Only lives of white people are relevant

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LAST week, Da’esh killed Haidar’s mother and father. I refuse to legitimise this grotesque group by using their preferred name. They are neither Islamic, nor a state, but exactly like those who crush things underfoot, as the term “Da’esh” describes.

They snuffed out the lives of thirdyear law student Alaa Awad and Basima Atat’s husband, Adel Termos, along with 40 others. They were not killed on the streets of Paris, but in Beirut a day earlier.

You’ve probably never seen these names and I don’t blame you. There are no detailed accounts of the lives and aspirations of the Beirut victims by any major media outlet, no intimate interviews with families and friends.

Even less is known about 19 Iraqis killed by a Da’esh suicide bomber at a funeral in a mosque in Baghdad just hours before the Paris attacks. Only some Da’esh attacks that week were decried as attacks “on all humanity”.

Landmarks and monuments around the world did not light up in the colours of the Lebanese and Iraqi flags to honour them. Google did not change its logo to commemorate them. Facebook did not provide users a profile photo overlay of the Lebanese and Iraqi flags to show solidarity with them.

However, we know all 129 victims of the Paris attacks: names, ages, nationalities, and occupations.

There is the recently engaged Spanish citizen Michelli Gil Jaimez, who studied at a business school in Lyons and was living in Paris.

Then there is 32-year old music buff and field hockey fan Thomas Ayad, and “generous, funny and fiercely loyal” 36-year-old Briton, Nick Alexander, who was working at the Bataclan concert hall selling merchandise.

Given the wall-to-wall coverage of the Paris attacks, the average person would find it hard to believe that Jaimez, Ayad and Alexander were not among the first victims of Da’esh last week, and that the vast majority of Da’esh’s victims have been Muslim.

Not only were the Beirut and Baghdad attacks under-reported, but misreported. Most described the Burj al-Barajneh district in southern Beirut as a “Hezbollah stronghold”.

Never mind that the twin bombings occurred outside a bakery in a bustling neighbourhood, as people streamed on to the street after sunset prayers enjoying the last days of autumn.

Did the description of some type of political background of this area place the terrorism in “context”? Did these people deserve it? Were the political affiliations of those killed in Paris ever highlighted, and did we even care what they were?

Some South African journalists have recognised the breathtaking hypocrisy of the world’s indignation. Digital editor for The Citizen, Devlin Brown, admitted he received multiple messages and queries from people interested in the Paris massacre and requests for his analysis of the politics that caused it. “Yet not one person bothered to ask what happened in Beirut,” Brown wrote on Monday.

In a searing piece on Tuesday, Independent Online managing editor, Adrian Ephraim, wrote: “Dignity for the dead is in the details, and sadly there are none if you’re not Western. In the Middle East and Africa the dead have no story to tell.”

In June 2014, Da’esh massacred over 700 military recruits in the Iraqi city of Tikrit. In January, Boko Haram killed an estimated 2 000 people in the town of Baga in north-eastern Nigeria. In April this year, al-Shabaab gunmen killed 147 people at Garissa College in Kenya. In October, two bombs were detonated outside the Ankara Central railway station, killing 102 people. These deaths were a snippet in the international news section, something that happens in “those” parts of the world.

There is no story to tell about the hundreds of thousands slaughtered every day for the past five years in Syria. There is nothing extraordinary about the untold number killed in the US’s seemingly permanent war in Afghanistan, including patients and staff targeted, bombed, then shot while fleeing the Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in Kunduz a month ago.

Saudi Arabia’s continuing air strikes, which have killed more than 5 000 civilians in Yemen since March, are not newsworthy. Neither is the genocide in Burundi nor the ongoing siege of the Gaza Strip.

A news veteran told Ephraim it is dead white people that sell newspapers. That adage still holds true. The lives of citizens in New York, London, Madrid and Paris are still more valuable than human beings in Chibok, Aleppo, Mombasa or Sana’a.

Suraya Dadoo is a researcher for Media Review Network, a Joburg-based advocacy group. Find her on Twitter: @Suraya_Dadoo