A funeral for one of the more than 150 people who died in the recent truck bombing in Kabul, Afghanistan.
“Terror is an emotion,” says Masha Gessen, author of a book about the Boston Marathon bombers.
Many things elicit terror. Being raped, being beat up for speaking a certain way, being stopped by the police, and being the target of a drone strike are all probably very terrifying. But, for most of the Western world, terror is brown Middle Eastern people attacking areas in Capitalist nations dominated by white people and wealth.
It’s not incidental that the attackers choose sites associated with a specific socioeconomic status. Ariana Grande tickets are not cheap and the London Bridge area is not populated with public housing. As for the Paris areas that were attacked in 2015, Pamela Druckerman described them in The Times as “bobo neighborhoods, former working-class districts now overrun by bourgeois bohemians like us.”
According to Western norms, money and skin color are the global symbols for humanity and freedom.
For President Barack Obama, the killings in Paris were “an attack on all of humanity and the universal values we share.”
According to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Paris attackers “hate this life of freedom.”
After last week’s Ariana Grande attacks, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared, “Terrorism is a global threat and it is incumbent on the enlightened countries to defeat it everywhere.”
Of course, the “enlightened countries” in Netanyahu’s statement are Western, capitalist, and white.
To maintain their image of “enlightened countries” it’s best to avoid spotlighting how the policies of these “enlightened countries” directly and indirectly terrorize the people in the Middle East on a daily basis. To help them with their coverup, the “enlightened countries” turn to big media brands and corporations.
Times columnist Charles Blow writes an “Ode to Obama” while conveniently neglecting to mention that in the final year of his presidency, Obama ordered 26,171 bomb attacks (that’s three bombs every hour, 24 hours a day, seven days a week).
YouTube, Amazon, and Facebook all changed their sites to showcase their “solidarity” with France after the November 2015 Paris attacks, but they don’t bother to alter their sites when there’s similar attacks in the Middle East (they’d be changing their sites constantly if they did).
Then there’s this site. While HuffPost has much to say about Ivanka Trump’s Memorial Day tweets and Kellyanne Conway’s couch etiquette, they’re relatively quiet when it comes to bombings in Middle Eastern countries. HuffPost made the attacks in London a homepage story, but the Kabul truck bombing that killed more than 150 people had a hard time getting a “splash headline.”
Though media brands and corporations conceal it, there is a clear correlation between the violence in Middle Eastern countries and the violence in Western countries.
The Pulse nightclub shooter, Omar Mateen, told the 911 operator, “You have to tell America to stop bombing Syria and Iraq. [America is] killing too many children, they are killing too many women. OK? So what am I to do here, when my people are getting killed over there? You get what I’m saying?”
The FBI waited months to release the unredacted transcript of Mateen’s calls. It’s sort of obvious why. Mateen’s call provides a context for his attack, which undercuts the portrayal of Middle East murderers (as opposed to Western murderers) as irregular barbaric evil losers who are so filled with hatred for supposedly free humans that they savagely attack them for no reason whatsoever.
When a Western politician, British Prime Minister candidate Jeremy Corbyn, actually brought up the relationship between “wars our government has supported or fought in other countries and terrorism here at home,” he received some bad publicity.
Right now, Western politicians, citizens, celebrities, media brands, and corporations express anger and outrage about so many different things, but one thing that unifies them is their misleading, one-sided, and racist understanding of terrorism.