A woman with her face bloody, her feet bruised and dirty and her shirt torn, sits on an airport seat. Her face is filled with pain, confusion, and sadness.
The iconic photo has circled around the media as the image of the Brussels terror attacks in Belgium. The death toll has reached 32 and more than 300 have been injured.
The attacks have been a striking reminder of the Paris terror attacks that took place in November where 130 people lost their lives at the hands of gunmen.
A massive manhunt has gone underway for the three suspects involved while Belgium mourns their losses. The manhunt spurred the arrests of six people in Brussels who were accused of terrorism.
ISIS claimed credit for the attack and many Islamic State supporters put chilling messages on their Twitter accounts praising the bombings. As the media surrounds and talks about terror and politicians put their solutions to the forefront, Belgium, the home to NATO, deals with their devastated city.
How should we react when terror strikes? How do we react when innocent people, coming and going in an airport and in a subway station, are killed?
Billionaire presidential candidate Donald Trump said in an interview with Fox and Friends, “I will tell you, I’ve been talking about this a long time, and look at Brussels,” Trump said. “Brussels was a beautiful city, a beautiful place with zero crime. And now it’s a disaster city. It’s a total disaster, and we have to be very careful in the United States, we have to be very careful and very vigilant as to who we allow in this country.”
While the overall crime in Belgium is fairly low, with street crime and items stolen from cars seeming to be the most popular crime, according to Bureau of Diplomatic Security, in 2015, Belgium’s terrorism rating was classified as “high” because “… Belgium maintains open borders with its neighbors, allowing the possibility of terrorist operatives entering/exiting the country with anonymity.”
Molenbeek, a city in Belgium not too far from Brussels, is labeled by some as the jihadi capital of Europe. The city is home to many radically inclined Muslims and also where one of the Paris attackers grew up with two of the Brussels attackers.
Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders replied to Trump’s comments saying in an interview with Jimmy Kimmel, “At the end of the day, we cannot allow the Trumps of the world to use these incidents to attack all of the Muslim people in the world,” he said. “It is unfair—to imply that because somebody is Muslim, they are a terrorist, that is an outrageous statement.”
President Obama, who was still in Cuba when the attacks occurred, was criticized for his response which was to attend a baseball game in Cuba with his family.
Senator Cruz, while speaking to reporters in Washington, slammed Obama’s decision saying, “While our friends and allies are attacked by radical Islamic terrorists, President Obama is spending his time going to baseball games with the Castros and standing at a press conference with Raul Castro as a prop, while Castro denies there are any political prisoners in Cuba.”
Politicians have often used their reactions to push their campaign rhetoric and to try and convince Americans that they can lead citizens in these times where terrorism seems to be happening with increasing frequency.
The response to the attacks from Sen. Cruz, which was to shut out Muslims and to put American Muslim communities under police surveillance and patrols in order to monitor them, was widely criticized by New York City’s police chief and also by another presidential candidate—the Ohio governor and presidential candidate John Kasich called Cruz’s proposal “ridiculous” to a CNN town hall.
Bill Bratton, the New York City police chief said this, “The statements [Cruz] made today is why he’s not going to become president of this country. We don’t need a president that doesn’t respect the values that form the foundation of this country.”
Pulitzer Prize winner Glenn Greenwald, in an interview with Democracy Now! slammed the politicians for their hateful rhetoric.
“… the best friend of ISIS seems to be Western politicians, like you hear Ted Cruz, like you hear from Donald Trump, who, essentially, every time there’s one of these attacks, want to declare Muslims or Islam the actual culprit which does nothing but serve to exacerbate the very wedge that ISIS is trying to drive into the heart of these Muslim populations in Western societies,” Greenwald said.
The wedge that can be driven into the Muslim populations, according to Greenwald, is dangerous and encourages ISIS to continue their dominance and their message of hate.
With all of the talk of banning Muslims or monitoring their neighborhoods, tension is high in the U.S.
“If you’re even a little bit younger than me, you do not know an America without Islamophobia. Something that is terrifying to me is what it’s like to be a [Muslim] teenager in an environment where you’re always talked about as an “other” or a terrorist or somebody violent,” one girl said when describing what her American life was like to NPR.
Obama called on Americans to embrace Muslim Americans in a radio address: “In that effort, our most important partners are American Muslims. That’s why we have to reject any attempt to stigmatize Muslim-Americans, and their enormous contributions to our country and our way of life.”
Despite the politics behind the response to Belgium, ISIS has exposed a large hole in European security that leaves Europe exposed and vulnerable. There has been a lot of controversy over whether Brussels could have prevented the attacks and whether they knew about the bombers beforehand.
The FBI informed Dutch authorities that two of the bombers, who were brothers and had been expelled by Turkey, were wanted in Belgium, however; the Netherlands later let them go.
The Dutch, on the other hand, have replied saying that the FBI did not mention Belgium, but they did send a letter about the bombers to Belgium. In turn, Belgium has denied that the Netherlands ever mentioned the bombers.
This series of miscommunications showed the weakness in European security and how underprepared they were for a terrorist attack. Two Belgian ministers, the interior and justice minister, have offered to resign over their failure to track the Islamic State militants, however, they will be staying on for now.
Belgium has the largest number of foreign fighters leaving the country to go and fight for ISIS which had made it a target for Islamic extremism. The question of why young people would want to murder innocent people is yet to be answered. Currently, the focus seems to be on Brussels security and politics in the U.S.
A little over a week before the attacks in Brussels, Turkey experienced a car bombing in the city of Ankara which left at least 37 people dead five days after Brussels; a suicide bomb at a park in Pakistan left more than 70 people dead, most of which were women and children.
The terrorist in Pakistan has sparked a debate over whether Christians were targeted on the Easter Sunday killings. In Pakistan, tension is boiling over between hardcore Muslims (the majority) and Christians (who make up only 2 percent of the population).
Raza Rumi, a college professor, said in an interview with the International Business Times, “The Taliban share the same ideology as the Islamic State. Non-Muslims have to be subjugated or converted, so it’s a furtherance of that agenda,” he said. “But the brutal reality is that both Muslims and Christians died, because that’s how terror is — indiscriminate.”
A spokesperson for the terrorist group behind the attack said this in a statement, “It was our people who attacked the Christians in Lahore, celebrating Easter. It’s our message to the government that we will carry out such attacks again until sharia [Islamic law] is imposed in the country.”
While the politicians debate the correct response that should be taken for terror attacks that have occurred in the past couple of weeks and Belgium looks for better ways to increase their security, victims have reacted and given their stories about the bombings in Brussels.
Victims of the bombings tell the story of blood and chaos during the attacks and the rushing aftermath of the bombings. “People dove to the ground. Parts of the ceiling fell in. There were some injured people lying on the ground. I saw a foot that had been blown off,” one witness told the New York Times in a phone interview.
“I was very near, very, very near. After the first explosion, doors were flying, windows were flying. Everyone was crying, children and young people lying on the floor, so many people injured, I did not know how to help them,” one Brussels resident told CNN.
Out of the 32 who died in the terror attacks in Belgium, four were American, two of them were Dutch siblings living in New York hoping to become citizens and the other two was a married couple who lived in Gatlinburg, Tennessee.
The lady in the iconic photo was later identified as an Indian flight attendant and a married mother of two. Her family says that she is responding well to her medication and that they’re thankful she is alive.
Laina Yost
Intern