A post at BoingBoing asks:
Why are US blogs ignoring Mumbai?
According to that post, there are good reasons to pay attention to what's happening in India:
US political bloggers paid lots of attention to the Madrid 3/11 bombings and the London 7/7 bombings. Now Bombay is attacked by terrorists -- similar methods, similar scale -- and barely a mention.
Doesn't this story have important ramifications for American foreign policy? If the attacks were mounted by a Pakistan based organization, it could move two nuclear countries closer to an armed confrontation. If it was mounted by Al-Qaeda, that would be significant as well. And no matter who was involved, another attack on public transportation is important for domestic debates about anti-terror funding.
Weren't bloggers supposed to be way ahead of the MSM? In this case at least, they're way behind.
I'll go down my blogroll, which contains a decent balance of lefty and righty blogs, and see who's been covering the bombings.
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2 comments:
Sometimes I wonder about the culture of fear we currently are in at the moment. Sometimes I wonder if we get jaded or desensitized to tragedy? Perhaps that's the reason for the lack of blogging re: the Indian bombings?
I will tell you this, that every year thousands, if not tens of thousands of Indians are victims of terrorism, particularly in the area of Kashmir; yet, we hardly hear anything of that.
I'm not sure how true it is that US bloggers ignored Mumbai/Bombay. Having said that, US bloggers aren't particularly obligated to cover any particular disaster. People cover disasters that they have a connection with. 9/11 had such a connection. 7/11 and 3/11 had similar connections; western, civilized countries were attacked by Islamic terrorists. India, on the other hand, has been suffering terrorist bombings for decades, so this is hardly anything new or out of the ordinary. It is significant, and unfortunate, but if a blogger were to cover every catastrophe facing the third world, he'd never have any time for sleeping.
I do feel that the international news media both feeds off of, and increases popular fixations on the Palestinian problem. The death toll from the Muslim terrorists in India was far greater than the casualties from the Gaza incursion in the early going (and still is, I believe). Despite this, the Palestinian problem is more sexy, I guess.
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