The Unknown Terrorist gestures toward the double standard by which Muslim rights and lives are treated as if they have less value than those of non-Muslims. The sadistic Frank Moretti keeps a "Cabinet of Human Comedy" containing historical items commemorating cruelty: a letter by Stalin; a machete from the Rwandan genocide; shoes from an Armenian mass grave. Among his trove is a Dutch pistol from the forces that failed to protect the Muslim Bosniaks of Srebrenica from massacre in 1995. He remarks: " 'The Serbs killed eight thousand civilians left unprotected. And this Beretta … meant to protect all those people, never used.' He was laughing. 'That's something, eh? Three thousand Americans die and it changes history. Eight and a half thousand Muslims die and it's forgotten' " (134). In his own distorted way, Moretti is here calling attention to the disparity in what Judith Butler calls "grievability": the degree to which lives lost can be publically recalled and commemorated. Butler points out the vast discrepancy between the recording and individualization of those lost in the United States on 9/11 and the countless, nameless, faceless others subsequently killed in the war on terror.

DEFINE: Introduces Butler's concept of grievability — the differential capacity of public commemoration across populations.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 378