More than 150 Muslim Fulani villagers were killed when terrorist members of the ethnic Dogon raided their settlements and either shot them or hacked them to pieces with machetes, killing a large number of women and children in the process. It’s unclear what motivated this massacre since the Dogon are religiously eclectic and have had issues with the Fulani before over land rights, so it would be premature to speculate that their targets were killed for purely religious reasons like those in the Christchurch terrorist attack were just a few weeks ago, but that latter tragedy has nevertheless captivated the world’s attention despite it having more than 3x less victims than what just happened in Mali.
As “politically incorrect” as it may be to say, the Mainstream Media’s double standards over these issues prove that not all Muslim lives are equal and that some victims “deserve” more international sympathy than others. It can’t be known exactly why information outlets the world over are giving more attention to Christchurch than Mali, but it might have to do with the former’s “clash of civilization” optics and the fact that many naïvely assume that massacres of the sort that frequently take place in the “Global South” could “never happen” in the West. The collective shock that the so-called “Golden Billion” felt after the Christchurch terrorist attack and the other high-profile ones that preceded it like Charlie Hebdo partially explain these editorial double standards.
That said, it also belies a disturbing presumption that large-scale killings are so normal in the “Global South” and especially Africa so as to not necessarily be newsworthy in and of themselves whenever they happen irrespective of their scale. More cynically, there aren’t any clear motives for the Mainstream Media to politically exploit this tragedy like some have suspected them of doing with similar ones in the West such as Christchurch in order to regulate free speech and crack down on gun rights, and the case can actually be made that there’s a reason why they’d want to suppress news about anything of the sort that might come out of Mali in particular.
Most of the world has forgotten that France launched an anti-terrorist military intervention in this impoverished landlocked country in 2013 that continues to this day under the branding of “Operation Barkhane” and with the involvement of the so-called “G5 Sahel” countries that have seen its scope stretch all across the region. Suffice to say, it’s completely failed in defeating terrorism even if it thwarted a proto-Daesh entity that was poised to take over Mali, as the resultant failed state that France was left to deal with in its wake has opened up a Pandora’s Box of other conflicts that continue to spread throughout the region, an “inconvenient fact” that nobody wants to draw attention to.
The post presented is the partial transcript of the CONTEXT COUNTDOWN radio program on Sputnik News, aired on Friday Mar 29, 2019:
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Great post 😁