A nation is in mourning today after a horrific ISIS attack that claimed dozens of innocent victims.
That nation is Lebanon.

However, unlike the Paris attack, President Obama didn't say that the attack in the streets of Beirut was "an attack on all of humanity".
Unlike the Paris attack, Senator Lindsey Graham didn't call the attack on Beirut "an attack on human decency and all things that we hold dear.”
While Lebanon took a moment out of their mourning to describe the Paris attacks as "an assualt against supreme human values that formed France's message to the world", most of the rest of the world has ignored the Beirut attack that happened only one day earlier.

This double-standard has not gone unnoticed.

It also seems clear to me that to the world, my people’s deaths in Beirut do not matter as much as my other people’s deaths in Paris.
We do not get a “safe” button on Facebook. We do not get late night statements from the most powerful men and women alive and millions of online users.
We do not change policies which will affect the lives of countless innocent refugees.
This could not be clearer.
I say this with no resentment whatsoever, just sadness.
...
We need to talk about these things. We need to talk about Race. We just have to.

The racist aspects of this GWOT have never been clearer. It's not a bug, it's a feature.
While people rush to say how "we are all France" today, no one bothers to say that "we are all Lebanon. Or Syria. Or Iraq." Or anywhere else that isn't predominently white, Christian, Western-European land, and with a pro-war government.

We should feel extreme sympathy and sadness for the horrific attacks in Paris. There is nothing wrong with what President Obama and Lindsay Graham said. I would be shocked if they said anything differently.
That's not my point. My point is that outrage and sympathies for victims of terrorist attacks appear to be selective, and that selectivity has a distict pattern based on ethnicity and nationality.
It's easy to see that most of the people most outraged about the Paris attacks are generally indifferent about the non-westerners getting killed, and about to be killed, in the middle east.

It isn't just the people of Beirut that have noticed this racial double-standard. So has ISIS, and this is important.

If we treat muslim lives as having less value than western christian lives then we prove ISIS correct, and we've been doing a darn good job of it.
Syria's President Assad has noticed too.

"Can you feel sad for a child's death in the sea and not for thousands of children who have been killed by the terrorists in Syria?" al-Assad said, referring to images of a dead Syrian boy that shocked the world. "And also for men, women, and the elderly? These European double standards are no longer acceptable."

It may be ironic to hear this coming from the Butcher of Damascus, but that doesn't mean he isn't right.

“It is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.”
- Albert Camus.

They want the West to overreact. They want the West to treat muslims differently than white christians, and when has doing exactly what your enemy wants ever turned out well for you?
French President François Hollande has promised to "lead a war which will be pitiless." Oh, good. Because the results of the French bombing of Syria and Libya has been so wonderful.
Far-right National Front party leader Marine Le Pen promises to follow ISIS' plan even further.

"Islamist fundamentalism must be annihilated, France must ban Islamist organizations, close radical mosques and expel foreigners who preach hatred in our country as well as illegal migrants who have nothing to do here," she said.

It would be a real tragedy if France was to follow the United States down this road of a racist war on terror.

America has a very long history of racist foreign policy.
From post-Civil War Latin American policy, to the Philippine Occupation, to the Internment of Japanese during WWII.
Consider what this West Point professor proposes.

In a lengthy academic paper, the professor, William C Bradford, proposes to threaten “Islamic holy sites” as part of a war against undifferentiated Islamic radicalism. That war ought to be prosecuted vigorously, he wrote, “even if it means great destruction, innumerable enemy casualties, and civilian collateral damage”.

Not caring about civilian causalties, at least when those civilians aren't western, has a price. So what is that price?

It seems the Obama Administration has known for years how Salem and Waleed died, and what a terrible mistake it was. Yet the President refuses to admit it.
Instead of an official apology, a few months after my visit, members of my family were handed $100,000 in sequentially-marked U.S. dollars in a plastic bag. A Yemeni security service official was given the unpleasant task of handing this over. I looked him in the eye and asked how this was acceptable, and whether he would admit the money came from America. He shrugged and said: "Can't tell you. Take the money."
What is the value of a human life? The secret payment to my family represents a fraction of the cost of the operation that killed them. This seems to be the Obama administration's cold calculation: Yemeni lives are cheap. They cost the President no political or moral capital.

Faisal's family are the lucky ones. As it stands, the United States plans no compensation payments to the families of innocent victims in Iraq and Syria.

Yemeni lives are indeed cheap. So are Syrian lives. And Iraqi lives. And Afghani lives.
This isn't a bug. This is a feature of the war. This feature is the primary reason we aren't winning.
Consider Anwar al-Awlaki, the first American citizen that we assassinated in this war.

The list of plots and attacks influenced by Awlaki goes on and on.
In fact, Awlaki’s pronouncements seem to carry greater authority today than when he was living, because America killed him.

That statement in the NY Times undermines everything about our war strategy and ensures that we can never, ever win.
It's long past time that Americans stop supporting this futile effort. We keep making martyrs faster than we can kill them.

The State Department released a discouraging report a few months back about the environment of terrorism in the world today.

A new report released by the U.S. State Department analyzing terrorist attacks reveals a sharp rise in both the number of attacks worldwide and the effectiveness of terror groups to inflict mass casualties.
According to the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), the number of terrorist attacks in 2014 increased by 35 percent, while total fatalities increased 81 percent.

That's an awfully poor short-term trend, but it actually is just a continuation of a horrible long-term trend.

In 2001, the CIA-FBI estimated that there were between 500-1,000 al-Qaeda members worldwide.
In 2011 the government estimate was 3,000-4,000 al-Qaeda members.
Today, because of the rise of Nusra Front, the al-Qaeda affilliate in Syria, and the civil war in Yemen allowing AQAP to rebuild, the number of al-Qaeda jihadists globally now numbers in the tens of thousands.

After 14 years and trillions of dollars, al-Qaeda is now many times more numorous and larger than ever before, and then there are the tens of thousands of ISIS militants, and countless other unaffiliated jihadists.

“The war on terror has been the basis for an ideology of racism, Islamophobia, and a climate of massive repression.”
- Ralph Schoenman

The War on Terror has always had a tinge of racism, but slowly that racism is becoming more overt.

Does anyone doubt that if Obama's bombs were killing nice white British teeangers or smiling blond Swiss infants - rather than unnamed Yemenis, Pakistanis, Afghans and Somalis - that the reaction to this sustained killing would be drastically different? Does anyone doubt that if his overhead buzzing drones were terrorizing Western European nations rather than predominantly Muslim ones, the horror of them would be much easier to grasp?
Amazingly, some Democratic partisans, in order to belittle these injustices, like to claim that only those who enjoy the luxury of racial and socioeconomic privilege would care so much about these issues. That claim is supremely ironic. It reverses reality. That type of privilege is not what leads one to care about and work against these injustices. To the contrary, it's exactly that privilege that causes one to dismiss concerns over these injustices and mock and scorn those who work against them. The people who insist that these abuses are insignificant and get too much attention are not the ones affected by them, because they're not Muslim, and thus do not care.

Some will justify this global assassination program based on the fact that most of the brown-skinned people getting killed are "bad guys". How do they know that most are "bad guys"? Because government officials tells them so, eventhough 90% of drone strike victims were not targeted.

Ironically, government officials are also the ones defending the shooting of brown-skinned people on American streets because they were "bad guys". The only differences are that when its done on American streets we actually know and care who we killed, while there is a distinct lack of outrage against our racist War on Terror.