For days
now, American cable news has broadcast non-stop coverage of the
horrific attack in Brussels. Viewers repeatedly heard from witnesses
and from the wounded. Video was shown in a loop of the terror and
panic when the bombs exploded. Networks dispatched their TV stars to
Brussels, where they remain. NPR profiled the lives of several of the
airport victims. CNN showed a moving interview with a wounded,
bandage-wrapped Mormon American teenager speaking from his Belgium
hospital bed.
All of that
is how it should be: That’s news. And it’s important to
understand on a visceral level the human cost from this type of
violence. But that’s also the same reason it’s so unjustifiable,
and so propagandistic, that this type of coverage is accorded only to
Western victims of violence, but almost never to the non-Western
victims of the West’s own violence.
A little
more than a week ago, as Mohammed Ali Kalfood reported in The
Intercept, “Fighter jets from a Saudi-led [U.S. and U.K.-supported]
coalition bombed a market in Mastaba, in Yemen’s northern province
of Hajjah. The latest count indicates that about 120 people were
killed, including more than 20 children, and 80 were wounded in the
strikes.” Kalfood interviewed 21-year-old Yemeni Khaled Hassan
Mohammadi, who said, “We saw airstrikes on a market last Ramadan,
not far from here, but this attack was the deadliest.” Over the
past several years, the U.S. has launched hideous
civilian-slaughtering strikes in Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Syria,
Somalia, Libya, and Iraq. Last July, The Intercept published a photo
essay by Alex Potter of Yemeni victims of one of 2015’s deadliest
Saudi-led, U.S.- and U.K.-armed strikes.
You’ll
almost never hear any of those victims’ names on CNN, NPR, or most
other large U.S. media outlets. No famous American TV correspondents
will be sent to the places where those people have their lives ended
by the bombs of the U.S. and its allies. At most, you’ll hear
small, clinical news stories briefly and coldly describing what
happened — usually accompanied by a justifying claim from U.S.
officials, uncritically conveyed, about why the bombing was noble —
but, even in those rare cases where such attacks are covered at all,
everything will be avoided that would cause you to have any visceral
or emotional connection to the victims. You’ll never know anything
about them — not even their names, let alone hear about their
extinguished life aspirations or hear from their grieving survivors —
and will therefore have no ability to feel anything for them. As a
result, their existence will barely register.
More:
East Timor...? More than 200 000 people are massacred and zero media coverage.
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