Boko Haram, Garrisa U, and Charlie Hebdo

By David Mills:

None of the world’s famous and powerful marched for al-Shabab’s 148 victims at Garissa University, just as none had marched in January for Boko Haram’s 2,000 victims, as they had done when the editors of the leftwing newspaper Charlie Hebdo were killed in Paris. Far more people were murdered in Africa than in Paris, but their deaths weren’t followed by days and days of statements, analysis, paeans to the victims and gestures of solidarity.

No one expected it. The Hebdo murders, suggest the editors of the Jewish Daily Forward, “were horrifying and impactful not because of the number, but because of where they took place — in the heart of cosmopolitan Europe — and who was killed and why. And, perhaps, because the victims were white.”

The editors publicized and protested the inequality, for which they deserve praise, but I don’t think they saw all the reasons for the Western elites’ different responses. Race is certainly part of it….

More to the point, the Paris attack struck close to home. The victims were journalists and journalists write the news. The terrorists hit a major Western city like the ones where the political leaders and opinion-makers live. The victims were aggressively secular. In marching for the victims, the famous and powerful were marching for themselves and their own.

Which does not apply to the victims in Nairobi and northern Nigeria. They were black Africans, not white Europeans; students, not journalists; living in the developing world, not Europe; and Christian, not modern and secular. No high official is going to fly to east Africa and march for them. The Kenyan and Nigerian victims are not their people.

They are ours [as Christians].