Hacker News Reader

Comment by unmole | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why Kashoggi is brought up so much more frequently compared to what Saudi Arabia is doing in Yemen.

In general people find it much easier to understand the story of one person than to understand the story of thousands.

Not to mention it feels more black and white. Killing a dissident journalist in your embassy in another country, coming from up top, directly contradicts the promises/suggestions made by the Prince that SA is modernizing and becoming more free/open. The coverup was amateur, in part aided by Ergodan mastery at slowly leaking intel that just kept poking holes in SA’s story.

Meanwhile fighting “terrorism” has lots of gray, and is notoriously messy.

Yemen is a civil war that has turned into a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Things aren't black and white and its very hard distinguish between propaganda and facts.

Khashoggi is very black and white. A US journalist was killed after being lured into a Saudi embassy.

Exactly. The fact that 1) he has a face we can identify with, and 2) they lured him into an official establishment of their government and then killed him in cold blood. A place where you might otherwise expect the rule of law to prevail.

Saudi laws aren't even codified. There isn't really a rule of law there.

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

Yeah I understand that, what I mean is that from our perspective a person should be able to walk into a government office and be safe from extra-judicial sanctions. So a Saudi national may not feel that safe themselves, but it is harder for someone from a Western-style liberal democracy to intuitively understand and is therefore horrifying.

The press also hates when one of their own is killed (understandably). They have the power to keep it in the headlines, in this this case Turkey helped them out too.

I also wonder why my lawmakers haven’t responded to my requests to respond to the Rohingya crisis.

You’re right that the crisis in Yemen is enormous in scale, and it absolutely should be addressed, but the murder of a journalist threatens freedom of information and global accountability and is therefore particularly frightening in that it’s an attack on infrastructure instead of just a person.

A NY Times journalist explains why some wars are less covered in the US (by comparing Syria coverage to Yemen coverage in the US):

"Conflicts gain sustained American attention only when they provide a compelling story line that appeals to both the public and political actors, and for reasons beyond the human toll. That often requires some combination of immediate relevance to American interests, resonance with American political debates or cultural issues, and, perhaps most of all, an emotionally engaging frame of clearly identifiable good guys and bad guys."

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/world/why-some-wars-like-...

It's the personification of the brutality. You can put one face as opposed to the thousands in the crowd.

Which in turn is child's play compared to what the US has done in the middle east for the past decade or two

Well, one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.

"If only one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that’s only statistics." - Joseph Stalin

Also, Turkey has been dolling out new bits of information about the ambush regularly, keeping the negative stories rolling.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com