Qahtaniya

The war supporters, the cheerleaders have taken to saying that the newest strategy to win the war is finally working; what could be a sign that they might possible be right? How about when the second worst terrorist attack in history happens? With more people killed than in any other attack in history, with the sole exception of September eleventh, yet another tragic milestone has been reached. Before the Tuesday two weeks ago, on the fourteenth, the second highest toll caused by terrorists was 430, twenty nine years ago in Iran, when a movie theater called the Cinema Rex was torched by militants.

Even with the tragic distinction of having only one other attack surpass it, I don’t think that it’s received the amount of coverage and attention that something of this magnitude deserves, it happening in Iraq couldn’t have helped the matter. With daily car bombings and massacres, these types of events can grow to seem routine in their monotony, but still, it is by far the worst bombing of the war, almost three times worse than the next worst one. I’ve asked a few people about it, and not a single one of them knew what happened, or how massive it was. I think that it being worse than anything other than 9/11 is important, something significant that people should at least be aware of, but it’s probably too much to hope for to get people to care.

Even the attempted car bombings in the UK back in June received more attention, despite how incompetent they were. It was all over the news for at least a week, while the only real consequences that those would-be bombers managed to get were setting themselves on fire and getting arrested. They crashed one car bomb, caused another to get towed, then ended up only managing to get one of them burned to death and the others arrested.

Even with the stupidity, incompetence, and failure that those would be terrorists showed, that event received overwhelmingly more coverage than the second worst terrorist attack of all time simply because it happened in London and Glasgow, instead of Qahtaniya and Siba Sheikh Khidir. It’s depressing how much people’s outrage is directly proportional to how similar to them they see the victims to be. It’s how the mentality of “fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here” takes hold. As long as they’re “not like us”, their lives are expendable in the thousands, if that may provide some possibility of saving a few dozen lives that they identify more with, not only from the US, but from Spain or the United Kingdom.

What does it say when the next to worst terrorist attack that’s ever happened can take place, and hardly any one notices?