An excellent post over at Prison Planet on the lack of a reaction to the ETA bombing of the Madrid airport.
How many people who aren't news junkies know that Madrid Airport was bombed on Saturday? Relatively few I would venture, and that's because major western governments and their media mouthpieces don't hype terror unless Muslims are behind it.
...
Operatives of the Basque separatist organization ETA packed 800kg of explosives in a car bomb that ripped apart the parking lot of Barajas Madrid Airport, killing two and injuring twenty people.
Now imagine if "Al-Qaeda" bombed Heathrow or LAX. You'd never hear the end of it, the news would be on it 24/7 and entering an airport would be akin to checking into a concentration camp. And yet Saturday's blast was greeted by little more than bylines and muted dismissals by the mainstream media.
Before 9/11 terrorism was seen through the prism of a criminal problem because fewer people lose their lives as a result of it than do those who get struck by lightening. There have been just 2,929 terror induced deaths since 9/11 according to the Bush administration's own numbers and more people every year die in swimming pool accidents - hardly the mega threat to western society that many have portrayed. Put in this context, Saturday's bombing would not have made the top of the news because like all terrorism that occurs in the west, it is extremely rare, random and, like murder, rape or theft, is impossible to ever truly prevent.
But in the "post 9/11 world," the artificial creation and maintenance of the myth of "Islamofascism" is dependent on ceaseless obsession with the imminent threat of Muslim terror around every corner, and that's why something like the Madrid Airport bombing would have been shoved down our throats until kingdom come - but only if Muslims were behind it.
Terror attacks like Saturday's become mere pre-cursors to the "and finally" puff piece if they can't be pinned on "Islamofascists" and the scam recycled.
It's almost a national emergency nowadays if Muslims - God forbid - are seen praying on an aeroplane, and their every action being scrutinized as a foreboding for the apocalypse, which only breeds suspicion across all of society, has turned the land of the free into the United States of Hysteria.
2 comments:
Assalaamu alaikum,
Subhanallah... I've had this same thought so many times! In the past few weeks, there were the bombs in Spain, nine bombs (was it nine?) in Bangkok, something going on in the Indian state of Assam where scores of people were killed, and various other bommbs and grenades. But since they're not Muslim-related, they're pretty much ignored in the U.S., at least.
Wa 'alaikum salaam. I wasn't aware of the incident in Assam, and I should have noted the lack of a reaction to the Bangkok bombings. Good catch! I wonder if geography and the nationality of those killed also plays a part? Bangkok's just an hour-and-a-half's flight from where I'm at, and got significant airtime on the news here. Events in Assam should have made the news here as well, but perhaps I just missed it. So while India and Thailand are close neighbors to S'pore, for the US it's "way over there." NYC and London are "closer to home." (The surprise then being, why didn't Madrid get more notice? Not enough deaths?)
Also, would the Bali 2002 bombing have made such a stir if most of the dead had been Indonesian instead of Australian?
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