Terror Respects No Borders, Sympathy Shouldn’t Either

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/06/opinion/terror-respects-no-borders-sympathy-shouldnt-either.html

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After Monday’s terrorist attack on the subway in St. Petersburg, some Russian state media outlets noted that expressions of grief and solidarity in the West were far fewer than after attacks on targets in Western countries. No “Je suis Charlie”; no projection of the Russian flag onto the Brandenburg Gate, which has been illumined in the past in the colors of Britain, Israel, Turkey and France; and though the lights on the Eiffel Tower were doused, the gesture came only after criticism on social media of Paris authorities.

There is little question that the United States and Western Europe give considerably more attention to attacks on their territory or their people than to attacks elsewhere. The frequent suicide bombings in Muslim conflict zones rarely attract much sympathetic outpouring on social media — in the West, or, for that matter, in Russia.

What seemed to vex the Russians, however, or at least the Russian state media, was what they saw as a double standard that further proved the Kremlin’s propaganda about a West out to get Russia.

Russia under President Vladimir Putin is in fact in very low esteem in the West, and its defense of its ally, President Bashar al-Assad, over the heinous chemical attack in Syria only lowered that.

Yet elemental human sympathy should not be entangled in geopolitics. Russia is as vulnerable to the plague of Islamist terrorism as any Western nation, with large Muslim populations both in Russia and around its borders.

After 130 people in Paris were killed to spread terror in 2015, Russians brought flowers, candles and notes of support to the French Embassy in Moscow in a spontaneous outpouring of sympathy. The 14 who died in St. Petersburg were also people just going about their lives — a wrestling coach, some students, a doll maker. They too deserve flowers and tears.

People of good will should open their hearts and minds to the tragic and unnecessary suffering of all victims of terror, whether it is Russians caught in a hail of shrapnel in a subway car, or Syrians torturously killed in the chemical attack, or the 31 people killed on Wednesday in attacks in Tikrit, Iraq. None of them deserved this.