I am numb to reports of violence in the Middle East. It seems that every day someone is getting blown up over there for no reason at all except for ideology.
'A citizen of Sarajevo, a woman of impeccable adherence to the Yugoslav ideal, whom I met soon after arriving in the city the first time in April 1993, told me: "In October 1991 I was here in my nice apartment in peaceful Sarajevo when the Serbs invaded Croatia, and I remember when the evening news showed footage of the destruction of Vukovar, just a couple of hundred miles away, I thought to myself, 'Oh, how horrible,' and switched the channel. So how can I be indignant if someone in France or Italy or Germany sees the killing taking place here day after day on their vening news and says, 'Oh, how horrible,' and looks for another program. It's normal. It's human."'
It really is a book that everyone should read. It seems to me that it becomes more relevant and important by the day.
France is EU therefore considered "the west" by many.
Which is the worse tragedy to you: the death of your wife, or the deaths of 100 faceless strangers whose life you cannot empathise with 3.000KM away.
I mean, it's a shame, and a horrible tragedy, but most people with empathise more with the French who are considered to be living in comparable safety to those who live in Beirut. (which has been a volatile zone for as long as I've been alive).
People in "the West" or "Europe" are compared to loved ones while people across the Mediterranean are "faceless strangers whose life you cannot empathise with."
Of course our connection to Paris is stronger than our connection to Beirut.
Likewise, I don't begrudge China when (for example) they cover natural disasters there more than those in the US.
From the guidelines:
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Terrorism, war and violence in Europe is definitely a new phenomenon, at least in this scale, I'd say.
As for media reception of said violence, I believe this to be HN-worthy as well...
There is a war going on in the Ukraine that has killed over 8000 people, the Madrid train bombings in 2004 killed 191 people, the Northern Ireland Troubles killed 3,530 then there were the wars in the former Yugoslavia which killed over 140,000.
There have been wars and conflicts in Europe pretty much forever - the recent ones aren't on the scale of the terrible wars of the past but to think that Europe has been completely at peace doesn't seem quite right.
1. Most Americans could find France on a map. Lebanon? Not so much.
2. France is America's "oldest ally" - lots more common ground.
3. Many Americans have been to Paris; much fewer to Beirut.
The article points to some other things:
4. The perception that this happens all the time in Lebanon, even though "it had been a year of relative calm."
5. Network effect (perhaps I'm misusing that term a bit) - FB activated their stuff because people were interested in it, which gets more people interested in it. I know I went straight to the TV after seeing my Twitter feed light up about it; had it just been a buried headline somewhere I might not have been as gravitated toward it.
Not necessarily saying any of these things are good or bad. Sometimes I feel like people take on an accusatory tone when bringing up topics like this, so I wanted to explore some explanations.
Comparing empathy responses is just as messy. Should we make character judgments based upon the number of visitors to ones funeral? I think not.
Just out of curiosity, could flying an American flag in Lebanon, maybe nearer the Syrian border, potentially cause you some problems? What about the French flag? They'd had a rather intertwined history together. Seems odd to try and read in to ones empathy based upon such things.
Maybe if they fixed all the damaged buildings from their last civil war the rest of the world might start to forget their recent violent past. It wouldn't hurt. Regardless of how peaceful it might be now, it's a very recent thing in Lebanon and there are reminders everywhere of the violence. It hard for people to not factor that in. I feel bad for their victims, but I suspect it is similar to how the rest of the world feels about American gun violence victims; they don't fly our flag after every school shooting, and I don't expect them to or need them to do so.
But we humans are emotional and irrational all the time, and harm to somebody in any way "closer" to us is felt much stronger compared to unnamed faceless victims just somewhere out there. So all is usual, as per our human standards...
This is all anecdotal, but it's meant to support your point - while 9/11 was certainly one of the deadliest and probably one of the most costly (monetarily speaking) single attacks ever, it was hardly something that put us on equal footing with places like Israel and pre-2010 Sri Lanka. But it mattered to all of us a lot more because we had never seen it here, we didn't think it could happen here, we knew where NYC was, we knew those skyscrapers, etc.
The French attacks were from an outside element, ie: an element that isn't a part of the established political structure. That is the difference.
I also think it is alienating (and rather offensive, to be terribly blunt) of you to argue that "they are used to violence" as if that means it somehow affects the population of cities like Beirut, the sense of loss felt by the families of victims, or any of the other human emotional elements.
Beirut is as much a large, cosmopolitan, vibrant city as any in Europe. It is no war zone. And it would do everyone good to remember that the very real and visceral trauma that the Paris attacks constitute is something many people feel on a weekly (or more frequent) basis, and that doesn't diminish the subjective horror of it.
I'm also not arguing that they are used to violence there for it is alright. I'm saying that they support violence or at least the use of it by their politicians to achieve their political goals there for they get what they promote.
(AFAIK Bhutan doesn't have strong popular support for any terrorist organisations, but I mostly picked it at random. Feel free to pick another.)
Google Translate, paste URL, from English to a random language then click the button for the original version.
If the EU had a sense of humor, they'd ship the refugees to South Carolina.
Unless you're quite confident that those would be reasons that don't also apply to Beirut - that's exactly what I was getting at.
There is no "the difference". There are differences.
It's a difference of notoriety vs. obscurity.
All this article is trying to get people to recognize is that a) the Paris attacks are awful, but b) as awful as that is, remember that this kind of horror is a more constant occurrence for many people, and that we should reflect on that more often as we participate in the politics of our own countries.
> If you can find any French political party or ruling faction that had a hand in the attacks then I would agree with you but I doubt that is the case.
You know, I'm not sure that the far-right nationalist racists like the Front National, or the ban on the burqa, or the other efforts at systematic alienation of France's minorities don't play a roll in all of this. People don't open fire into crowds they feel they have friends in, or attack societies they feel they are a part of, and Europe's attitude that assimilation is a one-way street, and the casual racism of many people here doesn't exactly create a welcoming atmosphere, either for recent immigrants or second- and third-generation ones.
However, the more important point is that it is always a radical fringe. Saying it is otherwise is terribly offensive and suggests a fundamental lack of understanding.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Lebanon#Cedar_Revol...