Category: Europe

When a series of bombs went off at the Brussels airport and in a subway station yesterday, killing 31 people and injuring more than 200, the reaction of the US press was immediate and overwhelming. Every major news outlet turned its website over to coverage of the suicide attacks, often accompanied by live tickers and infographics. “Brussels Attacks Shake European Security” reads the banner headline on today’s New York Times’ front page (3/23/16); the Washington Post (3/22/16) worried that the bombings “made clear that European capitals remain perilously vulnerable despite attempts to dismantle the militant network that perpetrated the worst terrorist attack in Paris in generations last November.”

It was a curious statement, given that just nine days earlier, another European nation’s capital had been the site of a remarkably similar suicide bombing. On March 13, a car bomb went off in Ankara, Turkey, killing 34 people and injuring 125. As in Brussels, the Ankara bombing, carried out by a Kurdish group opposed to Turkey’s military actions in Kurdish regions of Syria, targeted a transit hub—there a heavily trafficked bus stop—and the victims were likewise unsuspecting civilians going about their lives, including the father of international soccer star Umut Bulut (Guardian, 3/14/16), who was on his way back from one of his son’s matches.

If terrorists had set out to conduct a controlled experiment on how the US media covers mass deaths overseas, they couldn’t have planned it any better. The Ankara bombing was mostly relegated to smaller stories buried in the foreign section: The New York Times (3/14/16) ran a 777-word story on page 6, noting that the attack “raised questions about the Turkish government’s ability to protect its citizens”; the Washington Post (3/14/16) ran an even shorter story reporting that “initial reports suggested at least some of the casualties were civilians waiting at nearby bus stops” — a strangely inexact account, perhaps explained by the article’s dateline of Beirut, over 400 miles away. CNN at least had a reporter on the scene — Arwa Damon, an Emmy-winning Syrian-American journalist based in Istanbul — though she was limited to a series of five-minute reports running down the basics of the attacks.

The news reports following the Brussels bombings were dramatically different in both scale and tenor. Multiple stories on the bombings and on the growth of support for ISIS in Belgium, plus video of the bombings’ aftermath were the norm; the New York Times website added a series of interactive graphics showing the bombing sites in detail. Scrolling website tickers updated readers on related news both large and small: The Washington Post’s feed included the breaking news “Starbucks Closes All Belgian Stores,” while the Times ticker included a post reporting that Facebook hadn’t yet released a tool to overlay the Belgian flag on top of profile photos.

It was almost an exact repeat of last November, when bombings in Beirut and Paris on subsequent days received wildly disparate attention from the US news media, with the Beirut bombings that killed 43 getting just 1/40th the US media coverage of the next day’s Paris attacks that killed 136. And the wall-to-wall coverage of Paris and Brussels is called into even greater relief when compared with the numerous other terrorist incidents in recent months that have received little US attention, such as attacks in Bamako, Mali; Tunis, Tunisia; Istanbul, Turkey; Jakarta, Indonesia; Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso; Mogadishu, Somalia; and Grand-Bassam, Ivory Coast, between November and March that collectively took 117 lives (Public Radio International, 3/22/16).

The usual defense of US outlets that offer lesser coverage of deaths in other parts of the world cites readers’ and viewers’ increased interest when Americans are somehow involved — at its most base, the principle expressed in McLurg’s Law that a death in one’s home country is worth 1,000 deaths on the other side of the world. (This was on full display in the Chicago Tribune’s lead story on the Brussels bombings, which was headlined “Brussels Attacks: 3rd Bomb Found; Americans Hurt.”) But while US citizens were injured in Brussels — three Mormon missionaries caught in the airport blast received widespread coverage, including in USA Today (3/22/16) and on CBSNews.com (3/22/16) and NBCNews.com (3/22/16) — and none in Ankara, another Turkish bombing this month did have American casualties: Two Israeli-Americans, Yonathan Suher and Avraham Goldman, were killed along with two others in an ISIS suicide bombing in Istanbul on March 20. Their deaths earned brief stories in the New York Times (3/19/16) and Bloomberg News (3/19/16), but no mention elsewhere in the US news media.

Perhaps the greatest difference in post-bombing coverage, though, came in the lessons the media suggested that readers draw from the Brussels and Ankara attacks. Ankara’s bombing was treated as matter-of-fact, if not entirely unremarkable: The New York Times article’s first sentence (3/13/16) described it as merely “the latest of a string of terrorist attacks that have destabilized the country,” though it later acknowledged that it was the first of these that had targeted civilians. (By the US State Department’s definition of “terrorism”—which involves attacks on non-combatants—the earlier attacks would not be considered terrorism.) The Associated Press coverage (3/13/16) noted only that it was “the third in the city in five months,” without mentioned that the first two attacks were against military targets, not civilians.

The Brussels attacks, meanwhile, were presented as a “shocking turn of events” (Washington Post, 3/23/16), but one explained by Belgium no longer really counting as European at all. The Post’s Adam Taylor reported that the Brussels bombing “wasn’t exactly a surprise,” noting that the Belgian capital, “once best known as a center for European culture and politics,” was now “tainted” by its “links to extremism and terrorist plots.” The problem, it specified, was centered in Molenbeek, a Brussels suburb “just across the Canal not far from some of Brussels’ more fashionable areas,” which  “first began to fill up with Turkish and Moroccan immigrants around 50 years ago” and is now beset by high unemployment and “many seedy and rundown shops.”

The New York Times, meanwhile, prominently featured a news analysis piece by Adam Nossiter (headlined “Brussels Attacks Underscore Vulnerability of an Open European Society”) warning that “the enduring vulnerability of Europe to terrorism in an age of easy travel and communications and rising militancy” would lead to

a new round of soul-searching about whether Europe’s security services must redouble their efforts, even at the risk of further crimping civil liberties, or whether such attacks have become an unavoidable part of life in an open European society.

Nossiter didn’t specify which civil liberties could be “crimped” — a term that had been toned down, by the time his article appeared on today’s print front page (3/23/16), to “impinging on.” He did suggest, though, that Belgium could face “widening derision as being the world’s wealthiest failed state” — something that raises the question of how the United States, with 31 mass killings in the year 2015 (according to USA Today’s ongoing “Behind the Bloodshed” count), should be categorized.

(Nossiter, a longtime Times correspondent, has a bit of a history of “news analysis” pieces showing the need for a bit more analyzing, including one arguing that the displacement of New Orleans’ poor could present an “upside” of Hurricane Katrina, and another citing the African Union’s refusal to cooperate with the International Criminal Court as representative of “the gulf separating the West and many African leaders” on human rights, notwithstanding that the US has itself refused to cooperate with the ICC on numerous occasions.)

Bloomberg News echoed the idea that freedom — either of civil liberties, of travel, or both — was to blame, noting “the vulnerability of open societies such as Belgium” while asserting that “a deluge of refugees from the Middle East is testing the 28-nation bloc’s dedication to open borders and stirring up anti-foreigner demagoguery” — a correlation that would be more believable if Europe hadn’t had a long history of xenophobia well before Syrian refugees began arriving in 2015.

There are certainly reasons why the Brussels bombings might be considered of greater direct concern to American residents than the one in Ankara—specifically, the involvement of ISIS, which as the target of US bombing is more likely to attack the US than a Kurdish group. (Much of yesterday’s reporting on the Brussels bombings focused on what they meant for possible attacks on the US, including former US House homeland security chair Peter King helpfully telling CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, “Even though there is no indication of an attack, it could happen.”)

Yet the deluge of coverage of the Brussels bombing, and the paucity of attention for Ankara, began even before the bombers’ identities were known. And US news outlets steered clear of any opportunities to humanize the Ankara victims — unlike the UK’s Independent (3/14/16), which reported on a widely shared Facebook post that asked “Will you be Ankara?” and compared the site of the attack to “a bomb going off outside Debenhams on the Drapery in Northampton, or on New Street in Birmingham, or Piccadilly Circus in London.”

Instead, the lasting impression for US readers is that deaths in Belgium are more newsworthy than an equal number of deaths in Turkey, and that if Belgium is to avoid sinking to the level of “failed nations,” it needs to address the outsiders who are dragging it down to a level unbecoming of its continent, or at least its western half. Europe, it’s clear, has no monopoly on anti-foreigner demagoguery.

Neil deMause is a contributing writer for FAIR, and runs the stadium news website Field of Schemes.

By Ryan Carey-Mahoney

A series of coordinated attacks in Brussels on Tuesday morning killed dozens and injured hundreds. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the devastation — an attack that some have been warning for years would be possible.

To really understand all that’s happening in the Belgian capital, we recommend you read these five stories.

1. Why is tiny Belgium Europe’s jihad-recruiting hub?, by Michael Birnbaum

With 350 citizens in Syria, Belgium has the highest number of foreign fighters per capita of any European country. The influence of those fighters, bitter divisions throughout the country and “ineffective” integration of immigration has made Belgium a breeding ground of terror activity.

Like other European nations, Belgium is experiencing the consequences of what critics call decades of ineffectiveness in integrating immigrants, including many Muslims.

2. Why is Brussels under attack?, by Adam Taylor

In recent years, Brussels has gone from being a cultural center to a city riddled with terror plots. Take, for instance, last week’s capture of Salah Abdeslam, thought to be the last surviving architect of the Paris attacks. Its success quickly became overshadowed by the thought of how vast this terror network could be.

While the discovery of Abdeslam was touted as a success, it also appeared to show that the number of people involved in the Paris attacks could be far larger than first thought. And worryingly, there were signs that Abdeslam and the network around him had been planning more attacks.

3. A decade ago, she warned of radical Islam in Belgium’s Molenbeek, by Steven Mufson

Just over a decade ago, Belgian journalist Hind Fraihi went undercover in Brussels’s Muslim-heavy district of Molenbeek. Her reports revealed a hot-bed of violent extremism bubbling up in the area that she says should have been a wake-up call for Belgium.

Now, she says, because Belgian authorities have not done enough to fight extremism, “there is a whole generation waiting to participate in these actions.”

4. Attacks in Brussels bypassed a city already on high alert, by Thomas Gibbons-Neff

The city started preparing for an attack after the assaults in Paris in November. But even being on high alert for a “possible and likely” attack for months wasn’t enough to prevent them.

“You can’t protect every target, everywhere, all the time,” one security official said. “They’ve been on complete alert, and still all these measures are still insufficient against a determined adversary.”

5. Turkey’s president warned of terror threat to Brussels just days before it happened, by Ishaan Tharoor

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan issued a foreboding statement in the wake of his country’s own terror attack on March 13. In it, he warned that attacks like the one in Ankara, the capital of Turkey, can happen anywhere, specifically citing Brussels as an example.

There is no reason for the bomb which exploded in Ankara not to explode in Brussels, where an opportunity to show off in the heart of the city to supporters of the terror organization is presented, or in any city in Europe. Despite this clear reality, European countries are paying no attention, as if they are dancing in a minefield. You can never know when you are stepping on a mine. But it is clear that this is an inevitable end.

Read more: 

Blasts leave dozens dead at Brussels airport and metro station

Live updates: Attacks in Brussels

• Yasmin Ahmed

On Tuesday morning, Brussels became the newest victim of terrorism. Two explosions at Zaventem airport left 14 dead and many injured. One of the explosions is believed to have originated from a suitcase bomb, the other from a suicide bomber. The metro system was attacked an hour later, leaving 20 killed and many injured at the Maelbeek station. The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the attacks.

Between the two attacks at least 170 are injured, according to new reports. “We were fearing terrorist attacks, and that has now happened,” Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel said at a news conference, reported by The New York Times. The attacks were “blind, violent, cowardly.”

Molenbeek is a suburb of Brussels known as a hotbed for terrorist recruitment and activity. Salah Abdeslam, a Belgian-born French citizen, was apprehended four days ago in Molenbeek and charged for his involvement in the Paris attacks in November. Police believe the Paris attacks, in which more than 130 were killed, were planned in Brussels. 

Some residents of Molenbeek have spoken to reporters, though doing so is dangerous. CNN reports that young people there feel marginalized and have few economic opportunities, making them particularly susceptible to radicalization. Whatever the reason, more residents of Belgium have left to join fighters in Syria and Iraq than from any other Western European country.

Belgium has come under harsh critique for their response to terrorism in the past. Molenbeek’s mayor was given a list of suspects in the neighborhood a month before the Paris attacks. She was criticized for not acting when two of these suspects were implicated in the Paris incident. 

Belgium’s Interior Minister Jan Jambon promises that the country is doing all it can: “One-and-a-half years ago, we had 15 persons per month leaving for Syria or Iraq, now it’s less than five,” he told CNN.

Countries across Europe and the world have ramped up security measures in the wake of these latest attacks. Belgium’s neighbors have tightened border security. France has sent hundreds of police officers to its transportation hubs — trains, airports and ports.

The international community has responded with support and solidarity:

• French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said: “We are at war. In Europe we have been subjected to acts of war for several months.” 

• British Prime Minister David Cameron called for Europe to “stand together against these appalling terrorists and make sure they can never win.” 

• Russian President Vladimir Putin said the attacks “show once more that terrorism knows no borders and threatens people all over the world.” 

• US President Obama announced that “this is yet another reminder that the world must unite. We must be together regardless of nationality or race or faith in fighting against the scourge of terrorism.”

• Germany’s Justice Minister, Heiko Maas Tweeted: “Today is a black day for Europe. The horrible events in Brussels affect us all. We are steadfastly at the Belgians’ side. 

• Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven called the attacks an “attack against democratic Europe.”

• European Union leaders issued a joint statement: “This latest attack only strengthens our resolve to defend the European values and tolerance from the attacks of the intolerant. We will be united and firm in the fight against hatred, violent extremism and terrorism.”

Commentators worry about the impact these and other attacks might have on open borders in the European Union. Immigration checks were already implemented in several countries following the attacks in Paris.

Meanwhile, Islamic State press operatives released this brief statement: “Islamic State fighters carried out a series of bombings with explosive belts and devices on Tuesday, targeting an airport and a central metro station in the center of the Belgian capital Brussels, a country participating in the international coalition against the Islamic State.”

“Islamic State fighters opened fire inside Zaventem Airport, before several of them detonated their explosive belts, as a martyrdom bomber detonated his explosive belt in the Maalbeek metro station. The attacks resulted in more than 230 dead and wounded.”

Story Developing….CNN Reports, at least 30 now dead as a result of these attacks.

—Erin Wildermuth

Erin is a freelance writer, photographer and filmmaker. She is passionate about moving beyond party politics to identify pragmatic solutions to social, economic and political problems. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Times, the American Spectator, Doublethink and Scuba Diver Magazine. She spends her free time scuba diving, snowboarding and ravenously reading popular nonfiction. Erin holds a master’s degree in International Political Economy from the London School of Economics.

Sources:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-35869254

https://time.com/4267336/brussels-attack-world-respond/

https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/18/europe/salah-abdeslam-profile/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/21/europe/belgium-terror-fight-molenbeek