Nigerian Woman & Child
Terrorists Killed 2,000 People in Nigeria Last Week. So Why Doesn’t the World Care?
Click on this link to Mic.com to read entire article
http://mic.com/articles/108192/terrorists-killed-2-000-people-in-nigeria-last-week-so-why-doesn-t-the-world-care
http://mic.com/articles/108192/terrorists-killed-2-000-people-in-nigeria-last-week-so-why-doesn-t-the-world-care
The past week has been one of horror for France. After a three-day rampage in which terrorists killed 17 people both at the Charlie Hebdo offices and at a Jewish kosher supermarket, one fugitive still remains at large. An estimated 3.7 million French citizens took to the streets of Paris in a solidarity march as the attack and its aftermath continues to dominate international headlines.
But thousands of miles away, another crisis went largely ignored. Boko Haram insurgents in Nigeria committed a massacre of unbelievable proportions in Borno State. Over the period of a few days, the terrorist group killed more than 2,000 people in the town of Baga, as well as 16 neighboring towns and villages, burning entire communities to the ground. Amnesty International described it as the terror group's "deadliest massacre" to date, and the Guardian reports that local defense groups said they gave up counting the bodies left lying on the streets.
By every objective measure, Boko Haram's vicious massacre in Nigeria dwarfs the tragedy in France, so far that the Nigeria bloodshed has been described as one of the worst terrorist attacks in modern history. There's only one problem: In all likelihood, you probably didn't hear about it until just now.
Source: Haruna Umar/AP
Where is the international outcry for these non-Western and predominantly Muslim victims of terrorism? The terrorist attacks in Borno State and Paris unfolded over the same time frame, but the story in France generated more than 50 times more news stories worldwide.
This silence is not accidental. There is a clear double standard when talking about Western vs. non-Western and Muslim vs. non-Muslim victims of terrorism. Terrorists attacks on the West, and against non-Muslims in particular, are sensationalized in the media while those afflicting non-Westerners and Muslims are normalized and treated as business as usual, generating limited public interest and, in turn, limited outcry from activists and institutions that could actually affect change.
This discrepancy in coverage raises important questions about the way the media talks about terrorism — and whether the Western news outlets that so fiercely dissected the brutal Charle Hebdo massacre will ever see non-Western and Muslim victims of terrorism as "mournable." And the result is telling: Reports about non-Western victims of terrorism are generally overlooked or ignored unless they fit particular narrative of freedom and civilization under assault from Islamic extremism.
Is the attention on Charlie Hebdo really about the assault on free speech? Not necessarily. One day after the 10 white journalists were tragically murdered at Charlie Hebdo and became martyrs for "free speech," two Tunisian journalists, Sofiene Chourabi and Nadhir Ktari, were beheaded by Islamic State militants in Libya and received almost no coverage for their sacrifice.
Additionally, the Committee to Protect Journalists found that more than half of the journalists killed in 2014 were Muslim, even though the international media dialogue of the past year focused almost exclusively on the Islamic State's beheadings of white Americans James Foley and Steven Sotloff, as well as the deaths of other white journalists like Camille Lepage.
"More than half of 61 journalists killed in 2014 were Muslims, many working in conflict-affected countries such as Iraq, Syria, Pakistan and Somalia," writes Rafia Zakaria for Al Jazeera America . "But few have received the recognition or commemoration accorded to Western journalists or a handful who worked for Western media outlets."If this were solely a question of who is fighting to defend "free speech," then international media would be honoring the sacrifices of the scores more non-Western and Muslim journalists who have died in the line of duty.
Why it matters. Reports about non-Western victims of terrorism are typically restricted unless they can serve a particular agenda, and we saw that again this past week with the media's ominous silence around Boko Haram's massacre of thousands of victims in Borno State. There are no neat narratives surrounding this "Islamic war on women," and no Westerners were killed. It was simply terrorist violence on an unprecedented scale perpetrated against Nigerians, many of whom were Muslim.
We are still not sure of the full scale of the violence in Baga and neighboring towns just yet, but what we do know is staggering. Baga, a town of 10,000, is now "virtually non-existent" according to Musa Alhaji Bukar, a senior government official from the region. Hundreds of corpses are rotting and litter the streets. Entire towns and villages have been burnt down, and thousands of people have had to flee into Lake Chadwhere they face hunger, dehydration and attacks from wild animals while they await rescue on unstable sand bars. This is one of the worst terrorist attacks in history, and Boko Haram followed up on it by makinga 10-year-old girl blow herself up in a market in Maiduguri this Saturday, killing at least 10 more people.
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