The Western media have double standards when it comes to terrorism

[shaayecanaan]

The Western media have double standards when it comes to “terrorism.” Within hours after two bombs were detonated at the Boston Marathon last April, many in the media had christened it a “terrorist attack.” Meanwhile, the August 15 bombing in Rouweiss that killed at least two dozen is a “blast” that occurred in a “Hezbollah stronghold.”

On 15 April 2013, in the middle of the afternoon, two pressure cooker bombs exploded 13 seconds apart near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Three spectators were killed, including an 8-year-old boy, and 264 others suffered an array of injuries.

(snip)

Four months to the day, a car bomb exploded in the early evening at a busy intersection in the heavily populated residential neighborhood of Roueiss in the southern part of Beirut. So far, 24 (and counting) have died, and a further 355 (and counting) have been injured.

Despite the fact that the perpetrators and the act itself snugly fit into the legal definition of “terrorism” by the US and UK authorities, the media coverage by British and American media outlets described it as a “bomb blast” from a possible “suicide attack.”
More so, as media critic and former editor-at-large of Al-Akhbar English Emily Dische-Becker in Berlin observed to the Institute of Public Accuracy, many of the foreign news agencies took great pains to add that the car bomb explosion occurred in a “Hezbollah stronghold.”

Virtually all reports on the attack on the residential neighborhood of Roueiss noted Hezbollah’s military involvement in Syria, therefore subtly inferring that the attack was justifiable despite the fact that the victims were innocent civilians. Those killed will not have the leisure of being named and cared for by extensive human-oriented stories, slick infographics, painful photo galleries, and a barrage of follow-up tales of coping the day after.

This “context” was not provided by the mainstream press when it came to the Boston bombing and other similar incidents over the past decade. To put it in perspective, it is akin to describing the Boston Marathon bombing as an attack on a “democrat strong-hold,” possibly linked to the brutal, destructive military invasions and bloody escapades of the Americans and their allies.

http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/boston-beirut-comparison-%E2%80%9Cterror%E2%80%9D

[azurnoir]

1. the term terrorist and terrorism has become relative to who is doing the killing

Malala Yousafzai the Pakistani girl who was the victim of a Taliban attack is considered a heroine, but if she had been wounded by a drone she would have simply been another nameless statistic, nothing more