The massacre in Paris is not just a French or a Western tragedy. It has caused universal outrage. Yet the global media’s coverage of the horror tends to give the West a monopoly on pain.
Why, hours before the Paris attack, nearly 50 Shia Muslims were slaughtered by the IS and more than 200 injured in Beirut; 27 members of a Shia leader’s funeral were butchered in Baghdad, which has lost count of such occurrences. And all of this on the heels of a Russian passenger aircraft brought down over Sinai, killing all 224 passengers, and the October massacre in Ankara, killing 102 and so on and so forth including the 141 school children slaughtered in Peshawar at the hands of terrorists now wearing the IS garb.
Could all those smart anchors on the streets of Paris not have reflected on the pain outside their immediate surroundings? This is the parochialism of the contemporary media, focused only on “us” and “our kind”.
In the imperial global hierarchy, the media covering such events and the one that is beamed worldwide happens to be in exclusive control of Washington and London. This media’s perspectives are prioritised by Western interests. Whatever the explanation, the coverage of an event such as Paris divides the world into two sets of audiences.
Folks in the West, their anxieties heightened by the outrage, find comfort in the international community getting into a scrum on the issue in Vienna, Antalya… wherever. They find the coverage in tune with their fears and concerns.
This powerful community is not even aware of the popular Cairo blog, which asks the question: “The international community keeps asking what the region is doing to stop the spread of the ISIS; the region keeps asking why ISIS is only a problem when it strikes Western targets.” Millions in the Arab world ask such questions.
Social media in the region lampoons the West’s reactions. A cartoon shows two patients in a hospital: one covered head to toe in bandages is named “Syria”, and the other, in the adjacent bed, with a bandaged finger is called “Paris”. A man in a three piece suit, labelled the international community, leans over to kiss the bandaged finger.
Since there is in the Arab world (as in India) no media capable of live coverage of events such as the attack in Paris, there is among these populations an acute sense of helplessness. Each family is riveted on its TV set that blares Muslim terror at them but never dwells on Muslim pain. Iraq, Libya, Syria— three efficient dictatorships have all been destroyed. Nearly three million have been killed by Western bombardment, the IS, consequent civil wars. Hundreds of thousands are on the march towards a Europe torn between hospitality and its exact opposite.
These are the images, which preoccupy their brutalized lives. Self-centred coverage by the Western media comes across to them as frames from which their continuing tragedies are missing.
I am sensitive to these disparities because I was present at the inauguration of the global media when in February 1991 CNN brought the first ever war live into our drawing rooms. This was the Operation Desert Storm.
The coverage resonated with Western audiences because it came so soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Equally, it added to the Arab world’s sense of defeat and humiliation. It almost ignited global terrorism in this era.
What irks Arab intelligentsia most is a sense of impotence at two levels—one at the level of their own authoritarian regimes, which are often in cahoots with the West, and secondly with the West itself that is impervious to popular Arab discontent.
It is an article of faith in the Arab world that the ISIS is, in its origins, a US, Saudi, Turkish, Israeli creation. Off the record, Arab ambassadors in New Delhi will testify to this widespread belief in their respective countries.
After the Paris attack, the media has boosted the anti-terror mood to the sort of pitch reminiscent of the first Gulf war. This time even Russia is part of the pack.
Incidentally, the media forgot to mention the first effect of the Paris attack—cancellation of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s visit to France, Italy and the Vatican, an outcome that must have pleased Riyadh.
Western resolve to fight terror will be on test in Africa where the entire belt from Nigeria right up to Somalia is in the line of fire of IS look-alikes such as Boko Haram and Al Shabab.