I have a question regarding Malala Yusufzai

[Vile Atheist]

I use the term "West" because the attack gained a lot of coverage in Western media and audience. Even though drone attacks did not. So even though America is directly responsible for its own foreign policy, Western media and audiences focused on this incident even though less than two week prior 20 civilians including multiple women and children were killed in a drone strike. So yes that is hypocritical and yes it is the fault of Western media to not acknowledge this hypocrisy.

I won't speak for the United States or any other country in "the West", but here's the CBC's (owned by the Government of Canada, no less) coverage:

Search of "drone strike" on CBC.ca yields 89 articles.
Search of "Malala Yusufzai" on CBC.ca yields 1 article.

Both were searched for within quotation marks. So Canadian media covered drone strikes 89 times more than Malala. What were you saying again?

I am not fostering hatred. I said specifically Americans, not the West. And secondly since George Bush drone strikes have increased many mangitudes over and both Romney and Obama are pushing for greater number of strikes. As for Americans in general...

By your own statistics, about 20-25% of Americans oppose the drone strikes. If you asked Canadians or Europeans that number would be significantly higher. A quarter of the population is not a small number, though it should be a lot, lot higher. It certainly shows that you cannot treat political opinion in the United States or in "the West" as uniform.

And you also have to consider the political context of the United States. Americans (rightly so) feel victimized by the events of 9/11 where over 3,000 innocent civilians were killed and billions of dollars in damage was unleashed. Were the attacks completely successful, the White House itself would have been destroyed. With consistent fearmongering in the media (as per Sunstone's point), many Americans feel as if any measure to protect themselves is worth the price.

It is a wrongheaded view, but nonetheless it's easier to justify why someone else has to die when you feel you're in danger. And yes, I know why 9/11 happened and I know the United States' involvement in countries around the world. I know it doesn't have a stellar foreign policy record and the US government has done some horrible things. That is still not a justifiable reason to send 3000+ innocent civilians to their deaths and it will never be.

They are still culpable for the actions of their government which make it a very public matter. There is no excuse for them to ignore the far reaching implications of electing officials who specifically advocate such a policies. This is disregarding the high level of support Americans have for these attacks.

You're ignoring two extremely important factors. One is Sunstone's point of propaganda in the media. If all you're exposed to is propaganda, how culpable is a person really for thinking a certain way? The other is money. In the US especially, money is an important factor in bribing politicians. You can effectively ignore the people for most of a term and then when election season rolls around, that's when you start giving a damn what people think and that's when people start paying attention.

If you're poor and uneducated and you've been tricked by the media into thinking that if your government bombs the hell out of brown people half a world away, you'll be safe, are you likely to support that idea? Probably. If you're decently well-off, educated and aware, are you going to support the drone strikes? Probably not.

Perhaps you misunderstand me politics have been disregarded over a common cry of condemnation across all sectors of Pakistani society. This is a good thing.

That is great to hear.

 

[Vile Atheist]

Except that I do care about the people in drone strikes just as I do Malala and girls like her.

I think one of the things that baffles me is that being an American somehow equates me as being in the military and being responsible for the deaths over there.

I guess this is what brought me a little bit of emotion in this thread. I'm not American and to a large extent Canada has not been involved in war crimes in the Middle East (the largest perhaps being the detainee scandal). But the notion that I as a "Westerner", or even if I was an American citizen, necessarily support and am directly responsible for war crimes committed by a government I do not control offended me a little. That and the assertion that I am responsible for what the media covers and produces and what other people think.

Generally, we in the West are good people and not the callous ignoramuses we're often painted out to be. We don't all hate Muslims. We don't all blindly support our government. We don't all fall victim to the media's propaganda.

What happened to Malala is a tragedy and there is nothing wrong or hypocritical in pointing that out, especially when you're consistent in pointing out everyone's war crimes.