What an excellent post. I'm going to link to it right now.
Yes, superb post wonderdog. I'm going straight over to Progressive Bloggers to recommend it, and then perhaps I'll do some research and post something about this tragedy myself.
For those who are curious, this story is now the #5 headline at CNN.com (look for it below "Summer heat setting records across West").
sigh...
Wow. Great post. You are absolutely right ... but really, there is no surprise. Allied soldier casualty reports flood back every day, yet how often do we get Iraqi death tolls? They aren't 'one of us', so no one cares. Sick.
Or perhaps it's a summer Saturday and not many people have heard the news yet. I only heard about it on the 6:00 news, and I've been coding since then.
There are a couple posts on the topic listed in CanConv's War on terror category...
http://canconv.boundbygravity.co...gory.php?
cat=16
All by righties too...
Perhaps you're being a tad too snarky, no?
I think it needs a t-shirt.
Thank you for this post Wonderdog. On the day of the 7/7 attacks I was pretty distraught over the whole thing and couldnt bring myself to blog at all for a few days. But I was well enough to scan and read briefly. All I saw were huge union jacks and "We are all Londoners today" from the liberal and conservative blogs and while I know people's hearts were in the right places, it just made me ill for the very reasons you describe.
What's wrong with being snarky? We're all trying to call it as we see it, and clearly, this is how Wonderdog sees it.
There are a couple posts on the topic listed in CanConv's War on terror category...
Yes, there are two of them and one of them goes on to blame the Egyptians.
Yes, Robert, I think I found that blog too. It's the Egyptians' fault, and us lefties are now supposed to start blaming Blair and Bush...
Using the bombings as a stick to whack anyone is pretty much dumb. That includes this post. Instead of writing something about the plight of the victims in Egypt, the issue is how rightists respond? Cripes... that's not logical.
Sorry, I think Wonderdog missed the mark by a country mile here....
Egypt out of Iraq...Now!
We have to deal with root causes and there is no question that the Egyptians ongoing occupation of Iraq has invited this horrible bombing.
No one really paid attention to Spain either. There's good cause for it though. The leader of our nation lives in Britain.
I thought the issue was how the leftists respond?
What I said in closing about this on my blog was:
"...this is important news. It's 21:00 now, and I really haven't read much about it on the many blogs I frequent. (The one that I did was blaming the Egyptian government for it - never mind.) And I'd love some more backgound on it.
Why attack Egypt?"
I don't think that Wonderdog has missed a mark here.
As for what THE mark here is, well, no one seemed to be addressing it.
The one blog I found was using it as a base to attack muslims, Egypt and left wingers.
Seems post worthy to me.
Where, Andrew, did I attack rightists?
Ho, hum, looking carefully at what I wrote ... nowhere. I referred to bloggers in general, didn't I?
If there's an attack on right-wing blogs here, it's only because (or if) it's the right wing bloggers who usually respond to these things most vociferously.
Jay, you're going to start embarrassing yourself soon. Never - not once - have I argued that Iraq is a root cause.
Oops, did I write "soon?" I should have been using the past tense....
I have not posted on any of the recent attacks as so many have. I have commented in a few places. I noticed a dirth of coverage on the attack in Egypt.
Like you I am amazed the Blogging Tories are not to keen to talk about it.
Mark asks, Why Egypt?
Today's LA Times may have a partial answer: the target was "a seaside resort well-known for its thick presence of intelligence and security agents."
Everything's connected in this little global village of ours. But I've been unable to track down whose intelligence and security agents are being referred to here.
Anyone else?
Please don't let me interrupt your creepy little obsession with my writing -- you've now spent a LOT more time writing about that "pluck" column than I spent writing it -- but you're right, it was far from the most insightful thing I've written and far from the most insightful thing that could have been written. Again, please don't let that stop you from obsessing over it. It makes you kind of cute.
Now, on to your specific point: why so much comment about London and so little about Charm Al-Sheikh? A few thoughts:
-- congratulations. You're the last kid in journalism-critic class to learn about the difference between Thursday morning and Friday night. If something happens on Thursday morning, it'll fill the Saturday papers. If not, not. As for bloggers, some of them spend their weekend away from the computer. I would have thought a 10-year-old could figure that out, but you're making good progress.
-- There are a lot more English-language bloggers to link to in an English-speaking democracy than in Egypt, where there are fewer bloggers and many are writing in other languages. Again, there are people who would have figured that out.
Well, Paul, I think I've written about three offhand sentences on that column, which I hardly think qualifies as a creepy obsession.
To your point:
-- yes, you would expect less activity on the weekend. Some bloggers do spend their weekend away from the computer.
Others do not. Yet none of their posts were about this story.
-- I think that if we actually check, we'll see that most of the posts re London were not linking to UK bloggers but to news reports or to other North American bloggers. So the lack of English-speaking bloggers in Egypt would be something of a red herring.
The story was running on online news sites, yet it received very little comment. None that I could find from a a Canadian blog, in fact, at the time I posted this.
It's clear, then, that either blog coverage of the London attacks was disproportionately heavy, or that blog coverage of the attacks in Egypt was disproportionately light.
So nice try, Paul, but try again.
Incidentally, for those who want some kind of objective measure of the relative lack of interest sparked by the bombings in Egypt, toodle on over to Technorati and check out their top ten searches this hour.
For at least 24 hours following the bombings in London, about half of those searches were terms such as "London bombings," "London tube," and "London."
Yesterday, when I looked, only one referred to Egypt, and it was number five. Today, nothing. Number one today: Stephanie Klein.
'nuff said, I think. You can spin this fucker any way you like, but the facts support my contention.
Yes they do. I'm with you - heard similar flack myself on this one when I wrote about it after reading your post. I had my own little spat with 'anon' who took offense to my own view that the difference in posts on London vs Egypt had to do with us all being guilty of subconsciously playing the race card from time to time. I guess the truth is hard for some to hear, but cultural biases are ingrained - in a culture of imperialism and colonialism that is what happens, and we must be vigilant in our efforts to rise above that.
It's not easy, and we all fall into it from time to time - certainly, I know that I do - but where is that line, then, between a cultural bias and feeling more inclined to write about something which feels closer to home?
That's something I struggle with - I think we all do - but it certainly isn't something which diminishes the point. The perception that arises from the discrepancy in post numbers is that a bias exists, which whether true or false, that perception itself is nonetheless a problem. Many of us claim to be equalists, and to see all humans as alike, yet for the most part post only on our own people - what impression does that cast, I wonder? Which I think, personally, is the real issue here.
I don't know the answer to this issue - I don't know if there is one - outside of if we're going to write on a tragedy happening to our own, then when something similar or worse happens to others, we should be writing about it also. Proximity to home, ancestral ties, allegiances, are all excuses that don't address the core notion that we are humans, we are all the same, we all deserve to have our story told rather than ignored. It does us no good to just be aware of ourselves ... and I find it disturbing when a tragedy in another culture is met with a shrug ... most disturbing when I realize that I am the one giving the shrug, as I have done previously. As we have all done previously. I want to change that, to change myself so I no longer do that, and hope that others will aspire to that end also.
Thanks for the inspiration of your words.
"I'm confused about the math. How many Arab lives are equivalent to one Western life, and how many Western life equivalents does it take to make a story newsworthy in the Canadian blogosphere?"
It's cold, but you probably could develop some metric (number of column inches / number of posts etc.) and answer (to the extent you can answer anything with statistics) that exact question.
Start with 1 Canadian life as your base measure and every time you cross a barrier, whether it be a national boundary line on a map, a cultural barrier, a historical barrier or a racial barrier watch the number of lives required for an equivalent reaction increase.
Sure there are other factors at work such as the timing of the incident, both in terms of the weekly news cycle and in terms of how many other bombins there have been recently, but does anyone honestly think that if the Egyptian attack had occurred in, say, Liverpool, that it would have been covered as lightly as it has been? Of course not.
There was an American diplomat at the restaraunt 2 hours before the bomb went off, I'll try to find the link......
Can't find it, disreguard the last comment.
What disturbs me is that, despite the fact that terrorists have been killing and blowing-up Jews in Israel for decades now, you don't seem to point out that nobody every said "We are all Israelis," a far more apt analogy if you want to make a point about bias. Obviously, you are an antisemite.
The only reason there is a "crashing silence" is due to the fact all Muslims everywhere have done the exact same thing they have always done in the face of terrorism...
THEY REMAIN SILENT!!!!!
The longer Muslims have nothing to say(a "crashing silence"), about Muslim terrorists... the longer this war will go on, and the longer they will die. Where are the fucking fatwas for terrorists anyway?
p.s wonderdork: George W. Bush was in Egypt today to pay his respects... WAS MARTINI?
Excellent point Moshe.
Wonderdork must be a huge fan of carolyn perish.
It's funny, we do not get the same level of leftist lunacy when a Jewish settlement is shelled.
After all, Bush and Blair and the crusader alliance is the cause of all of terrorist's problems, according to all the terrorists. Mass murder is the only solution terrorists have...
Only Muslims can stop the war on terror. If they choose to fight a war agianst the West... they will die. 
Knight of Low-Grade Moron: Uh, what? So now we shouldn't care if Muslims get blown up by other Muslims because, well, they're all just fucking Muslims anyway?
Is that it?
And what does Paul Martin have to do with it? Did I make some comment about George Bush here? Am I a professed fan of Paul Martin?
Really, I'm trying to figure out what planet you're on.
Yaakov: Good point. You could make the same case about suicide bombers in Iraq.
But no, I'm not an anti-Semite. Fact is, these particular bombs were in Egypt, and was linked to the same terrorist network as the London bombings.
DazzlinDinko
"There was an American diplomat at the restaraunt 2 hours before the bomb went off, I'll try to find the link......"
This will change or prove what?
Mass murder is mass murder. Killing people indiscriminatly is NOT a military or political action in any way. It is a criminal act. It always will be.
"How many Arab lives are equivalent to one Western life, and how many Western life equivalents does it take to make a story newsworthy in the Canadian blogosphere?"
Well in context I guess we should have 24/7 coverage of the Sudan genocide. Death tolls by terrorists are going up worldwide. The vast majority of this is due to Islamic extremism. The London attacks were much more media signifigant because it happened in LONDON! Do you not see the relevance?
A train crash in Canada will ALWAYS get much much more media coverage than a train crash in North Korea with 10 times the death count. Geographicalpoliticalcultural relevance.
So the answer to you question is, it takes MUCH MUCH more Arab tragedy to "make a story newsworthy in the Canadian blogosphere?"
The same way it would take thousands of AMERICAN deaths to make Arabs dance in the fucking streets.
"So the answer to you question is, it takes MUCH MUCH more Arab tragedy to 'make a story newsworthy in the Canadian blogosphere?'"
That was my point, Einstein. Thanks for restating it.
Wonderdork... what "crashing silence" are you even talking about? I don't understand who sees the terrorism in Egypt reported in a different way than all the other terror that Islam is causing worldwide...
Read the post again, you half-wit.
And by the way, to your media relevance argument, it was the top news story everywhere I looked, but bloggers ignored it.
So much for that one. Try again.
"That was my point, Einstein. Thanks for restating it."
Yea well, it's a stupid fucking point. Why does it matter?
If an Afghani solder is killed in the line of duty while protecting his country, am I supposed to care more or less about that, than if a Canadian solder is fallen performing the same duty.
Ho ho, ha ha ... tears streaming down my face.
So, was it a "stupid fucking point" when you made it, too?
Address this, Low-Grade: it was front-page news, but bloggers didn't mention it.
Go on. That's right. Actually address the point, and stop blowing smoke.
Terrorists might be able to affect Middle Eastern Oil ventures, but it will be a long time before they are able to achive space flight.
Tommorow, the Good ol' U.S of fuckin' A is putting the Shuttle back up where it belongs.
I was fishing 15 miles from the launchpad of Cape Canaveral in Jan 2003. We caught 6 40 pound amberjacks to START the day. The captain of the boat was a WWII vet, and knew all of the sunk subs(great snapper spots). I watched Columbia go up for the Good of Humanity. When I got back from Florida and back on the reserve, I heard it disenigrated. The Muslim zealots(obl included) laugh as the first Israeli astronaut sacrifices his life.
The terrorists have a long way to go.
God speed Ramon.
God speed NASA.
God speed America.
wonderdork
When that thing LIGHTS THE FUCK UP tommorow... I'll be crying, I promise.
AND when it lands.
From the Ultimate Michael Yon.
"I remember the Kashmiri Mohammedan and his three jars. While terrorists on earth do their best to keep us down, men and women boarded a space ship in Florida today, and flew into space."
That's the LAST line. The first one is just as Good... ect, ect.
Let us not forget the Columbia Crew.
Let us not waiver for one second our deep commitment and gratitude to the United States of America.
How brave are those people in free fall as we speak. They know the risks involved on the journey back better than any of us.
You know it'll be a nice smooth one when they get home anyway! 
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