On Friday, Nov. 13, 2015, the terrorist group known as ISIS attacked Paris, France. Social media was abuzz, with people posting pictures left and right with "#PrayforParis," and changing their Facebook profile pictures to be tinted with the French flag. I saw someone say online that this attack was the equivalent of 9/11/01 in the United States, and we had to stand with France like they stood with us so many years ago.
This was a blatant attack meant to strike fear into the minds of not only Parisians and the French, but people all over the world. 129 people died, and over 350 were wounded in the attacks. In CNN's article "Terror in Paris: What We Know So Far," Paris prosecutor Francois Molins stated that three teams of terrorists planned and executed coordinated attacks at six different locations throughout Paris that Friday evening, including a concert hall, the Stade de France, and at least two restaurants. But a day before the attack on Paris, ISIS attacked another area.
The day prior, Nov. 12, there was an attack in Beirut, Lebanon; explosions were set off by suicide bombers during rush hour, killing at least 43 people, and injuring 239. This tragedy wasn't plastered all over Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, which lead to articles like Claire Bernish's "America: Your Solidarity With Paris is Embarrassingly Misguided," where Americans were being called out for only standing with Paris. Bernish writes that she mourns for Beirut, for Palestine, for China; that while she is mourning for Paris too, she is "weeping" at the fact that we are only focusing on them. She states that we should not be adorning our profile pictures with the French flag, "because as long as you wear just one flag, your attempt to stand with victims of terror is a most embarrassingly hollow solidarity, indeed." But the thing that Bernish doesn't acknowledge is that these tragedies weren't mentioned in the media. I had only found out about Beirut because someone had posted about it online, and then came the flood of CNN and New York Times articles talking about the disaster in Beirut. America is a country that prides itself on media, be it social or news, and a majority of information that many Americans get is through these media outlets.
The media likes to paint a picture, but it's not always the picture that we need to see. Of course the attacks in Paris are huge, and they should absolutely be covered in the media, but not at the expense of the attack in Beirut. We need to know what is going on around the world, especially with a terrorist group like ISIS who kills whoever they want because they think they can. And ignoring the "smaller" attacks to focus on the "big" ones isn't helping anyone.
