>When my people died, they did not send the world in mourning. Their death was but an irrelevant fleck along the international news cycle, something that happens in those parts of the world.<p>I think the author fails to understand the close relationship that France has with most of the western world.<p>It's not that the west doesn't care about a terrorist attack that happened in Lebanon (I certainly heard about it the night of on my national news channel), it's just that we tend to care more about attacks in locales that we and other people we know have frequented more often.<p>I don't know anybody from Lebanon or anybody who has ever been to Lebanon. Personally, I have been to Paris. My entire family and my wife's family have been to Paris. My wife's bosses were just in Paris last week.<p>The attack on Paris just hits closer to home, that's all.
Its true. The perceptions are not equal. If a multiple gang shooting happened in Chicago it wouldn't make international news as much as it would if it occurred in London. People are desensitized to things that become "normal".
I'm tired of reading this type of analysis because it's simply stupid. And I am pretty convinced the author knows it himself.<p>Here is why - islamic terrorists killing a few hundred people in Beirut (or anywhere in the Middle East, really) is normal. Not in a sense of 'what the world should be like' but in a sense of 'this is not an unexpected occurrence'.<p>Same way that Christian terrorists (even though they weren't called that) killing 20 thousands people in Paris 443 years ago (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Bartholomew%27s_Day_massacre" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Bartholomew%27s_Day_massac...</a>) was normal back then. That's what the Christian world was going through.<p>However in the last few hundred years Paris didn't really have religious terrorism - that's why it coming back is a big deal.
I learned a little while back that there are 250 gun deaths every <i>day</i> in the U.S. That's the equivalent of 2 of the Paris attacks, every single day. A staggering figure of close to 100K gun deaths every year, or 30x the 9/11 deaths. So while they aren't necessarily "terrorist"-related in the common sense of the term, they certainly bring terror to many families and neighborhoods.