Where there is terror, there's hypocrisy

Another terror attack. A big one. A medium one? Well. We can be sure of one thing: Few things unite the 'civilised' world like a terror attack in a developed country.

And fewer things amplify the breathtaking hypocrisies that have come to define virtually everything we do and feel after a terror attack.

News of a terrifying suicide attack on a peaceful funeral procession in Baghdad this week, which claimed 18 innocent lives was flung by media the world over into "International wrap" segments. It is the way it is.

No one needs to qualify shock or outrage. What happened in Paris is the work of numbing savagery. Anger and outrage hardly need justification; they hit home. This isn't some faraway dusty hell-hole in the Middle East. This is where you're thinking of taking an expensive holiday, may be, a year or two down the line. A concert venue. A restaurant. A skyscraper. A football stadium. Not some godforsaken ghetto in Alleppo or Ramallah.

Even suggesting that this dangerously latent hypocrisy exists is deadly today.

Context, comparisons, "what abouts" are filthy because they stick their noses so squarely into the fortified tents of global selectivity. Sorrow and anger are sanctities that must not be interfered with. Not now. And if possible, not ever.

And the reason this should be terrifying to us all, is that not one of us can be spared blame of selectivity at some level or other when it comes to a terror attack.

We must ask why the fact that 2,000 persons (UN figures) have been killed in terror attacks in Iraq in October alone hasn't stirred even cognisance, knowledge awareness - much less, protests, outpourings of grief and a world galvanised. Would it be possible for once for us not be waylaid by the tempting myriad excuses that present themselves in the guise of cynical context, circumstance, geography, distance, politics, desensitisation and media coverage.

This is about every one of us.

We can be brutal and choose to peg our selectivities on prejudice, and that still wouldn't fully justify the stunningly disparate manner in which we relate to terror attacks in two different countries. Anything that even looks to nail down this moral duplicity is labelled cowardice, inappropriate, badly timed, heartless. Hypocrisy has many friends.

It is for this reason that the sooner we accept that we are - each one of us - party to it in some form or other, the sooner there can be some desperately needed honesty to how the world views terrorism.

A newspaper's famous editorial tagline says it best: Because the truth involves us all.