Turkey is rapidly becoming a focal point in this whole affair and the way the politicians deal with it seems to only add more fuel to the fire. It must be extremely frustrating to live in Turkey at the moment, the people I'm in contact with there are literally worried for their lives and the lives of their families.
Over 100 people had been killed in an explosion in their capital, Ankara, following a suicide bombing attack from ISIS. Nobody cared. Then afterwards another attack had happened in Paris, and the whole world broke loose.
It seems that so-called "universal" values of "humanity" is biased towards Western societies.
The same thing happening again and now. Turkey has been recently suffering from similar attacks frequently in Istanbul, and Ankara; and only following an attack in Brussel that HN responds with a protest changing the title color, etc.
Not to mention that authoritarian government of Turkey throttles or censors Twitter, Google, Youtube, etc. after each attack, and spreads misinformation through some mass media channels that they "own". I do not remember any discussion about these censorships in HN. Are such concerns not of value to HN community?
Is that because such bombings and authoritarian regimes are somehow perceived as "normal" in the "Eastern European" or "Middle Eastern" countries? I am confused.
I think a good comparison is with Mexico, drug cartels murdering people hardly makes the news, even if the numbers are comparable or exceed the attacks in Paris. People more or less expect that sort of thing from that particular region so it is not considered newsworthy to the same degree.
Bombings in Ireland were also not that heavily reported on in the West, yes world wide web didn't really exist back then but the main media usually reported it as a footnote unless it was really an extreme event.
When Israel was averaging one suicide bombing every 3 days in the late 90's and early 2000's it seems that in the west it only reached the headlines once the death count came to 30 or so or as far as the US media goes when ever Americans were either targeted or were otherwise casualties of the event.
Hopefully, we'll get better.
Moreover, you're definitively right. I just watch Belgian TV (official channel). And I can say that people (opposed to governments) of Syria, Libya, Palestine,... are 99.99% of the time represented as mourning their death, singing and jumping; or represented with ruins behind them; or with weapons, or as super poor (compared to our materialist standard down here). So it's very hard for us to build a correct representation of what it is to live in the "orient". The web can give more information, but many (I guess) people get their information from mass media.
So yes, it's super biased towards western (ex colonialist) societies... And that's a shame. I'd love to see what's good in Africa, Turkey, south america, china,...
No. It's just that western societies have more money and more media running on it so western events get amplified. That and...
> Is that because such bombings and authoritarian regimes are somehow perceived as "normal" in the "Eastern European" or "Middle Eastern" countries? I am confused.
Yes. For as long as I remember the middle-east, part of north Africa, has always been in the news mainly for some bombings against civilians or something like that. Iraq, Lebanon, the whole Iran-Iraq war, the Egyptian bombings from the 90's, the Gaza strip, etc. As a child, in western Europe, I grew up with always the same pictures on TV about the middle east.
That's just my anecdotal opinion though.