As we go about our daily lives every morning, we hear about the newest attack on a country in the Middle East in the news. To us it seems logical to just blame it on some extremist group and expect Obama to intervene, but who really knows how that young Syrian girl who just lost her whole family in a bombing feels? We try to sympathise with these young, innocent people but we’re too Westernised for that. It’s like we’ve been programmed to care for the few minutes in the morning when the 8 o’clock BBC news is on, and by the end of the day, we’ve forgotten about newly orphaned children. As Malcolm X said, “the media is the most powerful entity on Earth…Because they control the minds of the masses.” It’s as if it’s now apart of our daily routines to hear about innocent civilians being tortured and not feel anything.
Conflict isn’t just in the Middle East, there’s been so many conflicts throughout Africa that sadly, haven’t had much media attention. Who knows about the riots in Kenya, or the troubles the Congolese people are going through? Who really, really, knows who is behind the missing teenagers in Northern Nigeria? But then again, which Westernised person dares to ask these questions? We trust the news enough to give us unbiased reports, but how is that possible when two stations give two different sides of the story, did they forget there’s three sides to every story?
You hear many people say, “things are different now, its 2014”, but the torture and inhuman acts that are happening to innocent people who are stuck in these conflicts all around the world challenges this notion. The time of Hitler may have passed and you would have thought that we would have learned a lesson from it and strive to help protect the innocent, but you thought wrong.
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