Beirut, Also the Site of Deadly Attacks, Feels Forgotten

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

I&#x27;m not entirely sure what people expected.<p>France is EU therefore considered &quot;the west&quot; by many.<p>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.<p>I mean, it&#x27;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&#x27;ve been alive).

Do we really need to have a thread for every news article related to terrorist attacks?<p>From the guidelines:<p>&gt; Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they&#x27;re evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they&#x27;d cover it on TV news, it&#x27;s probably off-topic.

From an United Statesian perspective, I think there are a lot of factors in play:<p>1. Most Americans could find France on a map. Lebanon? Not so much.<p>2. France is America&#x27;s &quot;oldest ally&quot; - lots more common ground.<p>3. Many Americans have been to Paris; much fewer to Beirut.<p>The article points to some other things:<p>4. The perception that this happens all the time in Lebanon, even though &quot;it had been a year of relative calm.&quot;<p>5. Network effect (perhaps I&#x27;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.<p>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.

Same logic could be applied to some 3000 persons that died on 9&#x2F;11, reaction to it considering relatively small amount of people was&#x2F;is extremely disproportionate. People are dying daily in more or less horrible way, left and right, and general population is caring less and less.<p>But we humans are emotional and irrational all the time, and harm to somebody in any way &quot;closer&quot; to us is felt much stronger compared to unnamed faceless victims just somewhere out there. So all is usual, as per our human standards...

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.<p>The French attacks were from an outside element, ie: an element that isn&#x27;t a part of the established political structure. That is the difference.

Please don&#x27;t post urls that require logins. Post this instead <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;translate.google.com&#x2F;translate?hl=it&amp;sl=en&amp;tl=it&amp;u=http:%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2015%2F11%2F16%2Fworld%2Fmiddleeast%2Fbeirut-lebanon-attacks-paris.html&amp;anno=2&amp;sandbox=1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;translate.google.com&#x2F;translate?hl=it&amp;sl=en&amp;tl=it&amp;u=h...</a><p>Google Translate, paste URL, from English to a random language then click the button for the original version.

Never been there, don&#x27;t know anybody there, don&#x27;t care. That&#x27;s not harsh, that&#x27;s human. Come on, stop milking it.