Racism Lives Unconsciously

[Adam]

We have had terrible terror attacks perpetrated on the city centres of London, Paris, Brussels, Nice, Boston, Berlin, and New York. They have varied in their degree of awefulness only by the level of the carnage the killers succeeded in inflicting on men, girls, boys, women, the peaceful communities they decided would be the token heads on the pikes of their ignorance-based hatred. 9/11 standing alone as an uniquely orchestrated case, the city centre bombings and shootings in more recent years in Europe and North America have, in addition to having had by now a terrible echo of repartition in method and choice of soft target, have also developed another level of inevitability.

Just like school shootings in the US, actually that last phrase 'in the US' is almostredundant as virtually no school shootings occur anywhere else, but then. As I was saying, similar to school shootings, terror attacks in cities anywhere get wall-wall coverage. All other programmes are fused into a continuous airing of repetitious reportage of newsmen (or newspersons) talking to each other or to "experts" on esoteric minutiae or on things which even my little knowledge often finds the expert short of expertise. I found one such US professor during the Westminster attacks twice definitively identify for the watching millions on the most watched cable news channel in the States two churches in Westminster and the main entrance to Westminster all, each totally erroneously. 

The problem was the news channels has hours and hours to fill and little to say. So they put up self-styled experts who said nothing or said nonsense. All because every channel was feeling obligated to pay homage to the terrible fact that 10 or 15 or 20 people had died of shooting or bombing in a modern city centre.

This week 21 people were blown up and shot during a 20 hour-long siege of a 5-star hotel complex in a modern city of some 6 million people. The city houses the fourth largest UN complex on Earth, is central to western military monitoring communications, and is headquarters for many international organizations. No, if it was Geneva, which will spring to the mind of many, you can be certain, the news would indeed be comprehensive.

However, this was in Nairobi. So CNN, for example, carried an initialthree-minute news bulletin, followed later by a 5 minute longer story. It was never more than the third story of the day. By the second day, when fighting was still going on, it was barely mentioned at all. It must be noted here that the killers were the Islamist group al Shabbat, who are affiliated to IS or Daish, and they claimed the attack was in retaliation for the Trump Administration's decision to move the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. There was thus a clear link between this attack and the US. It was an attack by IS, which is an organisation the UD President says he has defeated. Yet this story does not merit coverage in the US.

On the BBC website it was number one news, even though the Brexit debate was then going on in the British parliament. 

Theconclusion can only be that black African lives  - or maybe even white African like mine - don't matter a damn to US audiences and that Donald Trump has it perfectly right all along. Perhaps he should just finish the job and build a wall with Canada while he's at it. 

It puts me in mind of the movie Maze Runner. 

Adam