UPDATE: 10:00 p.m. local time ISLAMABAD (AP) A spokesman for the Punjab government says that a bomb attack on a park in the Pakistani city of Lahore has killed 60 people and injured 300.
Zaeem Qadri said Sunday that the chief minister of Punjab province, Shahbaz Sharif, has announced three days mourning and pledged to ensure that those involved in the attack are brought to trial.
Senior police officer Haider Ashraf says the explosion took place close to the children’s rides in Gulshan-e-Iqbal park. He says the explosion appeared to have been a suicide bombing, but investigations were ongoing. The area was crowded with Christians celebrating the Easter holidays, he said.
#WeAreLahore
(#No.HashtagSolidarityIsOnlyForNicePlacesThatGetAttacked)
Be that as it may, they were wearing colorful scarves, so…
… carpet-bomb’em! Right, conservatives?
Are all the Republicans in Congress going to cut short their trips and return to Washington? Or are leaders only required to do that when a Western European country is attacked?
No. But they’ll continue to justify discrimination against gays by claiming Christianity is “under attack worldwide.” And so it goes.
One of the unfortunate byproducts of the current climate of world affairs is that the heavy preponderance of terrorist attacks in the Third World get short shrift amongst western media, while attacks against so called First World targets get blanket, relentless, in depth, coverage.
I doubt that the Third World is totally oblivious to this profound discrepancy, or the difference in level of caring that it reflects. It seems unlikely that it does anything to mitigate the resentment that so many in the Third World feel about the West, but rather contributes greatly to fertilizing the soil in which terrorist attitudes and activity have bred so virulently.
It is ironically true that the Muslim world has suffered far more from terrorism than the West, but unfortunately the West screams far more loudly, and that tends to diminish our ability to even acknowledge, let alone mitigate the pain felt in the Third World.
We might not be the primary instigators of that pain, but it would be in our best interest to both acknowledge and attempt to mitigate that pain as much as possible.