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Even One Terror Death is a Tragedy

I’m glad to see that the New York Times took a special, in-depth look at the victims of terror with a humanizing interactive feature. Gruesome terror attacks in far-flung places around the world are becoming…

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I’m glad to see that the New York Times took a special, in-depth look at the victims of terror with a humanizing interactive feature.

Gruesome terror attacks in far-flung places around the world are becoming increasingly common. Mass casualties counts are mere stats. The news cycle moves on before many of the dead are even identified.

However, I’d like to see the Western press find a way to acknowledge terror victims who weren’t killed in mass attacks. Even one terror death is a tragedy. (I’ll come back to this point.)

The FBI defines mass murder as “a number of murders (four or more) occurring during the same incident, with no distinctive time period between the murders.” Indeed, the smallest mass killing noted in the Gray Lady’s interactive feature is a March 19 suicide bombing in Istanbul which killed four people — including two Israelis.

So due credit to the New York Times for an interactive look at The Human Toll of Terror, along with a side article explaining the project. The Times chose to focus on terror attacks from March 13 through the 27th.

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The paper’s heart was clearly in the right place. Editors don’t lightly ask their reporters to spend weeks tracking down photos and information about 247 people in the far-flung countries of Belgium, Turkey, Pakistan, Iraq, Nigeria and the Ivory Coast. And the Times even used the word terror.

We decided not to move on but to look back. To find out as much as we could about every single human being slain in a mass killing anywhere, to trace the ripple effects of the violence, to identify the things that connected people across places or distinguished one from the other. Simply put: to show terrorism’s human toll.

At first we set out to cover the month of March. But the attacks kept coming, so we scaled back to two weeks, for fear of being overwhelmed. Those two weeks included eight attacks in six countries; 247 men, women and children taken forever.

Remembering Taylor Force

On March 8, shortly before what would be the Times’ chosen time period, a 22-year-old Palestinian, Bashar Masalha, ran along a Jaffa boulevard, stabbing Israelis, before being shot by police. Masalha killed Taylor Force, a US citizen, and injured 12 others.

Vice President Joe Biden was visiting Shimon Peres in Jaffa, not far from the scene of the attack.  Eyewitness footage of the stabbing spree was posted online.

The New York Times reported Force’s death, noting that he was a West Point graduate, served as a US Army officer in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and was a graduate student at Vanderbilt University. He was in Israel along with 29 other graduate students learning about global entrepreneurship.

Mourning friends at Vanderbilt and in his hometown of Lubbock, Texas, recalled Force as a someone who always tried to help people.

Force isn’t noted in the interactive feature because he was killed before the time frame set by the editors, and because, fortunately, more people weren’t killed.

But had Masalha been successful, he would’ve gone down as a mass murderer. His failure wasn’t for lack of effort.

It seems to be an iron rule of press coverage that failed Palestinian attacks result in headlines emphasizing the Palestinian’s death. After all, no matter what the circumstances, headlines tend to recognize death, not intent.

And the drip-drip effect of all the Palestinian killed headlines is that the public simply associates Israel with — what else? — killing Palestinians.

Since October, 34 Israelis and four foreign nationals have been killed in a wave of Palestinian terrorism and violence, including stabbings, car-rammings, and shootings.

In the same time frame, around 170 Palestinians have also been killed. Of the Palestinian deaths, two-thirds were while attacking Israelis and the rest during clashes with soldiers.

I’m glad the Times decided to catch its breath and bring some humanity back to its terror coverage.

But I also hope the news industry will both realize and remind us all that the murder of even one person — such as Taylor Force —  is a tragedy too.

 

 

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