I think Trent is wrong. This Kenya murder spree isn't a tipping point and is not going to cost them much. The Western media outlets are, by and large, frantic to hide away anything that suggests a real struggle. A real struggle puts life in perspective, and the big media make their livings purveying trivia. Even our wars were described as though they were far-off "incidental" actions that needn't involve anybody on the home front: war on the cheap. This won't change much in the West. (*)
In the rest: look at those pictures with other eyes for a while. The death and fear is in among toy cars that cost more than a year's wages; with other luxuries all around. You see the images on a small TV under a canopy, and wish that you could have a chance at some of those nearly unimaginable luxuries. The people you see aren't your tribe--neither the villains nor the victims. If you live near Muslim areas, you may be (quite rightly) worried by the implications of the Kenya attack. If you don't, it will probably seem like no skin off your nose. And "Westerners" were involved (**), to confuse things even more. If anything, you might think people wallowing in luxury deserve an occasional poke in the eye.
All in all, I don't think this will change the attitudes of our elites at all, and of our general population by much. Those in the rest of the world who have Muhammedans for neighbors are probably already worried anyway. A large number of their co-religionists will be impressed.
There's something especially humiliating about being martyred in a mall. The trivial attachments to the world are all around you, and you chose the environment yourself. The last things you see aren't prison walls or howling mobs but a row of barbie dolls.
Granted, I may be biased. Malls are some of my least favorite places. During the great surge of mall building, I was in Africa, and when we came back to the States and went to one to buy clothes I was weirded out. I can't claim any sort of moral superiority--I can spend as long in a bookstore as a teenage girl in a mall; and we both wind up with "just stuff." But the garish wastefulness of it made me almost ill, and still bothers me.
(*) I predict that there will be two major stories that will push this off the front page and the editorials by next Friday: one a moderately substantive DC political story, and the other a celebrity/politician scandal. I don't know what they will be; I'm just convinced they will be there.
(**) At some point other countries are going to start trying to get the US and UK to pay damages for the people we take under our wing and then let loose on the world.
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