Justice

This Meme Explains Why You Won't Hear Much About ISIS' Latest Attacks

July 5th 2016

There is a terrible reason you won't hear much about the terror attacks in Baghdad that killed at least 200 people on Sunday.

isis-video Reuters - heavy.com

The suicide truck bomb that ripped through a shopping district killed more people than the terror attacks in Paris last year, the attack on a Brussels airport in March, and the mass shooting of a gay club in Orlando last month.

iraqi-woman-cryingAP/Hadi Mizban - apimages.com

There were also recent attacks in Istanbul, Bangladesh, and Saudi Arabia that received less attention than attacks on European countries and the U.S.

This meme illustrates the awful truth: people don't care about Muslim countries.

Author, human rights activist, and Harvard Fellow Qasim Rashid tweeted the color coded map of the world showing the level of concern the western world has for countries in other regions of the world.

"Tragedy World Map"cinismoilustrado.com - twitter.com

Muslims were the victims of 82 to 97 percent of global terror attacks in a five year period from 2006 to 2011, according to a report on terrorism by the National Counterterrorism Center. People from Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, and Nigeria suffered the most deaths in that order.

As Vox reported on Tuesday, experts anticipate more global attacks as the Islamic State loses territory in Syria and Iraq.

Despite the reality that most terror victims are Muslims in Middle Eastern and African countries, Iraq falls into the category of "well, life is like this," according to the map. The majority of African countries fall into the "who cares?" category.

"Tragedy World Map"cinismoilustrado.com - twitter.com

Rashid pointed out that there is a lack of public mourning for people in the Middle East and other countries where the citizens aren't white.

A 2014 study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that people have a hard time feeling empathy for other ethnic groups.

"Despite its early origins and adaptive functions, empathy is not inevitable." the study's authors wrote. "People routinely fail to empathize with others, especially members of different social or cultural groups."

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