If you don't know where Antananarivo is, I guarantee that you are not alone. I only know because sometime in elementary school I did a project on the country in which it is situated. The facts that have remained with me:
- It is the capital of Madagascar
- It is located in the northern half of the island, which itself is east of Sub-Saharan Africa.
- Madagascar has a lot of unique wildlife
- Whatever the local language is, it employs a large number of "a" sounds.
- In the south of the island there is at least one inactive volcano that is surrounded by extremely sharp rocks called "tsingy"s and the crater of which is now a lush, but threatened jungle that for most of the country's history was inaccessible to large-scale exploitation.
Actually, I'm not sure about that last one, but I know there are tsingys in Madagascar for sure.
They sure look pointy! I also remember that they are called "tsingy" because of the noise they make when you throw a rock against them. A little bit of local onomatopoeia.
At any rate, there has been a lot of turmoil in Madagascar, but you wouldn't know it if you lived in a Western country and watched the news or read the regular press. The president was recently sent into exile by the deposed mayor of the capital, himself a former DJ and talk show host, after the latter somehow took control of the army.
The astute amongst you (or those of you with a lot of time to kill) will have noticed that all of the sources above, are Western sources. It isn't that they aren't reporting the news from the island - it's that nobody really cares. Very few people in North America or Europe (or Egypt or Pakistan, for that matter), wake up in the morning unable to contain their desire to learn about the latest developments in Madagascar, and those that do probably have some sort of connection to the island.
We do, however, seem to take an awfully strong interest in other places. If an Israeli soldier is killed in battle, it isn't long before the whole world knows about it. Gilad Shalit (may God help him), is probably the most famous PoW in history - millions, if not billions, of people now know his name, and lots of people who've never been within 1000km of Gaza have an opinion about what to do about him. In that, I obviously include myself. Lots of middle-class North Americans now run around posing as experts on Pakistan's FATA region, and every time a Muslim detonates a bomb somewhere in the world, you can bet it will make the evening news. If it goes off in a Western country, it will be on page 1 of the paper and all day long on FOX.
And if 100 Chinese miners die in some sort of work-related accident, we'll probably all hear about that too.
It seems like there is a hierarchy, which, after you adjust for things like shared citizenship and same-city habitation, goes something like "North Americas & Western Europeans > Israelis > Australians > Arabs = South Asians > East Asians (except Japanese) = Eastern Europeans = South & Central Amercans > Everybody in Africa who lives south of the Sahara and isn't white.
Obviously, we could make some rearrangements there (who, if anybody, did the killing is also important) , but I think the point is clear enough - we care a whole lot more about people who a) look like us or b) we're scared will hurt us than we do about people who have nothing to do with us.
Why do we talk incessantly about Palestine but not about Sudan? Both the Western press and the Muslim community are guilty of this, even though the death toll in the latter in any given year is clearly higher.
Consensus is probably one contributing factor. Human beings are attracted to conflict - it is entertaining, after all, and news is, for many people, entertainment. Besides a few Arab nationalists, we can all more or less agree that the government of Sudan is not ideal, and that the peoples of southern and western Sudan have legitimate grievances that are being ignored or created by Khatoum. What we do about it is up for debate, but it's clear that almost nobody can take El-Bashir's side and be taken seriously.
Not so with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Especially in the United States, there is a large population of die-hard Zionists who would be able to justify almost anything that served the purposes of their ideology. It is, therefore, the combination of the outrageousness of the injustices, coupled with the volume of propaganda that defends it, that makes the debate heated.
An acquaintance of mine had another explanation - that Jews and Arabs share not an inconsiderable amount of history with Western Europeans, and that, for a variety of reasons, we have a material interest in the conflict. That's obvious enough, and a decent explanation, but it isn't a very good justification.
A fundamental precept of Islam is that all human beings a created equal, and that their moral worth is determined not by their place of birth or their race, but by their actions. "An Arab has no superiority over a non-Arab, nor does a non-Arab have any superiority over an Arab; also a white has no superiority over a black, nor does a black have any superiority over a white except by piety and good action."
Those were the words of the Prophet from his last sermon. It was revolutionary thinking at the time. Reading this blog, and looking at the world in which it exists, I think it still is.
