Bombs in Bangladesh, part two

Ward Harkavy at Village Voice follows up my brief earlier post on the bombs in Bangladesh with a nice, healthy rant. One commenter to Phronesisaical from Bangladesh remarked that there was no interest in the Bangladesh bombings in the US because Bangladesh doesn't have much role in American national interests. I think that's right -- international relations is fundamentally, even if wrongly, a function of state interests, especially if one takes a realist view of international affairs (which I don't, but which pretty much everyone in DC-land does). But there may be more to this too. Recall the administration's underreporting of the rise of terrorist attacks around the world since the invasion of Iraq. Though one would think that the American press would pick up on the Bangladesh story, they've been guilty in the past of viewing what's considered serious, real, true, important and what's not through the White House's refracted and now cracked lens. If the White House doesn't take it seriously, the press often doesn't take it seriously. But this is nevertheless huge news.

I was wrong when I recently wrote that the 350 bombs that exploded all across Bangladesh on August 17 were among the shots heard 'round the world that day.

Hey, my apologies. I didn't realize that the major U.S. media didn't give a shit about what's going on in the planet's seventh most populous nation, a crowded country whose sweatshop workers sew many of our clothes.

It's not that newspapers never cover Bangladesh. Only last October, the New York Times ran a long story about how vibrant the expatriate Bengali press is in New York City, about how Bangladeshis love to read, about how there are 12 competing Bengali-language newspapers in the city.

That heart-warming story, by Tripti Lahiri, was headlined "Immigrants with Ink in Their Blood."

No doubt. But what happened to the ink in the blood of the Times editors?

Lahiri's good read was a feel-good story. The frightening news that radical Islamists set off all these bombs in Bangladesh must have been a feel-nothing story.

When's the last time you heard of more than 300 bombs going off across a country, all within an hour's time and all accompanied by leaflets from an extremist group claiming credit?

Nevertheless, the only mention of the August 17 bomb blasts I can find in the Times, web or print, is brief wire-service stuff.