Beirut, Also the Site of Deadly Attacks, Feels Forgotten | Hacker News Reader

Beirut, Also the Site of Deadly Attacks, Feels Forgotten

nytimes.com

59 pointscaberus38 comments

Like nobody is shocked when yet another tornado rips apart yet another trailer court in the Midwest.

I am numb to reports of violence in the Middle East. It seems that every day someone is getting blown up over there for no reason at all except for ideology.

At least the bombings in Iraq didn't happen before the invasion from the US and allied forces, so even though we're numb, we should at least accept some amount of responsibility.

I'm still waiting for the US to accept a non-trivial amount of refugees for this precise reason. (Not going to happen...)

I think if the US didn't have an ocean separating them from the Middle East they would do things quite differently there.

I think so too, and it says a lot about the 51% of them that voted for Bush a second time.

If the EU had a sense of humor, they'd ship the refugees to South Carolina.

"some" amount is a severe understatement in this case

I can't help but think of Susan Sontag's book, "Regarding the Pain of Others":

'A citizen of Sarajevo, a woman of impeccable adherence to the Yugoslav ideal, whom I met soon after arriving in the city the first time in April 1993, told me: "In October 1991 I was here in my nice apartment in peaceful Sarajevo when the Serbs invaded Croatia, and I remember when the evening news showed footage of the destruction of Vukovar, just a couple of hundred miles away, I thought to myself, 'Oh, how horrible,' and switched the channel. So how can I be indignant if someone in France or Italy or Germany sees the killing taking place here day after day on their vening news and says, 'Oh, how horrible,' and looks for another program. It's normal. It's human."'

It really is a book that everyone should read. It seems to me that it becomes more relevant and important by the day.

I'm not entirely sure what people expected.

France is EU therefore considered "the west" by many.

Which is the worse tragedy to you: the death of your wife, or the deaths of 100 faceless strangers whose life you cannot empathise with 3.000KM away.

I mean, it's a shame, and a horrible tragedy, but most people with empathise more with the French who are considered to be living in comparable safety to those who live in Beirut. (which has been a volatile zone for as long as I've been alive).

That's exactly the problem.

People in "the West" or "Europe" are compared to loved ones while people across the Mediterranean are "faceless strangers whose life you cannot empathise with."

The thing is you can expect the same from people in Beirut, they will lack empathy with people in the west. It needs effort to have equal empathy to someone you have nothing in common than someone having the same kind of life than you.

I'd be curious what the media coverage was like outside of the west. What was it like in Lebanon itself? In Japan? In Israel and in Palestine? India? Morocco? South Africa? Argentina?

For context, people danced and celebrated in the streets of Lebanon and various other Arab countries when the towers were destroyed in NYC.

Specifically, a lot of Palestinian Arabs celebrated. The most widely aired footage was from a Lebanese refugee camp that houses Palestinians. In many other places, mass vigils were held, most notably in Tehran.

It's also just more accurate. I've been to Paris. I had 10 Facebook friends in Paris at the time of the attacks.

Of course our connection to Paris is stronger than our connection to Beirut.

Likewise, I don't begrudge China when (for example) they cover natural disasters there more than those in the US.

Do we really need to have a thread for every news article related to terrorist attacks?

From the guidelines:

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

> unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon

Terrorism, war and violence in Europe is definitely a new phenomenon, at least in this scale, I'd say.

As for media reception of said violence, I believe this to be HN-worthy as well...

"Terrorism, war and violence in Europe is definitely a new phenomenon"

There is a war going on in the Ukraine that has killed over 8000 people, the Madrid train bombings in 2004 killed 191 people, the Northern Ireland Troubles killed 3,530 then there were the wars in the former Yugoslavia which killed over 140,000.

There have been wars and conflicts in Europe pretty much forever - the recent ones aren't on the scale of the terrible wars of the past but to think that Europe has been completely at peace doesn't seem quite right.

I believe this story is on-topic because it contains an interesting sidebar about how Facebook's feature for letting friends/family know you're safe was activated for Paris, but not for Beirut. That's an issue of privilege/bias in technology, in my opinion.

From an United Statesian perspective, I think there are a lot of factors in play:

1. Most Americans could find France on a map. Lebanon? Not so much.

2. France is America's "oldest ally" - lots more common ground.

3. Many Americans have been to Paris; much fewer to Beirut.

The article points to some other things:

4. The perception that this happens all the time in Lebanon, even though "it had been a year of relative calm."

5. Network effect (perhaps I'm misusing that term a bit) - FB activated their stuff because people were interested in it, which gets more people interested in it. I know I went straight to the TV after seeing my Twitter feed light up about it; had it just been a buried headline somewhere I might not have been as gravitated toward it.

Not necessarily saying any of these things are good or bad. Sometimes I feel like people take on an accusatory tone when bringing up topics like this, so I wanted to explore some explanations.

It's really messy business comparing tragedies and ultimately trivializes aspects of them. Like what was worse the holocaust or American slavery? It has no answer.

Comparing empathy responses is just as messy. Should we make character judgments based upon the number of visitors to ones funeral? I think not.

Just out of curiosity, could flying an American flag in Lebanon, maybe nearer the Syrian border, potentially cause you some problems? What about the French flag? They'd had a rather intertwined history together. Seems odd to try and read in to ones empathy based upon such things.

Maybe if they fixed all the damaged buildings from their last civil war the rest of the world might start to forget their recent violent past. It wouldn't hurt. Regardless of how peaceful it might be now, it's a very recent thing in Lebanon and there are reminders everywhere of the violence. It hard for people to not factor that in. I feel bad for their victims, but I suspect it is similar to how the rest of the world feels about American gun violence victims; they don't fly our flag after every school shooting, and I don't expect them to or need them to do so.

Same logic could be applied to some 3000 persons that died on 9/11, reaction to it considering relatively small amount of people was/is extremely disproportionate. People are dying daily in more or less horrible way, left and right, and general population is caring less and less.

But we humans are emotional and irrational all the time, and harm to somebody in any way "closer" to us is felt much stronger compared to unnamed faceless victims just somewhere out there. So all is usual, as per our human standards...

When I studied abroad in Australia I lived in a house that included two Sri Lankans. When the other American in the house and I talked about how much 9/11 affected us, they brushed it off. Sure, they'd heard about it, but they said their reaction was more like, "Welcome to the world, America." A 40-year civil war was just ending in their country (I'm probably being charitable to my countrymen to say that maybe 10% of Americans knew that; I certainly didn't), and one of them said that everyone knew someone who had been around a bombing, or had been affected by one themselves.

This is all anecdotal, but it's meant to support your point - while 9/11 was certainly one of the deadliest and probably one of the most costly (monetarily speaking) single attacks ever, it was hardly something that put us on equal footing with places like Israel and pre-2010 Sri Lanka. But it mattered to all of us a lot more because we had never seen it here, we didn't think it could happen here, we knew where NYC was, we knew those skyscrapers, etc.

The difference is that the people perpetrating the attacks in places like Beirut have strong political support from the population in that country (Lebanon). Violence is part of their political culture and has been for a long time.

The French attacks were from an outside element, ie: an element that isn't a part of the established political structure. That is the difference.

Except that we already know that some (if not most) of the attackers in France were French nationals, so that argument doesn't really hold up.

I also think it is alienating (and rather offensive, to be terribly blunt) of you to argue that "they are used to violence" as if that means it somehow affects the population of cities like Beirut, the sense of loss felt by the families of victims, or any of the other human emotional elements.

Beirut is as much a large, cosmopolitan, vibrant city as any in Europe. It is no war zone. And it would do everyone good to remember that the very real and visceral trauma that the Paris attacks constitute is something many people feel on a weekly (or more frequent) basis, and that doesn't diminish the subjective horror of it.

I don't think you understand what drives the violence in Lebanon. It isn't a handful of radical citizens. It is national level political parties that draw strong support from the population. If you can find any French political party or ruling faction that had a hand in the attacks then I would agree with you but I doubt that is the case.

I'm also not arguing that they are used to violence there for it is alright. I'm saying that they support violence or at least the use of it by their politicians to achieve their political goals there for they get what they promote.

I think you're shifting your argument, but whatever: the horror of fearing you might die walking to the supermarket every time you do it isn't any less palpable just because the structures that incentivize the violence are different.

All this article is trying to get people to recognize is that a) the Paris attacks are awful, but b) as awful as that is, remember that this kind of horror is a more constant occurrence for many people, and that we should reflect on that more often as we participate in the politics of our own countries.

> If you can find any French political party or ruling faction that had a hand in the attacks then I would agree with you but I doubt that is the case.

You know, I'm not sure that the far-right nationalist racists like the Front National, or the ban on the burqa, or the other efforts at systematic alienation of France's minorities don't play a roll in all of this. People don't open fire into crowds they feel they have friends in, or attack societies they feel they are a part of, and Europe's attitude that assimilation is a one-way street, and the casual racism of many people here doesn't exactly create a welcoming atmosphere, either for recent immigrants or second- and third-generation ones.

Firstly, these attacks were not perpetrated by any national level political party. Your line of thought, as the article puts it, portrays "a busy civilian, residential and commercial district as a justifiable military target."

However, the more important point is that it is always a radical fringe. Saying it is otherwise is terribly offensive and suggests a fundamental lack of understanding.

I haven't looked into this specific incident but historically an example is Hezbollah who participates in the Lebanese government and is known to have supported any number of similar incidents in the past. They are a national level political party in Lebanon, and while radical by American standards I'm skeptical they are viewed as "fringe" in Lebanon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Lebanon#Cedar_Revol...

This incident has been linked to ISIS, so none of that is especially relevant in this context.

It's relevant to why people don't bat an eye when yet another thing explodes in Lebanon. Even if this time was different in the details.

That might be a relevant difference, but it's definitely not the difference. If the Paris bombings had happened in, say, Bhutan, do you think they would have attracted the same coverage?

(AFAIK Bhutan doesn't have strong popular support for any terrorist organisations, but I mostly picked it at random. Feel free to pick another.)

I'm not sure, if it didn't it would be for different reasons. When you are talking about Beiruit specifically though it's a city that has the potential to be an international level city but has been prevented from attaining that by the political climate that embraces violence, has for decades, and continues to.

> if it didn't it would be for different reasons

Unless you're quite confident that those would be reasons that don't also apply to Beirut - that's exactly what I was getting at.

There is no "the difference". There are differences.

I am, confident. Beirut is very similar to Paris, or New York in terms if it being a place that has strong international mind share. Bhutan is a place so out of the way that the terrorists wouldn't even know how to get there to attack it. CNN probably doesn't have an office in the country.

It's a difference of notoriety vs. obscurity.

Lebanese Muslims are predominantly Shiite, who were the earliest innovators as far as Salafists are concerned, and thereby number one on ISIL's shitlist.

Please don't post urls that require logins. Post this instead https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=it&sl=en&tl=it&u=h...

Google Translate, paste URL, from English to a random language then click the button for the original version.

Never been there, don't know anybody there, don't care. That's not harsh, that's human. Come on, stop milking it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com