YOLA, Nigeria — Hundreds of bodies — too many to count — remain strewn in the bush in Nigeria from an Islamic extremist attack that Amnesty International suggested Friday is the “deadliest massacre” in the history of Boko Haram…. District head Baba Abba Hassan said most victims are children, women and elderly people who could not run fast enough when insurgents drove into Baga, firing rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles on town residents…. An Amnesty International statement said there are reports the town was razed and as many as 2,000 people killed. If true, “this marks a disturbing and bloody escalation of Boko Haram’s ongoing onslaught,” said Daniel Eyre, Nigeria researcher for Amnesty International.
There’s little doubt but that events in France this week have been truly tragic. The world’s attention has rightly been focused on the massacre of innocents at the hands of of radical Islamist terrorists. Beyond that, there’s been an even worse and significantly more heinous massacre of children in Nigeria that’s gone virtually unreported by the mainstream media. The more I think about it, the less I understand it and the angrier I become.
Judging by the vast disparity in the numbers killed, what happened in Paris, though tragic, should logically have taken a back seat to the Boko Haram massacre in Nigeria…and yet few mainstream news outlets picked up the story. Why the difference? There’s no use in overanalyzing or sugar-coating it, so let’s try this:
Paris- Affluent, White, European…news outlets don’t have to work hard or incur great cost (or risk) to cover it.
Nigeria- Poor, Black, African…few news organizations have (or want) more than a token presence in the whole of the African continent.
It’s not difficult to understand why events in Paris have been covered like a blanket- the victims look like us and news organizations LOVE the City of Lights. Who wants to go to Nigeria, only to find themselves smack in the middle of a conflict they don’t understand and where their safety is difficult, if not impossible, to guarantee? Things work in France; they seldom do in Nigeria…and you can never get a good espresso or a decent croissant in the African bush. Then there’s the whole “angry , unbalanced Black men with Kalashnikovs and anger management issues” thing. Compared to France, Nigeria is the Wild West on steroids…and not in a good way.
We in the West may go on at length about how all lives matter, that no life should be held to be worth more than others. In reality, all lives AREN’T equal and some lives ARE more valuable and worthy of consideration; it just depends on the color of your skin. We may not admit to the truth (news outlets certainly won’t), but there’s a reason journalists were all over events in France while virtually ignoring the massacre in Nigeria. When you get right down to it, we believe the lives of those who look like us to be of greater consequence than those with black skin. Like it or not, that’s the truth in our decidedly NOT post-racial world.
(Oh…and if memory serves, there was a bombing at an NAACP office this week. I think it was in Colorado Springs, but I’m honestly not certain…because if you rely on the mainstream media for information, you’d never know that anything happened. NAACP? Yep, you guessed it…black people. Is it any wonder a terrorist attack on American soil was ignored?)
