What do you know about the worst terrorist attack this past week?

No, I am not referring to the terrorist attack in London that has a death toll of seven people and is dominating the news cycle. Nor am I referring to the suicide bomb that was set off outside a concert venue in Manchester. No, I'm referring to the one in Kabul, Afghanistan.

A massive blast tore through the diplomatic quarter of the Afghan capital Wednesday, killing at least 80 people and wounding more than 460, officials said. The devastation left Kabul in shock and underlined the country’s security struggles as it confronts a sustained wave of insurgent and terrorist attacks.

Interior Ministry officials said a huge quantity of explosives, hidden in a tanker truck, detonated at 8:30 a.m. during rush hour on a busy boulevard in the Wazir Akbar Khan district, which houses embassies, banks, supermarkets and government ministries. An entire city block was ravaged, with office buildings left in rubble and charred vehicles strewn across the road in one of the deadliest single attacks in Kabul.

The Taliban has denied responsibility, blaming ISIS. Some reports have speculated that this suicide attack was the result of Trump dropping the largest conventional bomb in the US military's inventory in the Khoresan province of Afghanistan against ISIS forces operating there because ISIS supposedly has a pattern of responding to attacks against its fighters with suicide bombings.

Meanwhile, yesterday, another bombing, this one at the funeral of an Afghan political figure, killed about twenty more people. That's over 100 people dead and hundreds more wounded from two terrorist attacks in Kabul within a span of four days. Last year conservative estimates place the number of civilians who were killed in Afghanistan's continuing conflict at 3,498 with another 7,920 wounded.

Over the course of the last 12 months there have been seven major terrorist attacks in Kabul alone where 20 or more people died, including two in which over 80 people died. Blame for these attacks has generally been assigned to either the Taliban or ISIS. Yet when these horrors occur, CNN doesn't go into 24/7 freak-out mode. MsNBC and Fox News don't spend hours telling us every last little detail they know or think they know, or provide insufferable analysis from countless experts and commentators about what it all means, who's responsible, what should we do, or should have done, etc., etc., etc.

This is not to diminish the deaths of the victims of the London and Manchester attacks. They are horrific and should be covered. However, I'm willing to bet most people in America knew little if anything about what happened this last week in Kabul. Kathy Griffin's stupid stunt with a fake decapitated head of Donal Trump received more coverage in America than these tragic and ongoing atrocities in Kabul.

Salon recently pointed out the discrepancy in news coverage and the hypocrisy regarding whose deaths from terror attacks we must care about and whose deaths we do not. The fact that the reporting is so skewed in favor of covering the deaths from attacks in Europe and America is largely the result of decisions by these corporate media outlets as to what is considered newsworthy. The subtitle to the Salon article says it all:

In biased media coverage of non-Western terror attack victims, the sense of personal tragedy is mostly absent

That bias has consequences. It magnifies the outrage against Muslims living in the West, thus leading to violent incidents like the most recent one in Portland. At the same time, by dehumanizing the victims of our wars of aggression in the Middle east, Africa and Southwest Asia, we as citizens of the country most responsible for the growth of extremist Islamic terrorists, along with our ally, Saudi Arabia, are manipulated into supporting further escalation of these conflicts. Already there is talk of putting more US troops in Afghanistan and of conducting a proxy war against Iran that could easily escalate into a full out invasion of the country that does not sponsor the terror groups doing most if not all of the killing in both the West and Muslim world.

The media doesn't have to lie to get us to do what the Deep State wants. All it has to do is mislead people through what it emphasizes in its news coverage and what it does not. The death of seven people in London is a tragedy of monumental proportions. The deaths of many, many more around the Muslim world - eh, who gives a damn. Unless we can blame our government's designated villains, Iran, Syria and/or Russia, for those deaths, of course.

So while you watch or read about the London attack yesterday, just remember far worse attacks happen everyday in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and other places around the world. And also remember none of this would likely have happened if our government and the other governments we dragged into this mess had not made the use of military force our only option. A policy decision, by the way, that was sold to us by the enablers in our complicit "free press."

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boriscleto's picture

Wouldn't know Afghanistan from a souvlaki stand.

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" In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry, and is generally considered to have been a bad move. -- Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy "

that was contemporaneous, and pretty fair.
And then, that's it.
I cut it off when they resumed their coverage about Jared Kushner.

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"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981

Big Al's picture

happening. They get their little tweets and reports on the Iphones and that's it. They get the headlines and put no thought into who is really doing what and why.

But even from those that think they care or think they know what's going on it gets murky. An example is the war in Syria. I saw a video yesterday of Robert Reich and right at the beginning he mentions the "Syria Civil War". That is a lie, a false narrative generated by our government and the oligarchy controlled media. It is a dangerous lie in that it seeks to control the definition of that war, that it is a war because of Syrians fighting each other for control of their country instead of an aggressive war against Syria from outside countries led by the U.S. But Reich parrots it like it's nothing and most of the "progressives" who listen to him think nothing of it because it's been pounded into them with headlines for five years, "Syria civil war", "Syria civil war".

We don't need everybody to understand for a revolution, but we need more than we've got.

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knows because they are told 24/7 it has nothing to do with our foreign adventurism.

They just want to kill us.

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Lookout's picture

Our hypocrisy is overwhelming. The trick is to play out Yemenis and Afghani's and ... as less than human - whose lives are unimportant. What is really amazing is the total lack of any rationale for the ongoing wars in the ME.

It's easy to see why we have been complicit in the creation and arming of ISIS...it gives a poor excuse for these insane wars we create and perpetrate. Wars for the profit of the fossil fuel corporations.

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“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

Few question why the US keeps bombing the ME. If somebody bombed my house and family for 16+ years, I'd be pretty pissed too.

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"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon

The Aspie Corner's picture

America's decades long mass psychosis couldn't end soon enough.

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Modern education is little more than toeing the line for the capitalist pigs.

Guerrilla Liberalism won't liberate the US or the world from the iron fist of capital.

CB's picture

These deaths are not even a fucking rounding error when it comes to killing completely innocent people. The US and it's allies kill innocent men, women and children on an industrial scale - all under the guise of bringing peace, stability, freedom and democracy.

MANCHESTER: Radicalization and Violent Extremism is the Responsibility of Western Governments
...
Official complicity is one of the elephants in the room. John Pilger and others have pointed to the fact that the British government knew there was a potential terrorist cell in Manchester, in the form of adherents of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), proscribed as a terror organization by the government, but turned into a useful tool during the war on Libya. Sympathisers, or members of the group, were well known to the authorities in Manchester. Many had been placed under a form of home detention when in 2011 they were released, had their passports returned and were allowed – virtually encouraged – to return to Libya to join Al Qaida-affiliated groups fighting under the air cover provided by the US, Britain and France.
...
The other elephant in the room is the ‘western’ wars which have killed millions of Muslims since the invasion of Iraq in 1991. The twelve years of sanctions alone (1990-2002) were responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children. The first war on Iraq was followed by the invasion of 2003, the destruction of Libya and then the war on Syria. If the death toll is extended back to Afghanistan it stands at a minimum of about four million, with estimates reaching as high as eight million.

Countless of millions of other Afghans, Iraqis, Libyans and Syrians have been turned into homeless refugees inside their own countries, or have been driven beyond their borders. In the aftermath of these wars thousands of people, men, women and children, down to infants and babies, have drowned in the Aegean or Mediterranean trying to reach safety in Europe. The ‘western’ governments that went to war against their countries must be held fully responsible for the short and long-term consequences of what they have done even if they are not prepared to admit responsibility themselves.

These appalling events would seem sufficient reason for any Muslim (or Arab Christian for that matter) to be very angry at what ‘the west’ has done and justification for the very small number of people who want to strike back. Against the scale of damage done to Muslim countries, the shock at ‘terrorist attacks’ (wars which extinguish the lives of millions of people do not fall into this category) should probably be that there have not been more of them.

We need to be precise about who is responsible for these crimes. ‘NATO’ did not destroy Libya: the US, Britain and France did, with marginal help from other actors. These three countries have been at the center of all the disasters that have overwhelmed the Middle East and North Africa since the French invasion of Algeria in 1830.
...

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Look at how the Western media covered the Beslan terrorist hostage situation that killed scores of children. The word "terrorists" was rarely if ever used. Hell, after the St.Petersburg subway terrorist attack, this is how Europe responded:

No European landmarks were illuminated for the St Petersburg victims
http://metro.co.uk/2017/04/04/no-european-landmarks-were-illuminated-for...

Only Israel had any such act honoring the victims.

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CB's picture

Each and every bomb we drop is equivalent to one terrorist attack. That means for each of the last 1000 days (as covered in the following link), we have perpetrated 76 terrorist attacks against a Muslim country. Imagine if the roles were reversed.

Here's a good site for monitoring civilian casualties by western nations:

https://airwars.org/

Monitoring and assessing civilian casualties from international airstrikes in Iraq, Syria and Libya. Seeking transparency and accountability from belligerents, and advocating on behalf of affected civilians. Archiving open-source reports, and military claims by nations.

22,013 Coalition Strikes
12,852 Strikes in Iraq
9,161 Strikes in Syria

1,031 Days of Campaign
3,817 Minimum Civilians Estimated Killed by Coalition
76,649 Bombs and Missiles Dropped

June 3rd – June 4th 2017: 32 new airstrikes

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"Repeat a lie a thousand times and it becomes the truth" some famous propaganda expert once said. I'm thinking he was off by at least 850 times. Seems like most people who have any time at all to consider current events, and thank god (or Trump) people are starting to be very engaged in following the news, get their news from one or two sources that they consider to be objective and reliable. We here seem to be a group of people that has always been engaged and critically so. Over the last 2 years most of us have found that there are very few trustworthy sources of information, and that even those we usually rely on must always be double checked. Mistakes happen, and unfortunately, people change though facts don't. What to do? How many people re-read Kevin Tillman's letter on the occasion of his brother Pat's birthday? How many people read Jeffery St Clair's recent long essay on the bombing of the USS Liberty? Or Gen Wesley Clark's warning? Or Eisenhower's for that matter? The media is controlled by a tiny group of people/organizations who have every reason to promote a war agenda. I have no answer as to how to reach people who may be able to think outside the propaganda machine.

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