OPINION: Pray for Paris - and the world

GRIEF: The terrorist attacks on Paris provoked an outpouring of grief around the world - whereas the terrorist attacks in Beirut the same week were largely forgotten.

I think it's safe to say that many of us were affected by the recent terrorist attacks in Paris. Three suicide bombings, mass shootings and 130 people dead, all at once.

Terrifying, and deeply upsetting.

Closer to home, there have been several arguments breaking out online following the attacks -- particularly about the French flag filter on Facebook, and the Safety Check app, which allowed Parisians to let their loved ones know they were unharmed.

Why, people have asked, are we able to fly the French Tricolour on our Facebook profiles, but not the colours of Lebanon -- targeted by terrorists only the day before? Why not have the Safety Check feature for people in the midst of the Egyptian Revolution, or Gaza conflict? Or Facebook photos in support of the Syrian refugees?

What does it say about our culture that we are devastated by atrocities in a European tourist hub, and largely ignore the same atrocities in the Middle East?

There have been several theories: colonialism and racism being one. It's easy for we Westerners to grieve for the affected Parisians because, well, they look like us. Middle Easterners are "the other".

As UK journalist Jonathan Cook wrote, "Europeans have always viewed ourselves as fully human, but seen those in the Middle East as slightly less than human, and not quite as deserving of our sympathy. It is such feelings that allowed Europe to colonise brown people."

We have become desensitised to the violence in the Middle East. The Arab world has long been portrayed as brutal, violent and primitive. Paris, for example, was described as "a city", whereas Beirut is a "warzone" and a "Hezbollah stronghold".

Deaths in a warzone are collateral damage, deaths in a city are murderous injustices.

Or is it just human clannism? In New Zealand, many of us have some kind of connection to Paris -- we've travelled there, we have French friends, or even have a French background.

Paris is familiar. It's close. It's relatable. It's easier to emphasise with. As a contact of mine, a former journalist put it, to get the same level of interest as for one person dying next door, you need five in the next town, 10 somewhere else in the country, 50 in a country linked by culture and several hundred somewhere else.

In the words of one of my journalism tutors; "our sorrow for Paris was visceral, but our sorrow for the Middle East is intellectual. And I'm not okay with that."

Whatever praying looks like individually, we need to pray for the world -- for France, Lebanon, and everywhere in between.

Poet Warsan Shire puts it well: "I held an atlas in my lap, ran my fingers across the world, and whispered, 'where does it hurt?' It answered: everywhere, everywhere, everywhere."