On November 13, the Un-Islamic State attacks flooded Facebook walls, Twitter pages, and breaking news flashes on television. As if to counter, a second wave of angry Facebook posts then came with news of the attack in Beirut on November the 12th which had not been as popularly shared or discussed on major news centers such as BBC—bringing heated Facebook debate of the overly Western agenda in the news media that had not shared the attacks in the Middle East.
But as Facebookers heatedly debated on the subject of over-Westernization in media that did not report on Middle Eastern affairs, meekly trickling information on systematic raids of the Central African Republic on November 13, shortly after the Paris attacks, peered its head in between Facebook fights of Muslim news centers with American news outlets. While arguments between Facebookers often concentrated on over-Westernization in the media, one nasty small fact remained: such hypocritical arguments, which often reflected a Muslim version of Arab-centrism, ignored other world news at the expense of each individual’s own ranked importance of news.
It is important first to underline the importance of all news and the need for equal representation of world issues in the media. While the argument that Beirut had been under-represented, perhaps even not represented at all, was correct, the hypocrisy of the argument that Western news was overly focused on events based in Western states clearly found its ugly head when Muslim news centers, such as MPAC and CAIR, failed to acknowledge, for example, the terrorist attack in Bosnia that occurred on November 18 or the raids in the Central African Republic that occurred the same day as the attack in France.
While Muslim news outlets are often the first to report on issues in Palestine, Syria, or Iraq, it has only become more starkly evident that Muslim news outlets often rely on the news of Arab or South-East Asian states as shown by the complete lack of regard for other Muslim groups such as Bosnian Muslims. No Facebook debate occurred involving/from Muslim news outlets crying “Where is your coverage on the attack in Bosnia?” As state violence have only increased in Bosnia due to the economic influences of Arab states funding recruiters to persuade youth and unemployed individuals to take arms, the issues of these terrorist attacks seems not to have warranted any interest in Muslim news outlets at all where no posts can be found on FB from Muslim leaders, CAIR, MPAC, etc. As multiple attackers roamed the streets of Sarajevo, shooting civilians and the killing of soldiers proved itself not to be a topic of debate of the Coverage of Western News V. Coverage of Muslim News debates— which demonstrate that the original issue at hand was not Coverage of Western News V. Coverage of Muslim News but rather Coverage of Western News V. Coverage of Arab/Desi News.
But then again, given the unrepresentative Facebook post “sharing” by CAIR in July 2015 using an article on the stones thrown at President Aleksander Vucic where events were depicted as a “simple” issue of bad “relations” between Bosnians and Serbs as opposed to issues of genocide resolution withdrawal, lack of indictment for Vucic’s murder of Bosnian Muslims and attempts to divide Bosnia through a court-based referendum, perhaps it is then better than that some Muslim news magazines do not report on non-Arab/Desi states. In any case, it is clear that perhaps many of the hypocrisies of “fair news coverage” arguments has been balanced between Orientalism and Arab-centrism, leaving both non-Arab/Desi and non-Western European countries like Bosnia essentially in the dirt.