You would think that by virtue of being human, every person’s life is worth the same. That if one person was to be murdered on one side of the world and another on the other, then the significance is the same.
Yet it is clear that this is not the case. We read on the news daily about people being killed in war-torn countries, people dying of hunger and thirst, children being murdered by missiles but these people remain anonymous to us. We do not learn their names, we do notooo hear about how their deaths have affected their families, we do not witness any coverage of their funerals. There are only a handful of voices to mourn them and they are quickly forgotten.
So why is it that when the same human dies in another country, there is a huge outcry? Where was the anger against violence then? Where were the voices demanding peace when people were being forced out of their homes and confined to open-air prisons? Where was the news coverage? Were these people not human?
So many questions and no plausible answers. You have probably guessed that I am talking about the three Israeli teenagers who were found shot yesterday. Of course, this is a terrible thing but I found it startling to see that on the BBC news website, there was a live reaction page to the deaths. Where was the live reaction when hundreds of others were being killed? In the same sentence, the news report describes how security forces have killed 5 people in clashes. There is no reaction to their death so are those people not human?
Apart from the fact this whole thing appears to be part of a larger conspiracy to give the Israeli government an excuse to finally attack Hamas which has always been a thorn in their side, this just made me think about how we as humans seem to have forgotten that we all share a bond and a link. Children are dying over the world in large numbers yet we focus only on three.
We need to learn to live together. Every evil act should be condemned, not only when it appears to directly affect us. Otherwise this makes us hypocrites.
No one wants to be a hypocrite.
A WORRIED STUDENT 
Don’t take this the wrong way, but surely if we should condemn all evil acts and learn to live together, surely we should be mourning for the Israeli teenagers too?
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Oh yes definitely but in the same way we mourn them, we should mourn every other death.
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Of course we should; I couldn’t agree more. But it’s not possible and it’s better to mourn for some than to mourn for none at all.
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True but the international trend has always been to mourn more for certain countries than others. Why is this?
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Possibly because different countries themselves respond to these situations in different ways
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Hmm I don’t think that is the case. Everyone is affected by death in the same way. For some it sadly is an everyday occurrence but the pain people have to go through is no dulled. It just becomes less sensational for the media to report. This however is not only the media’s fault but we as humans who disregard others.
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However, in different communities and religions, grief and death are dealt with in different ways and I think this does have an effect. However, I completely agree with you that all human life is precious and everyone has an equal right to be remembered
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That’s true. However the bias we see on the media cannot be ignored and should be changed. God knows how this can happen though!
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I can understand why it’s difficult for them, but it does need to change
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Yup!
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May God have mercy on every Palestinian soul lost and every Palestinian person affected since the start of the occupation.
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Amen 🙂
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Reblogged this on Carl's Rants & Raves.
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Whichever the country is and whoever dies, death is the end of life and it affects only the beloved ones of the deceased. Death is the end of died one whether a country mourns over or no, whether media covers the death story or not, nothing matters to the dead one and there can’t be any replacement of him in
his beloved’s life.
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True but it certainly affects those who remain behind. News coverage affects attitudes towards people and places which is quite important when it comes to conflict areas.
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“When one person dies, it’s a tragedy, but when a million people die, it’s a statistic.” ― Joseph Stalin.
I think that this quote sums it up,right ?
Good post.
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Perfectly!
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I think it is because certain things affect us more than other things, for instance the murder of a child or baby will usually affect a lot more people than the murder of a grown person, they are both people but one seems more wrong and people are much more emotional which causes them to speak out more.
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Yes I can definitely understand that children dying is more emotionally shocking but then at times, there are children dying but one is made to seem more significant than the other when the only thing separating them is their nationality.
For example, a Palestinian teenager was killed today but the Mayor Of New York, Obama and other world leaders have not directly said anything when they did just a day ago.
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Thats what im saying people feel a stronger emotional connection to different people and that is when you hear from them, its not right but that seems to be the way it is for a lot of people. And honestly if obama doesnt get popularity points for something he couldnt care less anyway so….
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Hmm so we as people need to learn to feel for everyone.
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Yes we certainly do.
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There are too many reasons to post them here. One is definitely the amount of propaganda (especially be the mainstream media) that is force fed into people on a daily basis. This is especially true when it comes to war.
But I agree, people have to be consistent if one person or a group of people are murdered no matter their location.
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I agree, propaganda certainly plays a great role in this.
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A great post! I started an article on this with exactly the same title but then I thought: I probably shouldn’t talk about politics on an american website. So I turned into a short story about children and war. Anyway, you were braver than me so I thank for exposing the truth that politics determine the value of life. Good job.
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I was a bit worried about posting this too actually but then I thought oh well someone has to say something!
Thank you 🙂
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I just wanted to make a comment on your response to someone else saying this ” Everyone is affected by death in the same way.” That isn’t necessarily true. The way I’m affected by a death is not going to be the same as you. I don’t really grieve when someone dies. It’s not that I don’t care but it’s death, I can’t change that. It’s been done. Do I feel sad? Yes. But not everyone is going to be affect by death in the same way as I am. Plus it’s circumstantial. If my cousin who has terminal cancer dies soon, I will not be affected as much as my mother and her cousins because I don’t know my cousin as well and haven’t grown up around her. If my dog were to die, I’m going to be affected much more than anyone else in my family. So on and so forth. You can’t say you’re being affected the same as those parents of the teens, or anyone who knew them. If we had to cover every death that occurs then there would never be anything else on TV or in the news besides the announcement of deaths. There’s so many people who die every day and to say we should cover everyone the same as the other, or react the same as the other is just unrealistic.
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True. We as individuals are affected by death differently but the point I was trying to make was that if one child dies, and another dies on the other side of the country/state/world or even ‘side during war.’ then that death is felt the same by each of their respective parents and family.
On the wider scale though, if the media mourns and reports on the death of one child, then surely it should try to report equally on the death of another?
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Eh the death won’t be felt the same by the parents and family. The child could’ve been a child soldier and the parents don’t even know their child is dead or was alive. Or the parents could’ve been in and out of the child’s life and drug addicts who were selling that child for drugs. It’s not going to always be felt the same. And like I said before, it would be way too difficult to eb reporting on all of these deaths. Children and people in general are dieing all the time. The ones people hear about from wherever their sources are will be the ones reported. It’s just not realistic to think that they could equally report on all of these deaths.
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That is true but I am talking about children in the same state. The ones we know have died yet we brush under the carpet. The media certainly knows that people have died else it would not say ‘5 people killed’ yet it CHOOSES to give them less coverage based usually on their nationality.
It is not realistic to report on all of them but it is realistic to report equally on those we know about. So if there are reports of some people dying, then the media should, as is their job, investigate and then report. Not ignore or give a small comment.
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Where I live I hear of all kinds of people dying. Of all nationalities, races, religions, etc. It also depends on the situation surrounding their death. For example, someone who was brutally murdered is going to probably get more time because there’s more to tell than old lady Suzie who died of natural causes in her sleep at the age of 80.
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That’s all true but at the same time, there is an inbalance in the media about what they choose to report, often influenced by political agendas.
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This is sadly true. Something I’ve thought about in the past, but it shouldn’t be something that is allowed to slip to the back of my mind the way it often does.
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Yup, often we tend to ignore these types of.things, thinking that they aren’t worth mentioning but they really are.
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