Perhaps not everyone draping the French flag over their Friday-night-out pictures is an astute observer of geopolitics. Does that mean that they value the life of a Frenchman over that of an Arab? Probably not.

The specter of sophisticated terrorist attacks, planned under the noses of intelligence officials, with massive casualties in our most secure cities rightly terrifies Americans. To me, what the French are suffering evokes our own grief after September 11, with their new bombing campaign over Syria even resembling the buildup to the American invasion of Afghanistan.

And if Americans want to mourn that with their French flags, so be it. Mourn the French. Mourn the Lebanese. Mourn the Iraqis. But, most of all, let the people mourn how they want.

Idrees M. Kahloon ’16, a Crimson editorial executive, is an applied mathematics concentrator in Dunster House.

This op-ed has been revised to reflect the following correction:

CORRECTION: November 16, 2015

An earlier version of this column misspelled the name of president of France. His name is François Hollande.