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Beirut, Also the Site of Deadly Attacks, Feels Forgotten
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Many people don't realize that the primary enemy and target of Isis are Muslims who they feel deserve to die for not holding up sharia law.
... and that is heart breaking.
... and that is heart breaking.
It's really heartbreaking when you see such an explicit display of value like this. I've already seen reactions to this article accusing people who sympathize with Beirut and Baghdad of dismissing what happened in Paris or underplaying it. It seems quite obvious that you can empathize with the people affected by all of the attacks, and also consider why one city gets the bulk of the global attention, and to feel for the people that don't. Thanks for sharing this.
Are you sure the 18,000 dead isn't from the 2011 tsunami? This one appears to have caused no damage or injuries that i can find in online news.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-34816292
That'll teach me to treat Twitter as a trusted source of news. Though in this instance, I'm very happy to be mistaken.
Why didn’t Facebook offer a Lebanon flag profile picture after the Beirut bombings?
This is unfortunate, and can only be seen for what it is. The ppl's of the European, Eastern European/Russian, Australia/New Zealand, and N&S American continents in general, and more or less, do not value the lives of the ppl's of what we perceive to be the Middle East to the same degree as the ppl of France. (In the U.S. that perception is skewed to include nation states of South/Central Asia, and Northeast Africa, and probably is built more on the demographics of the Muslim populations, than any geographic lines. Just recently I heard someone include Afghanistan, Egypt, and Somalia as part of the Middle East. But what do you expect when we learn Indiana is the mid west.) I don't wish to leave the impression that us eurocentric ppl really consciously believe the lives of the ppl of the Middle East as I have described have less value. But whether or not we are conscious of it, that is what it boils down to.
I was having this conversation with my GF who follows world news pretty closely. It was her observation that the coverage here in the U.S. of the two events was hugely different, and that played a big part in the different reactions. I have a lot of problems with what the mainstream news has become in the last 20-30 years, but I'm not going to blame this on the media. In fact one of my major problems with the news these days, is their tendency to be more concerned with reporting what its audience wants/what sells, than with what it needs/everything news worthy. If there was little coverage of the terror in Beirut, we the audience need to take responsibility for that, in that it was, in this case I think rightly determined, that the terror in Beirut would have little impact.
My feeling, and beliefs about how we see the ppl of the Middle East are expansive, and cultivated in many hours of thought and research. To go into just some of the reasons why I think we have a feeling of kinship toward the ppl of France, that we do not for the ppl of the ME, would make this post longer than most would care to read. (I know this bc this is the version after cutting about 2 pages.)
In this case I think there are a lot of reasons, and many that are do to long held biases, but I'll leave those aside. There is one factor I would like to point out though, that has nothing to do with any specific bias.
Our human brains are great at grouping like things together, and we tend to do this with everything that moves through our experience, or field of vision. Most find the actions of these terrorist who blow themselves up, horendious and cowardly, as they certainly are, but we also find these actions very hard to understand, and bc they are hard to understand, we label them as the acts of crazy ppl. These crazy ppl are by and large ppl of the Middle East, and that is how it is filed in our brain. When one of these "crazy" acts of terrorism happens somewhere in the Middle East it does not shock us so much bc we have filed crazy and Middle East in the same folder. In fact at some level by failing to do the hard work to understand these Middle East suicide bombers, and assigning them the tag of crazy, we tag "all those ppl" as crazies. If all the ppl of the Middle East are some kind of crazy, it only makes sense when crazy stuff happens there.
I think there is much more to it than that, but when we fail to understand things fully, and our brain loosely groups things together we are creating our own biases that we may not always be aware of.
I was having this conversation with my GF who follows world news pretty closely. It was her observation that the coverage here in the U.S. of the two events was hugely different, and that played a big part in the different reactions. I have a lot of problems with what the mainstream news has become in the last 20-30 years, but I'm not going to blame this on the media. In fact one of my major problems with the news these days, is their tendency to be more concerned with reporting what its audience wants/what sells, than with what it needs/everything news worthy. If there was little coverage of the terror in Beirut, we the audience need to take responsibility for that, in that it was, in this case I think rightly determined, that the terror in Beirut would have little impact.
My feeling, and beliefs about how we see the ppl of the Middle East are expansive, and cultivated in many hours of thought and research. To go into just some of the reasons why I think we have a feeling of kinship toward the ppl of France, that we do not for the ppl of the ME, would make this post longer than most would care to read. (I know this bc this is the version after cutting about 2 pages.)
In this case I think there are a lot of reasons, and many that are do to long held biases, but I'll leave those aside. There is one factor I would like to point out though, that has nothing to do with any specific bias.
Our human brains are great at grouping like things together, and we tend to do this with everything that moves through our experience, or field of vision. Most find the actions of these terrorist who blow themselves up, horendious and cowardly, as they certainly are, but we also find these actions very hard to understand, and bc they are hard to understand, we label them as the acts of crazy ppl. These crazy ppl are by and large ppl of the Middle East, and that is how it is filed in our brain. When one of these "crazy" acts of terrorism happens somewhere in the Middle East it does not shock us so much bc we have filed crazy and Middle East in the same folder. In fact at some level by failing to do the hard work to understand these Middle East suicide bombers, and assigning them the tag of crazy, we tag "all those ppl" as crazies. If all the ppl of the Middle East are some kind of crazy, it only makes sense when crazy stuff happens there.
I think there is much more to it than that, but when we fail to understand things fully, and our brain loosely groups things together we are creating our own biases that we may not always be aware of.
There's actually a term for it: "Compassion fatigue". The more you read/hear/experience a given tragedy affecting a group you become more hardened to the affect it has on you if the tragedy occurs again. It happens to psychiatrists, health care workers, lawyers, etc when dealing with the people they work over time.
I don't think it's necessarily racist though. I don't think that people see it like "Middle Easterners have inherently less value then Europeans". If a suicide bombing attack happens in Lebanon (which has a large track record for terrorist attacks) of course there will be far less notice then one happening in France. For example, if you took 129 Lebanese people and put them in France and a terrorist attack killed them I think the shock would be as much as this Paris tragedy had. It's more location then anything.
Not that it makes it right or justifies it, but it's sadly an important evolutionary advantage of human nature. Compassion fatigue is a natural defense mechanism.
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Dear Sir, I thought you were maybe one of the few who sometimes read my post. I know about compassion fatigue, if I'm not mistaken it is another name for STSS, Secondary trauma stress syndrome, that is basically the desensitizing that happens to ppl who routinely deal with victims of trauma, and when it becomes routine it can cause pretty heavy depression. I don't know if it technically can be used to describe everyone who has become desensitize to the chaos of the region in general, but it is no doubt a big part, maybe the biggest, of why such chaos is not covered very well. Aw, and now I understand you were invoking STSS as the reason news of bombings in the ME is determined not to have much impact, and not bc we don't care, or value those lives as much as french lives. And, yes I think you are absolutely right about that.
Where I would disagree with you is on the point of the disparity of our reactions being only based on location. Think of your hypothetical in reverse - if there were 129 Parisians killed in a bombing in Lebanon... I would not call it racism exactly, but to say that how many of us Euro/Anglo ppl think/feel about the ppl's of the ME is not different, and therefor discriminatory, I think is to believe in a nice fiction.
This morning I wrote at some length as to the reasons why many, and I will tell it is my belief, that most, of us feel, if only subtly, perhaps even unconsciously, different about the ppl of France, than we do about the ppl of the Middle East. I'll just say that I think the reasons are many. Maybe the best short way I can describe it, is to say it is something like the difference we might feel to hear a cousin we have never meet has died, compared to how we might feel to hear a complete stranger has died. Or, that we feel some sort of kinship with the French that we do not feel with the ppl of the Middle East. To believe otherwise IMO is one, naive, and two, only serves to exacerbate the problem. I would like to believe we have no biases in how we feel about ppl different than us, and I do believe most ppl understand we should not feel differently, but I don't think we are there yet. I think to get there we need to own our biases, bc it is only then that we can start to work through them.
Last night my previous post was bugging me, I thought it was bc I disagreed with ACFFAN, but I realized it was bc I didn't disagree strong enough. Unless it's true that you Canadians did some sort of secret relocation of all your fathead bigots sometime in the early part of the last century, which there is good evidence for in the populations of Montana and Wyoming, then you are surrounded by ppl who every time they have a bombing in the Middle East, think and say, "good, it's what they get" . It's wrong, but it is how it is. Many ppl here put far less value on the lives of the ppl of the Middle East than those of the ppl of France. "if only subtly, perhaps even unconsciously" It's not subtle and it's not unconscious, it's loud and intentional. And no one calls them on it, bc maybe their son/daughter was killed in the ME and how can you blame a parent whos child was killed in a war that we never wanted and never thought we should have been in. And BTW, the biggest lie was not weapons of mass destruction, it was that we were going to liberate anyone from anyone. We did not care about "Those People" then, and we care about them even less now. Do you realize the huge #'s of ME ppl killed in our invasions, it's gross, yet you never heard those #'s on the nightly news, and when you did no one cared.
My mother lived in Iraq for 4 years before I was born, my older brother was born in Iraq. My mother was there for the only reason any American has ever lived in the ME - The Oil! Her first husband was an engineer for Chevron. We have no historical ties with the ppl of the ME, and what we do are all of conflict. They are not the ties, that while often violent, also built bonds and blood lines, like the history the French enjoy.
The disparity in the reactions is not surprising, and are not just bc of location. Pretending some bigoted bias does not exist has never done anything to make that bias go away, and we should not pretend that bias does not exist in this case. Now ACFFAN pull your head out, and stop lying to yourself, us white ppl in general have ever only cared about one thing in the ME and that's the OIL!
My mother lived in Iraq for 4 years before I was born, my older brother was born in Iraq. My mother was there for the only reason any American has ever lived in the ME - The Oil! Her first husband was an engineer for Chevron. We have no historical ties with the ppl of the ME, and what we do are all of conflict. They are not the ties, that while often violent, also built bonds and blood lines, like the history the French enjoy.
The disparity in the reactions is not surprising, and are not just bc of location. Pretending some bigoted bias does not exist has never done anything to make that bias go away, and we should not pretend that bias does not exist in this case. Now ACFFAN pull your head out, and stop lying to yourself, us white ppl in general have ever only cared about one thing in the ME and that's the OIL!
1. Afghanistan is part of the middle east. Its always been considered that. Also Indiana is part of the midwest. I do not know a single person who doesnt consider it that. People in the state consider it that. Not sure why you think different on that but whatever. Just pointing those out.
Anyway I do not think it's that people care less about one place or another but it's the difference of one giant internationally beloved tourist spot many many people dream of going to vs another one i've never heard another person say they wanna visit. (Because of the danger to an American there.) One is viewed by many as peaceful and the other is right next to a war zone. So one is going to be shocking when it is attacked and targeted and the other is not really a surprise to have stuff happen in currently. I dont see that as people caring less about one life over another but when one is located next to Syria you just expect there will be awful war torn stories coming from it more so. Its also a matter of 130 lives lost vs 40 roughly. One is arguably more tragic in the loss of life count and of course will get more attention for that. It's not a bias of loss of lives but one of course is more shocking to have happen where it was. That is wholly due to the location of it and it's people within it.
And I think why most people find it hard to have kinship with the ME is because of evolution in our civilizations. A lot of what the ME has we in the US and France have moved away from or fought against. Rights of people, freedom of speech and expression, oppression, etc. So when an entire area does the opposite and fights to keep those things in place instead of evolving we are naturally going to lose a sense of similarity and understanding of choosing that way of life. Ill throw in the obligatory not all middle easterners here but most and certainly those in power there. It's not any wonder why someone in the US would have a hard time finding common ground with someone else who believes stoning is an appropriate punishment for a rape victim ya know. We are also a country fighting for separation of church and state vs one where religion rules every aspect of their life.
We do feel common ground as being humans however our daily lives are so drastically different I like most US women cant even imagine living there and how truly horrible it is. We literally cant even picture it or the horrors of such. We have moved so far from that way of life and they kept practices of the Dark Ages. An age we deem as atrocious, morbid, and something we worked to separate ourselves from. We feel that kinship with France because they are just like us. They evolved with us on the same levels. I believe that to be natural and not bias or discriminatory to struggle to find common ground with that way of life. Life is precious regardless of the region but there is nothing wrong with identifying more so with one country over another because of more commonalities. We have and will always have that human commonality but we have completely lost that daily living commonality and we value that. Heck it's how we pick friends and partners and such so it's not shocking. Common ground bonds people over anything else. One place who practices barbaric traditions and laws is not gonna be common ground to most US people.
It might be easy for you to just say those who disagree with you are naive or bias but stop yourself and just realize some people just are not gonna agree with you. I think maybe you are the bias one actually. At least to anyone who doesnt agree with your point of view. Are some people bias? Of course. Saying something like "it's what they get" is of course a horrible thing to say. But to honestly say everyone is bias and cares less about one life over the other being lost is just not true. That's just the extreme people saying stuff like that anyway, just like it's the extreme people doing this bombings. They are not the majority, just the loudest in their exclamations and declarations. You speak against lumping together those of the ME but you yourself just lumped together everyone as biased or not caring as much about one person over another. Both are wrong so maybe look at yourself before preaching next time and see you are doing exactly what you are speaking on instead of telling someone else to stop lying to themselves. Geez.
Either way this battle over who gets or deserves more attention is disgusting lately. Everyone is all pay attention to me. I deserve more. This person deserves more. That group deserves more. It's always versus something else. People just need to shut the fuck up and realize everyone feels different and the first step to betterment for our world is just fucking respect for that. You dont have to agree but the reaction of feeling the need to speak out to argue and actually say "no this is more worthy than that" does not now and has never helped anyone. It's dividing and divisive. It's like these morons who are upset at anyone who calls Caitlyn Jenner a hero with a response of "no, our troops are heros," "our firefighters are heros," and other stupid shit. Or the people who argue donating to an animal charity isn't as good of a cause as a homeless shelter. And this includes the idiots saying how come Paris and not Beirut. IT'S NOT A CONTEST. Why does it have to be? How about we just realize everyone is entitled to their opinion and their own feelings. To some people Caitlyn is a hero to them. Nothing wrong with that. Just like it's nothing wrong with a firefighter being their hero. Or donating to an animal instead of a human. We dont have to be picking one over the other. We need to be inclusive more often instead of opening our traps and spouting rhetoric of one thing over another as if to rank it. And because people who rank things of importance is a personal thing there is no need to argue about it. Just respect. That's all we need. Respect. Let someone have whatever hero they want, donate to who they wish, and so on. If the outcome is the same then does it really matter who got more tears out of strangers eyes on a particular day? I dont think so.
Anyway I do not think it's that people care less about one place or another but it's the difference of one giant internationally beloved tourist spot many many people dream of going to vs another one i've never heard another person say they wanna visit. (Because of the danger to an American there.) One is viewed by many as peaceful and the other is right next to a war zone. So one is going to be shocking when it is attacked and targeted and the other is not really a surprise to have stuff happen in currently. I dont see that as people caring less about one life over another but when one is located next to Syria you just expect there will be awful war torn stories coming from it more so. Its also a matter of 130 lives lost vs 40 roughly. One is arguably more tragic in the loss of life count and of course will get more attention for that. It's not a bias of loss of lives but one of course is more shocking to have happen where it was. That is wholly due to the location of it and it's people within it.
And I think why most people find it hard to have kinship with the ME is because of evolution in our civilizations. A lot of what the ME has we in the US and France have moved away from or fought against. Rights of people, freedom of speech and expression, oppression, etc. So when an entire area does the opposite and fights to keep those things in place instead of evolving we are naturally going to lose a sense of similarity and understanding of choosing that way of life. Ill throw in the obligatory not all middle easterners here but most and certainly those in power there. It's not any wonder why someone in the US would have a hard time finding common ground with someone else who believes stoning is an appropriate punishment for a rape victim ya know. We are also a country fighting for separation of church and state vs one where religion rules every aspect of their life.
We do feel common ground as being humans however our daily lives are so drastically different I like most US women cant even imagine living there and how truly horrible it is. We literally cant even picture it or the horrors of such. We have moved so far from that way of life and they kept practices of the Dark Ages. An age we deem as atrocious, morbid, and something we worked to separate ourselves from. We feel that kinship with France because they are just like us. They evolved with us on the same levels. I believe that to be natural and not bias or discriminatory to struggle to find common ground with that way of life. Life is precious regardless of the region but there is nothing wrong with identifying more so with one country over another because of more commonalities. We have and will always have that human commonality but we have completely lost that daily living commonality and we value that. Heck it's how we pick friends and partners and such so it's not shocking. Common ground bonds people over anything else. One place who practices barbaric traditions and laws is not gonna be common ground to most US people.
It might be easy for you to just say those who disagree with you are naive or bias but stop yourself and just realize some people just are not gonna agree with you. I think maybe you are the bias one actually. At least to anyone who doesnt agree with your point of view. Are some people bias? Of course. Saying something like "it's what they get" is of course a horrible thing to say. But to honestly say everyone is bias and cares less about one life over the other being lost is just not true. That's just the extreme people saying stuff like that anyway, just like it's the extreme people doing this bombings. They are not the majority, just the loudest in their exclamations and declarations. You speak against lumping together those of the ME but you yourself just lumped together everyone as biased or not caring as much about one person over another. Both are wrong so maybe look at yourself before preaching next time and see you are doing exactly what you are speaking on instead of telling someone else to stop lying to themselves. Geez.
Either way this battle over who gets or deserves more attention is disgusting lately. Everyone is all pay attention to me. I deserve more. This person deserves more. That group deserves more. It's always versus something else. People just need to shut the fuck up and realize everyone feels different and the first step to betterment for our world is just fucking respect for that. You dont have to agree but the reaction of feeling the need to speak out to argue and actually say "no this is more worthy than that" does not now and has never helped anyone. It's dividing and divisive. It's like these morons who are upset at anyone who calls Caitlyn Jenner a hero with a response of "no, our troops are heros," "our firefighters are heros," and other stupid shit. Or the people who argue donating to an animal charity isn't as good of a cause as a homeless shelter. And this includes the idiots saying how come Paris and not Beirut. IT'S NOT A CONTEST. Why does it have to be? How about we just realize everyone is entitled to their opinion and their own feelings. To some people Caitlyn is a hero to them. Nothing wrong with that. Just like it's nothing wrong with a firefighter being their hero. Or donating to an animal instead of a human. We dont have to be picking one over the other. We need to be inclusive more often instead of opening our traps and spouting rhetoric of one thing over another as if to rank it. And because people who rank things of importance is a personal thing there is no need to argue about it. Just respect. That's all we need. Respect. Let someone have whatever hero they want, donate to who they wish, and so on. If the outcome is the same then does it really matter who got more tears out of strangers eyes on a particular day? I dont think so.
Good post Teagan and while I don't agree with everything.
I definitely agree with your conclusion.
But Afghanistan isn't part of the Middle East is is central Asia. Kabul is further from Cairo (the center of the Middle East) than LA is from NY.
Camstory, there is a simpler explanation on the disparity of the coverage. While Lebannon is relatively peaceful by Middle East standards, if you look at this list of terrorist activities it looks like a majority of them happened in the Middle East, "dog bites man" isn't news, "man bites dog" is.
I definitely agree with your conclusion.
But Afghanistan isn't part of the Middle East is is central Asia. Kabul is further from Cairo (the center of the Middle East) than LA is from NY.
Camstory, there is a simpler explanation on the disparity of the coverage. While Lebannon is relatively peaceful by Middle East standards, if you look at this list of terrorist activities it looks like a majority of them happened in the Middle East, "dog bites man" isn't news, "man bites dog" is.
I'm on my way out the door, so I'll be back later. And, yes it is prolly mostly the man bites dog or location thing, I just think it is dangerous or that it is counter-productive to pretend that there are not many who feel differently toward the two groups of ppl, and to argue there is no different feeling is just disconnected with how ppl feel. Hell a handful of U.S. states have ban Muslims from the ME from immigrating in the last week.
Afghanistan, has never been part of the ME, Egypt tho in north East Africa is traditionally part of the ME (my bad), and I never said Indiana was not part of the Mid West, my point was that if you draw a line from north to south through the U.S. Indian is not in the Middle West of the U.S. by a long shot. In fact what we are taught are the mid west is central to mid east part of the U.S.
Afghanistan, has never been part of the ME, Egypt tho in north East Africa is traditionally part of the ME (my bad), and I never said Indiana was not part of the Mid West, my point was that if you draw a line from north to south through the U.S. Indian is not in the Middle West of the U.S. by a long shot. In fact what we are taught are the mid west is central to mid east part of the U.S.
I agree with much of what you say, and some of it is exactly inline with what I hoped to express. And, I very much hope it is clear that I have been playing the devil's advocate. These are not views I personally hold, but rather views I see all around me. I have called ppl when they have made comments like "that's what they get" never in public, but I hope I have the courage to do so if I'm ever in the situation. I hope the ppl who hold these views are a minority, but I'm not sure they are. And to act as if they do not exist is bad news IMhO. The question was asked if there was a difference in how ppl valued the lives of the ppl in the ME vs. the ppl in France. It is an ugly truth, but my honest answer is, YES, I think there are many who place different values on those lives.
Don't get me wrong I'm not saying racism doesn't exist against Arabs and I think most people are completely ignorant about modern day Islams beliefs and form erroneous conclusions because of it (ie: how progressive many modern day islamic countries have been, how many islamic countries have elected female elected heads of state, people just assuming Wabbism is similiar to every other form of islam, etc). I just firmly believe it is a small minority that don't care about Arabs or hate them and that there are many reasons why people will focus more on the Paris attacks beyond them being racist. It doesn't make it fair or right, but it does explain it. A bombing in Paris is far more unusual then a bombing in Beirut albeit generally not to that scale, there are usually half a dozen bombings there a year with a large ramp up last year.
Again, I re-iterate. If it was strictly a bias against Islamic people, I believe the outrage and shock would be similar if a mosque was bombed in Paris and 129 muslims died because of it. I could be mistaken though.
I also firmly believe that the majority of people would not support the foreign policy choices we make strictly for cheaper oil and a better economy. I don't believe it's strictly "about the oil" for most people. There's far more manipulation and lobbyist groups involved.
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I'm sorry ACFFAN. This topic gets to me in ways not much else does. When I hear ppl talking in derogatory manor about ppl of the Middle east, and know those ppl have not really thought about what it is that drives many of these ppl to do what they do I get pissed. I hate that I live in a country that supports the policies, or turns the blind eye, to the continued occupation of the Palestinian lands by Israel. I know what it feels like to be oppressed by an authority you have absolutely no control over, or no way to keep from doing unjust acts. To be subjected to such rape of power to do anything, is awful, and is on a different level than let's say having your ass beat. The mental anguish at being striped of all power, to be helpless to do anything really is rape. And if I were a 14 year old boy living in the occupied zone, and Israeli settlers came in and bulldozed my family home and started a settlement in what was once my neighborhood, I would feel raped. And if I was offered a way to revenge the rapist, that thought and the thought that the life I was living was one of misery, with the ever possibility of being raped at will again, I think being a suicide bomber might seem like a good way out. So, well we need to understand, that we don't understand, or have not put ourselves in the place of these ppl, before we just dismiss them as crazy extremist. They may be extremist, caring out crazy acts of violence, but why? That's what we need to understand before we will be able to stop it.
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