Unequal treatment of terror victims
Jan 14, 2015, 11:20 AM | Updated: 11:21 am
The world seems uniquely outraged over the massacre of French
cartoonists and writers at a satirical magazine but it’s not easy to
explain why.
The journalists had been threatened for years and knew they exposed
themselves to danger through their work. That wasn’t true for the
2,000 slaughtered in Nigeria the same week just for the crime of being
Christians, or the four Jews killed at a Paris market for the audacity
of buying supplies for Sabbath eve.
There’s also no way that 3,000 butchered Americans thought they would
provoke Islamic rage by going to work on September 11th. The courage
of the French journalists may make them especially sympathetic but it
doesn’t make their murder any more horrifying than that of apolitical
victims of countless other terrorist atrocities.
This senseless slaughter identifies jihadism as pure blood lust,
not a response to western policies or a coherent ideology.