An American dentist on safari in Zimbabwe shot and killed a lion, who, it turned out, was a local favorite and even had a name:  Cecil.

Subsequent to this tragic event the Western media went certifiably insane reporting on all the horrible details over and over again.  The dentist, in the meantime, has gone into hiding, having received death threats over the social medial

While this press orgy was going on Nina Shea of the Hudson Institute of Washington, D.C., released a report on sex slavery of women and girls in Islamic State, including sale of children as young as one year old, the price depending on whether the slave masters considered them pretty or ugly.  Thousands of Yazidi and Christian women and girls are subject to the most horrific abuse by people that are not barbaric or savage—these words are too mild—they are serial and industrial-scale sadists, pure and simple.  One aspect of this tremendously depressing report complains about the almost total lack of attention paid to this phenomenon by the Western media—and indeed Ms. Shea is right.

Worse, if that is possible, is the lack of media attention to the report itself, while oceans of ink and air time continue to be devoted to poor Cecil and his murderer.  Does it occur to anyone that liberating those women is worth more than every Cecil in Zimbabwe, or in all of southern Africa for that matter?

A beautiful sixteen year-old Jewish girl is killed in Israel by an ultra-orthodox Jewish fanatic, and an Arab baby and its father are killed by firebombs thrown at their house in the West Bank, apparently  by Jewish terrorists, although that is not yet clear. That is three people too many, not to mention the others in both cases injured but not fatally. The Israeli authorities from the president on down denounced the attacks in the most stringent terms and the Israeli police are searching diligently for the perpetrators of the arson attack.

During the same period of these two truly tragic incidents, in the rest of the Middle East—in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, and Afghanistan—hundreds of people were killed, most of them defenseless, innocent civilians, victims of terrorists and often of their own governments.  This doesn’t count the constant quasi-judicial executions in Iran, which holds the silver medal in the execution department, after China with the gold.

Who is doing what about that?  If three is too many, how about hundreds and thousands?  Where is the outrage in the Christian world about the Christian women enslaved by Islamic State?  The Pope finds time to denounce climate change in a major encyclical, but the slaughter of the remaining Christian communities in the Middle East is only worth mention in a homily or two.  As to the protestant sects, except for the pro-Israeli evangelicals, they are too busy denouncing Israel to bother about what is happening to their co-religionists.

What has happened to the sense of proportion, not to mention justice, morality, ethics and all those old, dusty concepts?  RIP Cecil, you lucky cat!  At least the media cared about you and you can strut about in the heavenly zoo proudly.  As to the myriad dead and the thousands tortured and turned into slaves, they will just have to wait for divine justice, I guess, because the human variety is dead.