The ninth of June, 2023, and I’m in London. Ten urgent notifications hit my WhatsApp. A friend, a father of a three-year-old girl, shares the breaking news – ‘Four Toddlers Stabbed in a Playground in France.’ The headline is quickly followed by anxious consecutive messages: ‘Can you believe this? Toddlers?’, ‘Among them is a kid younger than my daughter!’, ‘This is the ultimate evil. May he suffer for the rest of his life for this!’, ‘Oh, he is Syrian too! God damn it!’, ‘And an asylum seeker!’
I wrote back: ‘God only knows what drove him to this evil action. He might have seen his kids slaughtered in Houla, or they might have suffocated to death on sarin gas in the Ghouta. They could also have drowned and turned blue while holding his hand on their way to Europe.’
I appeared to shock my friend, as he kept typing and deleting. Then he ended our conversation by writing, ‘We live in an evil world.’
It turned out that the attacker, Abdalmasih Hanon, thirty-one years old, hadn’t witnessed any of the events I cited. He had in fact worked for the regime which perpetrated the Houla and Ghouta massacres. He also has a child of the same age as those he attacked, and in the last ten years he had applied for asylum in four countries. His role had shifted from armed oppressor to homeless refugee, and then apparently to child murderer. Was Abdalmasih Hanon the only evildoer in this story? But first, what is meant by ‘evil’?
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