Reactions to terror attack in Istanbul highlight Europe’s double standards
THIS year has started as much as the last one ended with blood, tears, violence and scores of innocent people brutally cut down in their prime.
What should have been a night of joy turned to horror in Istanbul on New Year’s Eve as a fanatical gunman opened fire in one of the city’s most popular nightclubs, mowing down over 100 people, killing 39 of them.
The attack – the latest in a seemingly endless list of atrocities carried out by the savages of ISIS – caused shock across the world but, compared to similar attacks in the ‘West’, the reaction on social media was curiously muted.
Recent terrorist atrocities in Paris, Nice, Brussels, Munich, Florida and most recently Berlin have typically led to mass outpourings of grief and sympathy online, usually accompanied a relevant Twitter hashtag. Yet that hasn’t been the case with the attacks in Turkey. Many thousands of messages of sympathy for the victims and the Turkish people have been posted online, but we haven’t seen anything like ‘Je Suis Paris’ or ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ social media trends that followed massacres on mainland Europe.
Last June after a lone gunman slaughtered 49 people and shot 53 more at a LGBT nightclub in Orlando Florida there were candlelit vigils across Ireland. Despite the fact that the carnage in Istanbul was remarkably similar – in its motive, method and horrific outcome – there has been no such public expression of sympathy and solidarity.
It is entirely understandable that people will be more moved by tragedies in countries that they are familiar with or which share their culture and values.
However it is also clear that many people – perhaps down to the failings of the media, both traditional and new – simply do not fully realise what is happening in the world.
How many readers are aware that in the last month alone – in addition to the innocents butchered on New Year’s Eve – some 269 people have been killed in three car bomb attacks in Turkey?
What about the death toll in Iraq, where close to 300 people were killed by car bombs in December?
Then there are the 566 men women and children who were burned to death, crucified, electrocuted, beheaded, shot by ISIS in Mosul in the last four weeks alone?
How many people took to social media to sympathise with the people of Nigeria on December 9 after Boko Haram suicide bombers – two schoolgirls – blew 234 people to smithereens in a village vegetable market?
All that is without even mentioning the ongoing horror in Syria where 50,000 people – including 13,617 civilians – died last year.
We live in a global world and – despite what extremists and the growing far right would have us believe – far more unites us than divides us.
In 2017, in the face of terror, oppression and tyranny, let’s remember that we are all in this together and it is only by staying united that we can win.