BEIRUT, Lebanon — Ali Awad, 14, was chopping vegetables when the first bomb struck. Adel Tormous, who would die tackling the second bomber, was sitting at a nearby coffee stand. Khodr Alaa Deen, a registered nurse, was on his way to work his night shift at the teaching hospital of the American University at Beirut, in Lebanon.
All three lost their lives in a double suicide attack in Beirut on Thursday, along with 40 others, and much like the scores who died a day later in Paris, they were killed at random, in a bustling urban area, while going about their normal evening business.
Around the crime scenes in south Beirut and central Paris alike, a sense of shock and sadness lingered into the weekend, with cafes and markets quieter than usual. The consecutive rampages, both claimed by the Islamic State, inspired feelings of shared, even global vulnerability — especially in Lebanon, where many expressed shock that such chaos had reached France, a country they regarded as far safer than their own.
But for some in Beirut, that solidarity was mixed with anguish over the fact that just one of the stricken cities — Paris — received a global outpouring of sympathy akin to the one lavished on the United States after the 9/11 attacks.
Monuments around the world lit up in the colors of the French flag; presidential speeches touted the need to defend “shared values;” Facebook offered users a one-click option to overlay their profile pictures with the French tricolor, a service not offered for the Lebanese flag. On Friday the social media giant even activated Safety Check, a feature usually reserved for natural disasters that lets people alert loved ones that they are unhurt; they had not activated it the day before for Beirut.
“When my people died, no country bothered to light up its landmarks in the colors of their flag,” Elie Fares, a Lebanese doctor, wrote on his blog. “When my people died, they did not send the world into mourning. Their death was but an irrelevant fleck along the international news cycle, something that happens in THOSE parts of the world.”
The implication, numerous Lebanese commentators complained, was that Arab lives mattered less. Either that, or that their country — relatively calm despite the war next door — was perceived a place where carnage is the norm, an undifferentiated corner of a basket-case region.
In fact, while Beirut was once synonymous with violence, when it went through a grinding civil war a generation ago, it has not had a bombing this deadly since that conflict ended in 1990.
(A reminder of the muddled perceptions came last week, when Jeb Bush, the Republican presidential candidate, declared that “if you’re a Christian, increasingly in Lebanon, or Iraq or Syria, you’re gonna be beheaded.” That was news to Lebanon’s Christians, who hold significant political power.)
The disparity in reactions highlighted a sense in the region of being left alone to bear the brunt of Syria’s deadly four-year war, which has sent more than four million refugees fleeing, mostly to neighboring countries like Lebanon. For the Lebanese, the government has been little help, plagued as it is with gridlock and corruption that have engendered electricity and water shortages and, most recently, a collapse of garbage collection. Many in the region — both supporters and opponents of the Syrian government — say they have long warned the international powers that, if left unaddressed, the conflict would eventually spill into the West.
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To be sure, the attacks meant different things in Paris and Beirut. Paris saw it as a bolt from the blue, the worst attack in the city since World War II, while to Beirut the bombing was the fulfillment of a never entirely absent fear that a more recent outbreak of violence would recur.
Lebanon seemed to have recovered over the past year and a half from a series of bombings claimed by Sunni militant groups as revenge for the intervention by Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based Shiite militia, in the Syrian civil war to provide critical support for the Syrian government.
Some blamed news coverage for the perception that Beirut was still an active war zone. They cited headlines — including, briefly, a Times one that was soon changed to be more precise — that refer to the predominantly Shiite neighborhood where the bombing took place as a “stronghold” of the militia and political party Hezbollah.
That is hard to dispute in the political sense — Hezbollah controls security in the neighborhood and is highly popular there, along with the allied Amal party. But critics say the phrase risks portraying a busy civilian, residential and commercial district as a justifiable military target.
Meanwhile, Syrians fretted that the brunt of reaction to both attacks would fall on them. There are a million Syrians in Lebanon, a country of four million; some have become desperate enough to contemplate joining the accelerating flow of those taking smugglers’ boats to Europe.
But now, the attacks could rally political pressure in Europe to stop admitting them. When evidence emerged that at least one of the Paris attackers may have posed as an asylum seeker to reach Europe, some opponents of the migration quickly used that to argue for closing the doors.
That drew sharp reactions from Syrians, who said refugees were fleeing to Europe precisely to escape indiscriminate violence.
Beirut Wonders If Some Terror Attacks Mean More Than Others
Over 40 died in Beirut in an ISIS terror attack a day before the Paris strikes, but Lebanese victims haven’t gotten the same attention
I’m not much of a mathematician, but back when I was a correspondent in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the middle 2000s, I tried to make sense of the barrage of terror attacks by developing my own little algorithm. I called it Taliban math. The first suicide bombing—in a market, in a capital city, in a school—was international news. In order for the next bombing to make a story, the number of dead had to be exponentially higher. I tried to pin down a ratio: how many Pakistani or Afghan dead would it take to generate the same newsworthiness as the death of an American? At what point during the arc of covering a war waged by terror attacks do we stop giving the names and details that make the dead one of “us,” and start assigning simple death counts that makes the dead one of “them?”
I thought about that this week as terror attacks unfurled in both Beirut, where I was based from 2010 to 2014, and Paris, where I lived in the late 1990s. The Beirut bombings, on Nov. 12, killed 43. A pair of motorcycle-mounted suicide bombers left a further 200 injured. It was a news item, to be sure, and the worst bombing since Beirut’s civil war ended in 1990, but one largely reduced to geopolitics: The attack was claimed by ISIS, or the Islamic State, and it took place in a neighborhood that was a stronghold for Hizballah, which is fighting in Syria on behalf of President Bashar Assad, with backing from Iran. International coverage didn’t dwell on the fallout or the families left behind, an omission that makes it seem almost inevitable that it will happen again.
Which brings us to the traumatic events in Paris on Friday night. Already the victims are being named, their brief biographies sketched out in a way that makes this attack much more personal. The venues are familiar, not just to me, but to thousands of tourists with happy holiday memories of those streets and bars and clubs, and millions more around the world who know Paris as the City of Love. Beirut is a cosmopolitan city of culture, but not long after I arrived, I installed safety film on all my windows, to keep shards of glass from raining down on me in the event of a bomb attack.
Much has been made of the disparity of coverage between two attacks, one day apart, and claimed by the same terror group. I don’t know what algorithm Facebook uses to activate its Safety Check feature, which allows users to mark themselves and others as safe in the wake of tragedies, and why Beirut didn’t trigger it. (Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that SafetyCheck had only been activated in the past after natural disasters, but that going forward it will be activated “for more human disasters going forward as well.”) The Twittersphere has lobbed, justifiably in some cases, accusations of Western bias, or worse, racism. “Dear Facebook,” @ktbradford tweeted. “Nice French flag overlay. But how do I change my profile picture to show solidarity with the people of Beirut?”
Whatever the reasons—and there are many—for the disparity of global reaction, the message that emerges from these twinned events is that some lives matter more than others. ISIS is not just a French problem, or, if the ISIS claims to have downed the Russian airliner in Egypt are verified, a Russian problem. It is not just a Lebanese problem. Until there is some recognition that an ISIS attack on one country is an attack on all, ISIS will be everybody’s problem—a problem that won’t be solved.
