Are we betraying the true Charlie Hebdo legacy?

What has happened in Paris with Charlie Hebdo is horrendous.

It is unfortunate that news outlets have allowed coverage of that shocking event to eclipse reporting of other happenings that we really ought to be told about. In particular there has been a second attack in a week on the town of Baga, Nigeria.

Soldiers walking in the street in the town of Baga, Nigeria in 2013.
Photograph: Pius Utomi Ekpei/AFP/Getty Images

The death toll from both attacks is thought to be around 2,000. Nearly 600 others have been stranded on an island on Lake Chad without food, water or shelter. There are countless refugees on a hopeless march to nowhere: women seperated from their husbands and children, not knowing whether they be dead or alive; bewildered children severely traumatised by the unspeakable savagery upon their loved ones that they have witnessed.

It is understandable that we Western Europeans and Americo-Canadians will be transfixed by an event in Europe or the Americas such as the Charlie Hebdo attack but if we allow our world to shrink to one view of the globe what will we become? That would not be the true Charlie Hebdo legacy but the legacy of our fears.

(With material from The Guardian, 10-Jan-2015)