The last few days have been particularly heart-wrenching. Terrorists murdered 34 people in Brussels on March 22. Several days later, they murdered almost twice that number in Lahore. In the same week, a suicide bomber blew himself up in a packed Iraqi football stadium and another killed several others in Ankara.

Prima facie, these incidents are much the same; brutal savagery has unexpectedly changed life forever for some unfortunate parent or child in Belgium, Iraq,Turkey and Pakistan.

Yet, they can never be the same. Indeed, they will be ‘constructed’ in the popular imagination to not be the same; with time, we will not see Ankara, Lahore or Iskindriya as anything but purely isolated tragedies with no great historical narrative or grandiose drama to be inferred (or exploited) from them -- something that, sadly, just happens in the ‘third world’. On the other hand, Brussels will continue to be elevated to, as Paris was, a particularly noteworthy and uniquely violent form of brutality against "humanity"; no less than an attack at the heart of "civilisation, freedom and liberty". This is despite the fact that the effect of Brussels, in terms of quantum, was no greater than attacks in any of the other cities.

Let’s take another example of how narratives will be constructed (or, manipulated); the relatively ‘liberal’ New York Times ran a headline describing the Lahore bombing as a "blast…killing dozens". Conversely, the same newspaper’s headline described Brussels through a wholly different framework of analysis: "Strikes Claimed by ISIS Shut Brussels…" So, whilst Lahore is framed as a domestic crime, that is, Pakistan’s problem, Brussels is elevated to some "global war", a catastrophic attack against innocent Europeans.

Yet all of this pales in significance when compared to the medieval and arguably devoid of integrity headline ran by the Wall Street Journal "Pakistan’s War against Christians"; the WSJ felt no shame in exploiting the Lahore tragedy to create a misleading narrative of war initiated by a state against global Christianity -- as if such a thing, similar to global Islam even exists.http://www.wsj.com/articles/pakistans-war-against-christians-1459441867.

Would the WSJ apply the same editorial standards to run a headline labelling the constant invasions by the West and its allies after 9/11 that ended up killing hundreds of thousands of Muslims as a "Western War against Muslim Children and Women"? Would they run a story highlighting that that in reality, Non-Europeans/Christians are the overwhelming victims of organised violence perpetrated globally, killed not only by terrorist bombs but also Western violence unleashed against entires nations every few years?

It will not. Such narcissistic, myopic engineering of narrative (and construction of what we call ‘knowledge’) that legitimates the self and delegitimates the ‘other’ has always historically been a staple feature of Western interactions with the ‘uncivilised’ non-Western world; only the rhetoric has changed. And, to be sure, it is not just the media; similarly biased constructions have always existed in many portrayals of non-Westerners from South America to China. For example, scholars such as Lorimer and Liszt demarcated the world as inhabited by "barbarians/savages" on one hand and the civilised "Westerners" and philosophers such as John Stuart Mill opined that "Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians".

Dividing the world into two spheres -- essentially constructed to be the Christian West and the non-West -- is not novel. Thus, the manipulative etymologising of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ victims should come as no surprise to us. Colonialism is officially in the past but the mind-set that demarcates degrees of evil based on the race and identity of the victim is hard to dislodge. Indeed, such manipulation of narrative is not only used to elevate a certain set of people as privileged and more grieve-worthy but has always remained essential to the conduct and justification of Western violence perpetrated against others.

Edward Said demonstrated how Western ‘knowledge’ tended to frame non-Western cultures as ‘uncivilised’, ‘barbaric’ and ‘primitive’. Let us not forget that such constructions have been very useful to legitimate wholesale oppression of and conquest against non-Western people, from South America to Mali. Although blatant occupation and aggression are frowned upon today, the killing of civilians to serve some interest or the other continues to be justified by the same colonial powers through adopting a different language and rhetoric -- that of terrorism, just war, armed conflict, democracy, self-defence and collateral damage.

In such a view of the world, the relative trivialisation (and opportunistic exploitation) of Lahore, Ankara and Iskindriya and parallel privileging of Paris and Brussels should be seen as a natural and modern corollary to a very old way of thinking about other civilisations.

Accordingly, when terrorist groups bomb Western cities, we should then not be surprised to see it portrayed as a global catastrophe with the victims stories broadcast ubiquitously. The ‘uncivilised’ should also accept it as their fate to quietly and uncritically partake (and in some cases, subserviently sacrifice their security and sovereignty) in whatever retaliation is decreed as punishment.

Thus, if a Western country decides to embark on violence, as it did after 9/11 (or France has done on a smaller scale in Mali and Syria) and countless civilians are killed when they bomb homes, hospitals, weddings and funerals, the engineered narrative will help us in thinking that such savagery is not as morally culpable as other forms of violence precisely because it happened in response to some earlier "evil". 9/11 or 7/7 or Brussels or Paris or some such "universally" heinous attack which the whole world was responsible to remedy; the hundreds or thousands of civilians across Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Mali, Yemen that have paid price of this conceit must thus accept the possibility of self-sacrifice to protect a greater civilisation than theirs. And when entire countries are destroyed, as is the case, for example, in Iraq and shirking all blame becomes impossible and too openly dishonest after failure, it always happens to be a few bad apples -- the Blairs, Bushes, Cheneys in what is otherwise a great civilisation.

Sadly, this forgiving perception doesn’t extend to how other civilisations are viewed, as the Wall Street Journal so clearly illustrates. Perhaps at the very least, we owe it to the victims of Lahore and Brussels to be honest.