Brussels, Belgium | The city of was rocked by explosions Tuesday morning, leaving at least 30 people dead and more than 180 others injured.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NzUgIp2rk0
It comes just days after Paris massacre suspect Salah Abdeslam was apprehended in the Molenbeek district of the city.
Just days before all this, however, there were actually not one, but two bombings that media and social media did not gave much attention… and you may not have heard about.
On March 13, a car bomb in the capital city of Ankara, Turkey, exploded leaving at least 37 people dead and more than 100 injured. On Saturday, an ISIS-connected suicide bomber killed at least four in a busy tourist area in Istanbul.
People are asking, where is the show of global solidarity for Ankara that there was for Paris, and there is right now for Brussels?
What if there was a bomb blast killing people in the middle of London, Paris, Chicago, Washington, New York, Tel Aviv or Frankfurt? Just like Charlie Hebdo & recent Paris attacks, there would have been constant BREAKING NEWS, an apocalyptic flood of mourning on Media & Social Media. A non stop stream of Jesuis Charlie & Pray for Paris hastags with flag DPs….but no show of “HUMANITY” after the blast in the middle of Ankara killing innocent human beings? Admit it, only lives of the MASTERS matter…. NO ONE CARES WHEN SLAVES DIE…THATS THE REALITY OF OUR “HUMANITY”. #PrayForAnkara #PrayForTurkey
Or, in the words of Facebook user on the day his city was attacked: “You were Charlie, you were Paris. Will you be Ankara?” In fact, the global reaction to Turkey’s deadly violence has been so muted that some people online felt compelled to speak out…
“Can you imagine the victims? The teenagers catching the bus to go home, the grandparents walking into town, the people waiting for a taxi after a long day laughing and socializing in the sun,” Facebook user asked. “It is very easy to look at terror attacks that happen in London, in New York, in Paris and feel pain and sadness for those victims, so why is it not the same for Ankara?”
Media (and social media) bias has been present in coverage of a number of terrorist attacks in Western countries, leaving in their shadows the stories of similar attacks in Muslim or developing countries. A day before the Paris attacks that left 130 dead, 43 died in a bombing in Beirut that went almost unrecognized. And in January 2015, the 17 left dead after an attack on the Paris office of satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo obscured the roughly 2,000 killed by the Islamic militant group Boko Haram in the Nigerian town of Baga.
While coverage imbalances are often corrected after the fact, the latest examples shows it continues to be a potent issue.
