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On Easter Sunday, a suicide bomber blew himself up at a busy park in Lahore, Pakistan, killing over 70 people and injuring more than 320 others. Less than a week before, multiple explosions took place at Brussels Airport and the Maelbeek subway station in Belgium, killing over 30 people and wounding more than 230. The world’s reaction to each of these events were markedly different, bringing attention once again to the problem of how the West views terror attacks in other parts of the world.
When a terror attack of any kind occurs in what is considered the West, the world unites in solidarity. National monuments from the Sydney Opera House to Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate are lit up in the colors of the affected country.
Cartoons are created and shared millions of times over through social media sites such as Twitter. On other platforms like Facebook, users are given the option to show the country’s flag on their profile picture.
When a similar or worse attack occurs anywhere else in the world, the reaction is drastically different. No country emblazons a monument with the colors found on the Pakistani, African, or Indonesian flag. These countries are lucky if they get an article featured under the World section, let alone the front page. This is especially true in the United States, a country which finds itself more and more focused inwards.
With an audience uniformed and seemingly uninterested in the world around them, newspapers have rationalized how they cover specific events. In an article for the British online newspaper The Independent, Will Gore explained that “the greater focus on Brussels than Ankara, then, is not about race or religion but fear. People in this country are appalled by terror attacks in Turkey (or Pakistan or Mali or Burkina Faso); but are much more likely to be scared by what they see in a familiar-feeling western capital – if it can happen there, it can happen here. The solidarity shown in the aftermath of massacres in France and Belgium is as much a coping mechanism to deal with this fear as it is a simple expression of sympathy for the loss of strangers’ lives.”
While this is certainly true, that should not stop the West from standing in solidarity with countries like Turkey and Pakistan when they face atrocities of this scale. At the very least, the leaders of Western countries should offer their condolences and possible help. According to RTNews, the “Canadian leader Justin Trudeau, French President Francois Hollande, and the Russian Foreign Ministry have passed on sympathies along with U.S. presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders, but most world leaders haven’t said much.” This is in comparison to the many leaders, including British Prime Minister David Cameron, who expressed their condolences to and made multiple offers of help following Brussels.
The divide as it now stands can only lead to more resentment in countries with already strained relationships with the West. Everyone should take the chance to make something good come out of such tragedies and connect as humans in an increasingly unstable world.