Power of a single story

Editorial

This month, a 15-year-old boy, Muhammad Qataa, was operating a food cart in Aleppo, Syria, and, according to reports, a friend asked Muhammad for a coffee, promising to pay later. Muhammad reportedly replied that, even if the Prophet Muhammad were to come down, the boy wouldn’t grant him credit, or wouldn’t give him a free coffee – or something to this effect. Other reports suggest he declared he was an atheist. The reports differ and, again, the facts hardly matter. Three members of an al-Qaeda-connected extremist group overheard the remark, whatever it was. They hustled Muhammad into a car and he was missing for a day. The next day, they returned.

A Syrian human rights group reports that Muhammad had been tortured for 24 hours and that, when he was returned to his neighborhood, his captors, surrounded by residents including Muhammad’s mother and father, declared: “Generous citizens of Aleppo: disbelieving in God is polytheism and cursing the prophet is a polytheism. Whoever curses even once will be punished like this.” The speaker then fired two shots, into Muhammad’s neck and face, and left the boy’s body in the street while they drove away.

A sad fact of human nature – one of many sad facts of human nature – is that a single story can have a more lasting impact than all the grievous statistics of war. There have been close to 100,000 people killed in the Syrian civil war, but this story somehow illuminates the madness in a way that drives home the lunacy of the violence.

The ideological absolutism that would kill a teenager – a child – for an innocent remark about a religious figure has a way of illuminating the mindlessness of deep-seated extremism. As the late, great Canadian balladeer Stan Rogers put it, in the context of the conflict in Northern Ireland, “causes are ashes where children lie slain.”

As unfair or deceptive as it may seem, a single story is often the best way for humans to understand larger issues and, so often, it takes a child’s story to move human emotion. Anne Frank’s diary has probably educated more young people about the Holocaust than any other single document or work.

The story of Muhammad Qataa, on a micro level, is clear: torturing and killing a child for the most innocent affront is brutality at is most base. On a macro level, the lesson is less clear. The murder was perpetrated by parties opposed to the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Western governments and most of the world, save Russia, Iran and other distasteful entities, also oppose the Assad regime. In fact, Western nations are preparing to arm the forces fighting Assad, some of whom are, hopefully, people who care about the same things we value – including a respect for human rights – while some, decidedly, are not. Some of them are the people who perpetrated Muhammad’s murder.

The brutal murder of Muhammad Qataa may put an individual, tragic face to the horrors of war in Syria and capture not just the minds but the hearts of the world. Yet it doesn’t reassure us that the end of the Assad regime would hasten a better – less violent and more equitable – Syria.

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