Graphic by Sana Amin/The Gazelle

Recently, my feeds on Facebook and Twitter have become clogged with repetitive calls.  The think pieces and opinion articles have begun to stack up.  After every terrorist attack in Europe or the United States — but more specifically the incidents in Belgium and France — there are demands that we should not ignore similar acts of violence, sometimes perpetrated by the same or similar groups, in countries outside of what is traditionally referred to as the West. This time around, with the bombings in Belgium, we were asked to also remember timely attacks in Pakistan and Iraq. These posts, tweets and articles point to the hypocrisy of Western media coverage, which privileges incidents in Europe — attacks on what are perceived to be the white body — over violence inflicted by Western governments and terrorist organizations elsewhere.

U.S. American and European media coverage is lopsided and hypocritical; it often ignores issues outside what it takes as its cultural borders: it treats the deaths of white U.S. Americans and Europeans as inherently more important and tragic.  When these calls for attention pop up in our digital streams, they do nothing.  They are reiterating a tired fact and actually stymie more important discourse. If this is the problem, the solution does not lie in vapid, 140-character criticism; we need a larger attack on this issue. We could start with nuanced examinations of the violence happening elsewhere instead of here. There are articles that desperately need to be written on topics like these, which require consideration.

When one flippantly calls attention to violence in, for example, Pakistan and Iraq, right after an attack in Belgium, the critique of hypocrisy only serves to promote the same hierarchy of value placed on acts of violence. Before I go further, I want to say that I am not arguing that we should not pray for Paris and Pakistan, Baghdad and Belgium. I also want to make sure that this is not interpreted as an attack on people from those places currently grieving for their countries and cities. This is aimed at those from outside these locations, who make the critique that the media is ignoring some events and privileging others; those who remind us — in the most self-righteous tone possible — that violence happens elsewhere.

The tone of most of these posts, tweets and critiques are drenched in liberal self-righteousness. The act of reminding assumes that most people on, say, Facebook — itself an echo chamber — do not already know that Western media is hypocritical and lopsided in its coverage. While many people may not know this, the posts function in this echo chamber, informing those who already agree with the same critical idea. The posts position their authors as somehow more informed and worldly for knowing about events in places outside of Europe and the United States. The critiques seem to exist, then, solely to prove liberal credibility and worldliness and to impress upon one’s friends that they, in fact, know a city in a non-white country. Even more shocking, they know about something that happened there. These people who write to acquire liberal brownie points rarely seem to write about acts of violence committed in places like Iraq and Pakistan unless it happens around the same time as an attack in Europe or the United States. You’d think that attacks happened in the West and the rest of the world in synchronization.  Maybe the best thing that happened to these critics is hearing about the violence in countries on the same news sources they criticize — because, honestly, they probably read the accounts of the latest Lahore blast on The New York Times instead of Dawn. How else would they establish themselves as good, aware liberals?

The critiques themselves continue to promote the exact same hierarchy of attention and importance that they claim to fight against. The arguments still place the events in conversation with each other, rather than allowing them the equal and separate importance that they deserve. This is not to say that we cannot discuss the events together, but that when we do, it should not be just to use the attention given to one event to illuminate another. In many instances it is the opposite: The acts become homogenous terrorist incidents. This wipes away the significance of factors like complex demographic and identity issues occurring in Brussels, or the status of Lahore as a relatively safe city within the rest of the country — a provincial capital that has a long history of terrorism and security in the midst of more deadly, daily violence in other parts of Pakistan. The critiques promote the same stripping of information and generate the same dichotomy between here and elsewhere that they argue against: We have to remember not only what happens here but also elsewhere.

The critiques also assume that the relevant attention is not being given at all, or that the attention does not matter unless it is in English and available to the Western pseudo-liberal. In Iraq and Pakistan, those directly impacted by this violence are mourning, while the vast majority of those countries indirectly affected and their neighbors and diasporas, are giving the necessary attention. They are hurt and are finding ways to heal — you and I don’t need to do that for them. Think of the altered #prayforparis logo adjusted with the addition of the Minar-e-Pakistan, a symbol of Lahore, in place of the Eiffel tower to fit the #prayforlahore movement. As a sign, it symbolizes healing and the rallying of a city or nation, but it also indicates an attempt to gain international attention. To do that, the image references Paris, because the West and Western liberals will only care and share in a world where a .jpeg makes it difficult to tell the Eiffel tower and the Minar-e-Pakistan apart.

All of this is part of a much larger problem, not just media hypocrisy, but fundamentally the difference between the value of white and perceived non-white lives, and, the tragedy of violence inflicted upon the white and non-white body in the liberal, Western and liberal Western mindset. This is not going to be fixed by a tweet. This is beyond raising awareness. We should fill the gap in coverage, but only in a way that is actually more productive than the coverage itself. Instead of only caring about what happens outside the West only when it can be compared with in order to criticize, we should just care.