Bombing on a scale of one to 10

If it’s in Europe it’s far more important than Africa as it is close to home

I SAW a cartoon on the internet this weekend which showed a map of the World, indicating the scale of interest and worry that we in Europe have with regards to suicide bombs and explosions caused by terrorists around the world and it does seem remarkably accurate.

The basic idea is that the closer to home the bomb is then the more worried we are and the more coverage it receives in the international press.

The map is entitled ‘Tragic World Map’ and divides the world into five differently coloured areas so that Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the USA and Western Europe are all the same colour and carry the punch line ‘Oh my God how terrible.’

Next come, India, Israel, Latin America, Mexico, South Africa and Turkey with caption, ‘That’s sad.’

Third is a combination of China, Egypt and Russia with ‘That’s life.’

Fourth come bits of the Middle East and Far East with the caption ‘Wait a moment, where is that?’

Last comes the rest of Africa with a swear word which translates as ‘So what.’

If American or European civilians are involved, then any one of the lower ranked areas will increase in prominence for a few days, but then things will quieten down again.

In the same week that I saw this map, we had the dreadful bombing in Brussels which grabbed headlines for days on end, but within a week either side of that there were 65 killed in Lahore, Pakistan when a suicide bomber picked an area in a park near a playground where mainly women and children were killed.

In Iraq, another bomb was exploded at a football ceremony with 17 footballers aged between 10 and 16 killed as were another 15 in the crowd.

Favourite city for Boko Horan terrorists saw 20 killed by a mosque in Maiduguri which seems to be hit on almost a monthly basis whilst in neighbouring Cameroon, two girls, who may have been kidnapped by that group in Nigeria two years ago were discovered before they could blow themselves up.

The only moral to this story is that these explosions are happening all of the time around the world and in the West we still don’t really take too much notice unless it is close to home and shakes us out of our own complacency.