Two things in life are inevitable — death and taxes. While taxes differ for Americans and Europeans, the reality of death applies to each universally. The aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo shooting, however, illustrates the strange fact that the rights of the dead — particularly those who have committed terroristic acts — are wildly divergent between the U.S. and France. In the wake of the shooting, French laws regarding proper burials for anyone, regardless of what they did while alive, stand in stark and unflattering contrast to America’s vengeful habit of refusing respectful burials to certain deceased individuals.
After the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s family struggled to find a home for his remains after the Worcester, Massachusetts funeral home that initially housed them became a target for protests. Tsarnaev’s remains were refused by various other cemeteries in Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Jersey. A proposal that called for burying him on the grounds of a Massachusetts state prison was unsuccessful. The situation became so dire that Worcester Police chief Garry J. Gemme was forced to make a public appeal requesting that someone volunteer to provide a burial site for Tsarnaev. Ultimately, he was buried in an unmarked plot in a small Muslim cemetery in Doswell, Virginia. Even then, his burial was highly controversial, prompting the county sheriff to alert the state attorney general, Kenneth Cuccinelli, to the situation. Cuccinelli’s office said they would investigate the burial in order to ensure that all laws had been followed in burying Tsarnaev there.
That said, at least Tsarnaev was given the dignity of a burial. After Osama bin Laden’s assassination, the U.S. Navy chose to bury him in the North Arabian Sea. This was an unusual move for a number of reasons, chiefly that burials at sea are uncommon in Muslim tradition, which has highly specific parameters for burials. Immediately after the assassination, radical Lebanese cleric Omar Bakri Mohammed called the burial an effort to “humiliate Muslims” — an exaggeration, given that most mainstream Muslims had no love lost for bin Laden and the fact that the U.S. made every other attempt to honor Muslim tradition, including respecting the alotted 24 hours, washing the body and shrouding it in a white cloth. The statement nonetheless had a grain of truth, especially in light of the fact that U.S. officials cited their desire to avoid creating a burial shrine for bin Laden’s fellow jihadists, rather than an inability to find him a burial site, as a major driving factor in the decision to bury him at sea.
Compare these cases to the reaction to the quiet burial of Said Kouachi, who was one of the gunmen in the Charlie Hebdo shooting. Over the weekend, officials in his hometown of Reims confirmed that Kouachi had been buried in an unmarked grave in a Muslim burial area in the city. Despite unease about the possibility of the burial site becoming a shrine for extremists, the decision to place the body in Reims came at the demand of the French government. The burial happened over the objection of the city’s mayor, Arnaud Robinet, who had previously pledged to “categorically refuse” Kouachi’s family’s request to bury him in the city. After Robinet’s comments, the French national government intervened to enforce a French law guaranteeing a right to be buried in the last town in which one lived. Similarly, Kouachi’s brother, Cherif, will soon be buried in a Muslim burial plot in a Parisian suburb, Gennevilliers, under the protection of the same French law.
The stark difference between American and French willingness — or lack thereof — to guarantee proper burials for all speaks volumes about the relationship each nation and its people have to terror. While the public and officials in both nations are understandably horrified by the acts of terror themselves, it is not the state’s place to use crimes as a pretext to deny a burial in accordance with one’s religious traditions.
As we continue to grapple with the threat of terrorism, it is important for the free world to treat all with respect and dignity — even those who we consider to be our enemies. Proper, respectful treatment of adversaries is essential to building a peaceful, better world. We should start by treating individuals who have perpetuated violence within our borders with the very dignity and compassion that they denied to others.
