Late last night I learned that in Bangladesh, American writer Avijit Roy and his wife Rafida Ahmed Bonna had been brutally attacked with machetes, almost certainly by Islamist extremists in retaliation for their published work, leaving Mr. Roy dead, and his wife and blogger Rafida nearly dead. Today I turned on MSNBC to learn more and I encountered #TheDress (with an in-studio expert), "lamas on the loose", Senator Inhofe's snowball, a debate about whether Madonna's fall was a publicity stunt, and the "big week for marijuana"'. To their credit, at least Leonard Nimoy's death was "coming up". So I switched to Fox News. Surely they would draw a straight line from this horrific attack on an American citizen to Obama's feckless foreign policy and be all over it. Nope. They were discussing the WHO dietary recommendations. Nothing about Avijit Roy's murder even on the ticker. CPAC coverage was coming up, so I had to turn off the TV to prevent nausea.
About a week ago, I saw a Facebook post with a link to an article titled "Islamists are burning Bangladesh, but does anyone care?". I read the article and sarcastically commented
There is no oil and no white people in Bangladesh. So, unfortunately, the answer to the question is "no".
I'm afraid I might have been right. The webpage for that particular article is not available for some reason, but here is a
link to the website that posted it.
People, an American author faced death threats for things he wrote that offended some Muslim extremists. He was just brutally and publicly hacked to death on the steps of a library in Dhaka where he attended an event that featured some of his work. His wife is in critical condition. Why is this not a story?