In a searing and cogent piece entitled “Thousands of Black Lives Mattered in Nigeria, but the World Didn’t Pay Attention,” the Root‘s Kirsten West Savali compares and contrasts the West’s response to the terror killings of almost 20 mostly white folks (including the gunmen) in Paris to the contemporaneous wholesale slaughter of ten times that number of blacks in Africa’s most populous nation-state, Nigeria.
This time the hypocrisy is blatant, obvious, palpable. And “willful,” says Savali.
“From a bombed NAACP office in Colorado to the decimated town of Baga, Nigeria, acts of terrorism against black people and institutions have failed to generate much attention in the United States this past week,” begins Savali.
The “satirical” magazine Charlie Hebdo, of course, was the target of an al-Qaida-inspired terrorist attack last week which murdered 12, while a separate and connected attack claimed the lives of four hostages and the killer at a kosher supermarket.
As Savali points out, the response of the Western world to the Paris attacks has been eerily similar to bygone and contemporary civil rights marches in the US against America’s past and ongoing systemic racial apartheid as practiced against its black citizenry.
Indeed, this show of Western unity in the face of “terrorism” included even Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (who’d been asked by French President Francois Hollande not to show up) marching alongside Europe’s top leaders and, amazingly, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
These leaders served as the intrepid vanguard of an estimated 3.7 million people as they moved through Paris’ streets and past Charlie’s offices — “a magazine whose Islamophobic bent has been largely underplayed in a broader debate about free speech,” writes Savali.
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