its streets, or the identity card necessary to vote in its election? The country is allowing its intellectual elites to get censored and hacked to death while the wealthy elite and the lives they lead is mistaken for a deeper freedom than it actually is. When this happens, critical thinking is lynched — and the right questions don’t get asked, solutions don’t get found.