I was an Iraqi professor of statistics until the United States and later ISIS destroyed my classroom and much of the university. I suppose I should thank each group for attacking when school wasn’t in session, but I believe that may have been coincidental. At any rate, like civilized people everywhere, I commiserate with the grieving citizens of Paris. However, I must at the same time ask that some critical facts be more energetically reported in the West. For instance, the same Saturday that suicidal men slaughtered unarmed Parisians, their ISIS allies killed twenty-eight people in Baghdad and forty-three in Beirut. Did you read about that? No, you say, in the tumult following the attacks in Paris, I missed it. According to my statistics, most of you wouldn’t have noticed and during the summer of 2014 hadn’t known ISIS killed more than eight thousand Iraqis and wounded almost sixteen thousand. In a country with a tenth the population of the United States, those numbers are cruel. Now let’s move into broader statistics, compiled since 2001, and emphasize that since the U.S. war on terror began, at least a million Iraqis have died along with two hundred thousand Afghans and eighty thousand Pakistanis. If you thought about those numbers more often, they would decline.

Sources – The Daily Beast; Democracy Now.