After Paris attacks, Western media turns arbiter
BY Saeed Naqvi22 Nov 2015 11:26 PM GMT
Saeed Naqvi22 Nov 2015 11:26 PM GMT
The massacre in Paris is not just a tragedy restricted to France or the West. It has caused universal outrage. And yet the global media’s coverage of the horror tends to give the West a monopoly on pain. Hours before the Paris attack, nearly 50 Shia Muslims were slaughtered by the Islamic State and over 200 injured in Beirut; 27 members of a Shia leader’s funeral party were butchered in Baghdad which has lost count of such occurrences. And all of these events taking place 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. Let’s not forget the 141 school children massacred in Peshawar at the hands of terrorists now wearing the garb of the IS.
Could all those smart anchors on the streets of Paris not have reflected on the pain outside their immediate surroundings? Such is the parochialism of contemporary media, focused only on an “us” and “our kind”. The larger humanity has to be left as the business of bards and bohemian poets with a leftist streak.
In the imperial global hierarchy, the media, which covers such events, happens to be in exclusive control or beholden to power centres in Washington and London. This media’s perspectives are prioritised by Western interests. Whatever the explanation, the coverage of an event like Paris divides the world into two sets of audiences.
Folks in the West, with their anxieties heightened by the outrage, find comfort in the international community getting into a scrum on the issue in Vienna, Antalya, or 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 have been asking 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”. The other, in the adjacent bed, with a bandaged finger is called, “Paris”. A man in a three-piece suit labeled the “International community,” leans over to kiss the bandaged finger.
Since no media house is capable of live coverage of events like the attacks in Paris in the Arab world (as in India), there are many among such populations that feel an acute sense of helplessness. Each family is riveted on its TV set which screams Islamic terror at them but never dwells on the pain of the average Muslims elsewhere. Iraq, Libya and Syria are three efficient erstwhile dictatorships that were destroyed. Nearly three million have been killed by Western bombardment, the IS, and 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 brutalised lives. Self-centered coverage by the Western media come across to them as frames from which their continuing tragedies are missing. At the cost of being repetitive let me tell you that I am sensitive to these disparities. 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 as triumphalism doubly exhilarating 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. The dazzling fireworks on live TV over Afghanistan a decade later added fuel to this fire.
What irks the 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 which is impervious to popular Arab discontent. The West only deals with potentates or rebel groups in Syria, Libya, and Iraq.
It is an article of faith in the Arab world that the ISIS is, in its origins, is a US, Saudi, Turkish, and Israeli creation. Off the record, Arab ambassadors in New Delhi will testify to this widespread belief in their respective countries.
In an interview with Thomas Friedman of the New York Times in August last year, President Obama himself admitted that the ISIS had been of use in certain circumstances. “We did not start airstrikes all across Iraq as soon as the ISIS came in because that would have taken the pressure off Nouri al-Maliki”, the then Shia Prime Minister of Iraq out of favour with the US.
In other words, not long ago, the priority was to get rid of Maliki rather than halt the ISIS. An altered world order may well be the price for that delay.
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 - the 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 like Boko Haram and Al Shabab.
(The author is a senior commentator on political and diplomatic affairs. Views expressed are strictly personal)
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