Candle vigil in southern Beirut to mourn 44 victims of suicide bomb, November, 2015. Demotix/Eduardo Lima. All rights reserved.
In the grip of the refugee crisis, the European Union is now in mourning after the horrific terrorist attacks in Paris. In the aftermath of horror, the underlying theme of the extensive media coverage and public outrage is racism: race is very relevant in two ways. Both amount to a Eurocentric self-indulgence that could frame and shape policy decisions.
First this shouts out in the binary patterns of West vs East confrontation, but also in the selective news coverage of terrorist attacks. So while the Paris attacks feature in all the global media and spark a global wave of solidarity from states and citizens, the attacks in Lebanon attract relatively small attention. The Beirut or Ankara terrorist attacks do not fit neatly into this binary frame and are consequently marginalised in the global public discourse. The same asymmetrical pattern of coverage applied back in January this year, when the Charlie Hebdo slaughter dominated headlines while Boko Haram’s Baga massacre elicited limited coverage.
