The Silence And The Fury: Why Are Americans More Outraged About A Dead Lion Than Dead Civilians?

If you have access to the internet (and since you're reading this, you probably do), chances are you've heard about the death of Cecil, a Zimbabwean lion who was shot and killed by Minnesota dentist and recreational big game hunter Walter Palmer. Although it reasonably could have been expected that there might be a fair level of upset at someone killing an animal for sport rather than self defense, reports that Cecil was illegally lured from the nature reserve he lived on by Palmer and his guides for the express purpose of being able to kill him compounded the subsequent outrage by several orders of magnitude. Thousands took, as they are wont to do nowadays, to Twitter to express their sorrow over the loss of Cecil and their fury towards Palmer, among them a number of celebrities. None other than MC Hammer tweeted "Can't believe this man counted it as valor to lure #CecilTheLion out of his protective home and killed him. #Cowardice," while former CNN talking head Piers Morgan, who used his show as a platform to vigorously promote gun control, was more than willing to temporarily suspend his professed distaste for gun violence in the wake of Cecil's death, saying "I'd love to go hunting for killer dentist Dr. Walter Palmer, so I can stuff & mount him for MY office wall."

Less malevolent but equally unhinged was Sharon Osbourne's reaction, who, in her infinite wisdom, declared, "#WalterPalmer is Satan. I don't know how anyone could go to this man for dental services after this. He is a killer. Beware!" Never mind that there is a big difference between hunting, legally or illegally, a lion, and killing another human being in cold blood. No, us foolish mortals should heed Mrs. Osbourne's warning: any dentist who engages in recreational hunting is the 21st Century-equivalent of Laurence Olivier in Marathon Man! It would be unfair to say that everyone who was upset by Cecil's killing reacted hysterically, however. Some simply left stuffed animals on the sign adjacent to his dental clinic, a clear-but-harmless act of protest against Palmer's hunt. Of course, there were also people who left signs of their own on the door to the clinic, bearing such heartwarming messages as "ROT IN HELL" (their caps, not mine) and "PALMER (again, their caps, not mine), there's a deep cavity waiting for you!", to say nothing of the dozens of protestors waving signs and voicing their disgust outside the building.

What's interesting though is that, for all their outrage about the needless killing of a lion, this writer has yet to see any of these individuals condemn a much greater occurrence of bloodshed happening as we speak, an occurrence that one could credibly argue they bear greater responsibility and thus greater chance to affect change for. This occurrence is succinctly summarized by the Associated Press: "U.S.-led airstrikes targeting the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq have likely killed at least 459 civilians over the past year, a report by an independent monitoring group said Monday. The coalition had no comment." Apparently, neither did Cecil's newfound fans.

True, this number is not as shocking as the well over a million civilians killed in Iraq and Afghanistan within the past decade, but when you consider that the U.S. isn't officially at war with Syria or Iraq, you would think that it warrants many a raised eyebrow or at the very least a few sanctimonious celebrity tweets. For that matter, you would think that Americans would be incensed that the President can send the country's military into combat without getting a formal declaration of war from Congress (a power delegated expressly to them by Article One, Section Eight of the Constitution, mind you), but then again, they haven't passed one of those since World War II, so perhaps that's expecting too much. With this confidence-inspiring history in mind, it's no wonder that the Obama administration felt comfortable enough last August to begin pummeling Iraq and then Syria as part of it's improvised whack-a-mole strategy with the then-nascent Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (more commonly known as ISIS) and other assorted terrorist groups (Khorasan? Khorasan? Bueller?) This lovely state of affairs lasted for almost half a year before California Representative Adam Schiff finally introduced not a declaration of war but a resolution authorizing ongoing operations against ISIS (what passes for the second best thing) on behalf of the administration this past January. Predictably, however, the Republican-controlled Congress opposed the administration's proposed legislation, not because it was too open-ended but because it wasn't open-ended enough in their book, ultimately tabling the bill and leaving us where we started: bombing people far, far away while acting like we're not bombing people far, far away.

Perhaps the fact that this tragedy is happening so far from American shores would explain American's indifference or ignorance of it in times past, but in the digital age, where information travels around the world in seconds, this explanation doesn't hold water. Indeed, it would require that one not consider the fact that people who are not aware of civilian casualties of American air strikes somehow heard about Walter Palmer's hunt, an event as removed from the day-to-day life of the average American as overseas counter-terrorism operations are. Within a short period of time, they were able to both learn and form a strong (most likely negative) opinion about the killing of one of Zimbabwe's most famous lions whilst remaining in the dark about the Anbar marketplace struck by American aircraft, leaving 18 Iraqi civilians dead or the 7 women and children reportedly killed by a U.S. cruise missile in the Syrian province of Idlib. Given that these events happened separately over the course of a year, one might think there would have been more than enough time for Americans to learn and come out forcefully against these acts, and yet, any memory of these innocent Iraqis and Syrians was utterly eclipsed by the fury provoked by other unfortunate events, not least of which was the death of Cecil. What times we live in that we feel more sympathy for predatory felines than unarmed Muslims.

In fairness, it is difficult to feel for people killed by bombs dropped in your name when the people dropping the bombs refuse to acknowledge said people killed by said bombs. According to U.S. Central Command, there is "no operational reporting or intelligence" confirming civilian fatalities caused by American forces, an extraordinary claim to make when one considers that over 1,000 air strikes have been launched in Iraq and Syria by this point. One is reminded of the 2011 bombing of Libya, where NATO dropped over 7,000 bombs and missiles on that nation whilst claiming with a straight face that no civilians were harmed up until independent investigators traveled there to see for themselves and found that, lo and behold, not only were civilians killed, but that the total number of Libyans killed by NATO might have been even higher than they had expected. It's bad enough that we're bombing people and then acting like nothing happened, but to make matters worse, our anti-ISIS strategy appears to consist of just that: making matters worse. After resisting the idea for years, President Obama asked and got permission last year to train and arm Syrians fighting against the government of Bashar Al-Assad and ISIS. One year and one million dollars later, five of the seventy rebels trained by the U.S. have been captured by the Al-Nusra Front - that is, Al Qaeda's affiliate in Syria. Several others have disappeared, hopefully not into the folds of ISIS, against which, need I remind you, we trained and armed them.

Then there is the question of Assad: what happens when our proxies come (as they undoubtedly will) into conflict with the regime's forces? The answer, as it turns out, is bomb him too, which would almost certainly lead to his fall and in all likelihood ISIS parading through the streets of Damascus and onward to Baghdad, Beirut, or even Tel Aviv, if they're feeling bold enough. Before you shrug your shoulders and dismiss this as something that only effects the people unfortunate enough to live there: per the Pentagon's own admission, a little over 4,000 American soldiers are currently stationed in Iraq. Yes, they are supposed to serve in strictly advisory roles, and yes, President Obama has stressed that he will not send them directly into combat, but the cynics among us (i.e. this writer) can't help but recall similar promises and assurances from another liberal, Democrat president: Lyndon B. Johnson, who infamously declared on the campaign trail that he would not send "American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves" and then proceeded to drag the nation into the bloody quagmire that was the Vietnam War, traumatizing an entire generation of Americans, devastating the lives of millions of Vietnamese, and costing him his presidency. 

Some 60 years after the Sixties, we find ourselves facing one of the major issues that defined that decade. The president is waging war off-the-books and in contravention of the Constitution, and Congress, instead of reining him in, has essentially given their tacit blessing to his actions. The only difference is that impressionable young college students haven't taken to the streets in protest, although that is liable to change when the war inevitably goes downhill and our body count comes closer (however marginally) to matching the other side's. Perhaps then, they will take some of that passion that led modern-day slacktivists to send dentists that shoot lions menacing messages and use it to wave picket signs outside the Pentagon or rush to the polling stations next year to vote the bums responsible for this mess out. If that's too much however, we can always settle for Sharon Osbourne accusing people of being the Devil on Twitter.