short takes

[cellio]

Prior to receiving an invitation to one I had not heard the word "webinar", but I instantly understood what it meant. That's a good sign in new vocabulary. (Contrast with, for example, "blog".) Not that I'm eager to start talking about webinars (let alone holding them), but still.

This week's episode of 24 included a PSA saying, essentially, "not all muslims are terrorists". Well duh. If the show were one of those fake documentaries I could see something like that, but doesn't everyone understand that 24 is fiction? And anyway, it looks like that's going to become very, very obvious next week, unless the previews are very misleading.

Someone posted "flushing 101" posters in the restrooms at work. I first saw the poster in a stall where the previous occupant had not flushed. I hope that wasn't the person who posted the sign.

Comments

[glenbarnett.livejournal.com]

Interesting. A lot of Australians, Britons, and even a few Americans were killed by Indonesian Muslim terrorists more recently than 9/11.

I would have thought the bombings would have made the US news.

Maybe it just doesn't penetrate the conscious.

[cellio]

That certainly made the news. But most Americans (perhaps most people?) don't think much about victims who aren't from their own group, sadly, and very real problems fall off the radar. It's all about what "they" did to "us", never mind that we're all human beings and nationalism is highly overrated in things like this. Why can't we judge individuals and not groups, and care about people who aren't "us"?

It would also be easy to come, incorrectly, to the conclusion that most Muslims are terrorists. Moderate Islam seems (from the outside) to be doing little to rein in the lunatic fringe.

[sekhmets-song.livejournal.com]

They were covered, but our American media certainly doesn't give them the air time that they gave to our "local" event. I do think that is too bad. Such stories told in passing don't have all that much impact, unfortunately.
I also think that part of the problem is that there hasn't been a single event of Indonesian terrorism with with the same high numbers of victims as 9/11. Due to that, it is easy for Americans to feel like it just isn't as bad, as it's only "one or two" (or a dozen or so), not bothering to understand the enormity of the terrorism over time. (We Americans love out statistics but just aren't really very good at fully understanding them.