After multiple explosions at the Brussels airport and metro station on Tuesday morning,#JeSuisBruxelles and #PrayForBelgium are the top trending Twitter hashtags worldwide.
But one meme in particular is starting to go viral — #JeSuisSickofThisShit.
—Cissi WallinBlomberg (@cissiwallin) March 22, 2016
The meme was inspired by similar hashtags after the Paris terrorist attacks last November that killed 130 people — #JeSuisParis — as well as the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January 2015 — #JeSuisCharlie.
"Je suis Charlie" was the original slogan created by French art director Joachim Roncin after the massacre at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical French newspaper. The newspaper’s website went offline after the shooting and when it came back online, the website was a black background with the phrase “Je suis Charlie.”
Not long after #JeSuisCharlie began trending online, Twitter users said they were ready for the hashtag #JeSuisSickofThisShit to use for all incidents of mass violence.
—Kalthoum (@KCedDz) January 13, 2015
—Shropshire Slasher (@joecool57h) January 9, 2015
Then in January 2016, Berlin-based PR and marketing consultant Tommy Kempert told Tech Insider he designed a meme that said "Je suis sick of this sh-t" against a black, scratched background after terrorist attacks in Istanbul.
He said he made it with an iOS App called WordSwag and posted it on Instagram, where it got one like.
But it wasn’t until Tuesday morning after the Brussels bombing that the slogan — and Kempert's meme — started to have a life of its own on social media.
Examples of the meme began to crop up on Instagram. Users posted the phrase against a neutral background. Nearly all the captions referenced Brussels and Paris as well as other cities and countries that have suffered similar instances of mass terror, but haven’t received the same level of worldwide outcry.
Some of them copied Kempert's original meme exactly, while others took artistic license.
Though there were a few variations on the meme, it was Kempert's original design that went viral after Joseph Willits, an employee at the Council for Arab-British understanding, retweeted a friend’s picture who had spotted it on a "STOP Cultural Terrorism in Lebanon" Facebook page.
“Brussels, Paris, Beirut, Baghdad, Ankara, Istanbul and many more. I think this sentiment speaks for many of us,” he wrote. His image has over 1,300 retweets and 900 likes at the time of this post, and counting.
—Joseph Willits (@josephwillits) March 22, 2016
Since then, the meme has taken on a life of its own with over 1,300 posts on Instagram and hundreds of pictures circling the web.
"[I] wish I wouldn’t have had to come up with this," Kempert told TI over email. "I’m not looking for fame here. I’m glad so many people feel the same about what is going on in the world lately."
The viral reach of the hashtag and meme — that all terrorist attacks are monstrous — comes after multiple bombings in Ankara, Turkey, this week that haven't received the same level of media attention as the Brussels attack.
There was a similar backlash after the Paris and Charlie Hebdo attacks, when terrorism in Africa and the Middle East in particular went virtually unnoticed by much of the mainstream media.
The week immediately following the November 13 Paris attacks, for instance, there was public outcry that Facebook didn’t offer a Mali flag filter after at least 10 gunmen stormed a hotel in Bamako, Mali, and took 170 people hostage.
