A couple weeks ago the Taliban, which controls about 80 percent of Afghanistan, announced that it would begin destroying statues and other artwork that were devoted to religions other than Islam. As the Taliban followed through on its promise, the outrage and coverage that this has garnered have been amazing. Everywhere I turns, it seems like I’m reading new articles or seeing new coverage of the story in newspapers, radio, and television. Protests were held around the world by people of many different religious faiths to protest the destruction.
Where was this intense level of coverage when the Taliban was stripping women of their basic human rights? When the Taliban executed several prostitutes recently, it garnered only a small mention in foreign newspapers and went largely unreported in the United States. Perhaps if the prostitutes could have somehow transformed themselves into statutes or works of art, Western media outlets would have found their story compelling.
The destruction of Buddhist religious icons is certainly deplorable, but so is the media’s habit of giving readers and viewers more information about the destruction of inanimate objects than the murder of human beings.
Source:
UN condemns statue destruction. The BBC, March 7, 2001.