What about Beirut? Is there a double standard in Western media?

Terrorists attack Beirut

The terrorist attacks in Paris have incited global support. But that has left some Lebanese, who suffered their own terror attack last week, asking: What about us?
The deadly terrorist attacks in Paris on Friday night happened one day after similar terrorist attacks in Beirut, prompting some to see a double standard in the media's coverage of the two events.

Forty-three people died and dozens were injured in the Beirut attack on Thursday. In Paris, at least 129 people died and more than 350 were injured.

Lebanon's capital is no stranger to terror. While Thursday’s twin bomb blasts were the deadliest in Beirut since 1990, the country has long been a terror target, with 14 bombings between July 2013 and June 2014 that killed almost 100.

But the Lebanese may have reason to feel slighted. #PrayforParis was mentioned about 6.6 million times on Twitter, compared to 273,000 mentions of #Beirut and #PrayforBeirut combined. Facebook activated Safety Check after a terrorist attack for the first time after the Paris attacks, with no similar feature activated the day before for Beirut, The Christian Science Monitor reported.

Lebanese critics complained that the West values Arab lives less than European lives, and that their country is depicted as a place where such violence is the norm.


“When my people died, no country bothered to lit up its landmarks in the colors of their flag,” Elie Fares, a Lebanese doctor, wrote on his blog A Separate State of Mind. “When my people died, they did not send the world in mourning. Their death was but an irrelevant fleck along the international news cycle, something that happens in those parts of the world.”

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