… did not happen in Paris on Friday, despite the fact that it was a horrific incident. Yet, though 129 people have been confirmed dead by French authorities – and presumably more will die in the coming days and weeks from the wounds they suffered – the Paris attacks don’t even come close to being the worst terrorist incident this year. It only seems like the worst.
However, in January of this year, over a four day period, a terrorist organization likely slaughtered 2,000 people (no precise count was ever taken), dwarfing the casualties in Paris, and, to be honest, every other terrorist attack that happened in the world this year.
Yet, I’ll bet few people remember this mass murder of innocent civilians because it was committed by Boko Haram, an Islamist organization committed to using violence to establish an Islamic state, that began January 3rd and ended on January 7th in an isolated area of rural Nigeria near the border with Chad.
District head Baba Abba Hassan said most victims are children, women and elderly people who could not run fast enough when insurgents drove into Baga, firing rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles on town residents.
“The human carnage perpetrated by Boko Haram terrorists in Baga was enormous,” Muhammad Abba Gava, a spokesman for poorly armed civilians in a defence group that fights Boko Haram, told the Associated Press.
An additional 20,000 to 35,000 thousand people fled the area during Boko Haram’s assault. Satellite imagery revealed the destruction of 57% of the town of Doko Gowan, the site of a Nigerian military base that was the focus of the initial assault. Of course, this was only the worst of a number of murderous attacks on the Nigerian people by Boko Haram over the course of 2015. In February they were responsible for the deaths of 41 more people in two separate incidents. In March, another 61 people died at their hands. In July, another 145 people were killed. Indeed, it would be easier to list the months in which a terrorist attack attributed to Boko Haram by news reports did not occur – only May and August. The Council on Foreign Relations estimates that over 14,000 have been killed by Boko Haram violence since May, 2011, but that is a conservative estimate. The likely number is much higher. And Boko Haram has made a point of targeting children, and killing large numbers of them, often by burning students while they were trapped in their schools and dormitories.
Yet, no one in Europe or America was calling for an international force to root out and destroy Boko Haram. No air assault is ongoing by the US military and its allies to take out Boko Haram’s command and control centers to “decapitate” their leadership. The deaths of all those people in Nigeria did not move the needle of public opinion one iota in the western democracies. Oh the United States “boosted” its military aid to the Nigerian government, and in October we deployed a small force to neighboring Cameroon to provide “surveillance and reconnaissance” operations (but not for the purpose of combat). But that’s a drop in the ocean compared to the military and economic resources we have employed to strike at the Islamic State, even before Paris.
However, the same could be said about the constant slaughter of innocents in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, India, the Philippines, and so, so many other countries. Obviously, there are a number of possible reasons why the deaths in Paris matter so much more to us than those who died elsewhere. But one does have to ask the question as to why the victims of the Paris attacks arouse our sympathies so much more than the people who die everyday at the hands of terrorists all over the globe that do not live in Europe or the Americas?
We held no candlelight vigils or church services for the victims of Boko Haram. Our college and professional athletes did not enter our sporting arenas before their games this weekend (or any weekend) carrying the flag of Lebanon to honor the victims of Beirut, as they did with the French tricolor. No one claimed to stand in solidarity with the victims of those massacres. No, their deaths did not arouse in us that same level of anguish and outrage, as did the victims in Paris. The US media certainly spent far less time covering those tragedies, and indeed far less time collectively covering all the other terror attacks worldwide, than it spent this past weekend with its round the clock attention tom the events in Paris.
I leave it to you to consider what that means about our society and its moral values.
