Bombay Attacks

Thanks to all those people who emailed or called asking if we had any relatives who were affected by the attacks in Bombay. I don’t have immediate relatives there, but I have plenty of distributed family members living in the area. None were directly involved in the train bombings, but they will surely be affected by having their city attacked. I am always touched by the level of personal attention we receive on the off chance that someone we know was involved in such horrendous man-made or natural disasters when they occur on the Indian subcontinent.
My disappointment lies with the media. Four times the number of people died in Bombay and hundreds more were injured compared to the attacks in London almost exactly a year ago, but the media attention to the Bombay situation is commensurate to a shark attack in Florida. The same thing happened when Delhi was attacked on Halloween in 2005. Hundreds of thousands of people in Sudan and neigboring states have died in recent years, but very few people seem to care.
Instead, we’re getting a blow-by-blow of the situation of Israel pouncing on Beirut in their quest to wipe Hezbollah off the face of the Earth. Not that the situations are comparable in terms of importance, but we can unequivocally predict the outcome of the latter: hundreds of innocent people will die soon, suicide bombings will continue in the name of martyrdom, and Israel will take an offensive posture in the name of security. Rinse and repeat.