2996 is the number of lives lost in the September 11 attacks 14 years ago. It's a figure well-known across the world, and a figure increasingly co-opted to justify further violence — much of this in the form of the United States' ongoing War on Terror.
The term War on Terror itself is oxymoronic — war instills the very violence, brutality and mass displacement it aims to remove.
The ultimate death toll of foreign intervention in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen is estimated to be over four million. Perhaps the indifference towards this number comes from a sheer inability to comprehend it. More likely, however, is the toxic apathy bred by racial homogenisation and the Islamophobia that follows from it.
The idea of the 'Muslim' has moved far beyond a harmless religious identity to a delusive and violent caricature. The term itself has come to represent more of a placeholder than much else — a frame maintaining a consistent appearance no matter its content.
Racialisation plays a key and definitive role in this, fuelling the marginalisation of people who fill the common brown-skinned connotation. In the immediate aftermath of crimes implicating Muslims as culprits, Indian Sikh people and their temples too face intensified violence and desecration due to being read, mistakenly, as 'Muslim'.
An overwhelming perception of Muslims as 'savage' and antithetical to peace accounts for incidents where overtly racist people can rejoice easily at the loss of human life, to little negative reaction. When a person is deemed unworthy or bereft of humanity, their death becomes gruesomely welcome.
This effect was seen in spades when over a hundred people were killed due to a crane collapse in Saudi Arabia in September last year. Many Americans saw the tragedy as 'karma' for the events of September 11, retweeting reports of the event with 'Thanks Jesus! On 9/11 too! God has spoken' or 'Karma is a bitch huh muslims?', and even describing it as 'retribution' and 'a beautiful rainbow.'The idea of karma touted by these tweets is based on the notion of balance. Ironically, the numbers here do not add up. Instead, a false equivalency is established — an imbalanced equation rarely questioned by those in power.
We are taught that nearly four million and counting killed in the War on Terror cannot equal the just under 3000 lost in the September 11 attacks; that there is still a score to settle, a debt to be repaid. Why? Because