Is anti-Muslim and anti-Arab bigotry driving how the West and America react to the increasing violence and terrorism in the world?

Many in the Arab world see a difference in how Americans, for example, have responded to the terrorism that took place Friday, Nov. 13 in Paris, and the terrorism that took place the day before in Beirut.

Both terrorist attacks were blamed on Daesh, the derogatory description increasingly used to describe ISIS (the Islamic State).

French police say 129 civilians were killed and nearly 500 were injured in seven coordinated terrorist strikes at public locations in Paris including a restaurant and a rock concert at the Bataclan theater.

Lebanese police say 41 civilians were killed and more than 180 were injured in the Daesh attacks in the Burj al-Barajneh district of Beirut. Included among the dead were three American citizens of Lebanese heritage.

There has definitely been a difference in public attitudes and reaction.

The Paris attacks have sparked a growing solidarity movement in the West. The Paris bombings have directly impacted American public opinion and foreign policies.

Millions of Americans replaced their Facebook images, for example, with images of the red, blue and white stripped French flag. President Obama and government leaders have cited the Paris attacks as the basis of policies to confront Daesh terrorism. Governors in 30 American states have placed moratoriums on accepting Syrian refugees.

Yet, most Americans ignored or seem unaware of the horrific Daesh violence that struck Beirut the day before.

A Daesh terrorist attack Oct. 31 brought down a commercial airliner over the Sinai desert in Egypt and took the lives of the 244 passengers, but the focus has been on the terrorist mechanisms rather than on the impact in human lives. It seems to be shrugged off as a part of the growing strains in American-Russian relations over Syria, where Daesh has a growing presence.

Many Arabs and Muslims have taken note of the different reactions and believe it is driven by increasing anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism in America and the West.

I believe that is a major part of it.

But I also believe there are other contributing factors Arabs and Muslims control but have ignored.

The Arab and Muslim news media and the Arab and Muslim government officials have been AWOL in driving sympathy for the dead in Lebanon, and have mimicked Western coverage of the Paris terrorism.

In other words, there is no Arab or Muslim leadership to drive greater sympathy, or awareness for the dead in Beirut as compared to the massive Western public outcry and sympathies for Paris.

That's a cultural shortcoming Arabs and Muslims refuse to address. It's easier for Arabs/Muslims to blame the West for having a discriminatory double standard to violence than it is to accept responsibility.

The fact is that there is a difference, is subtle politics. Daesh terrorists targeted civilians in Paris but their larger target was the West itself, which is why the West reacted more to Paris than Beirut.

The terrorist attacks in Beirut were intended as an attack against rival Islamic religious and political groups.

Daesh represents the larger Sunni Islamic religious movement and the targets of the Beirut attack were Shiite, Sunni rivals. Additionally, the Beirut attack targets are controlled by Hezbollah, the powerful Shiite militia allied with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, which Daesh is battling. Politics was also behind the Russian airliner terrorism. Russia is Assad's largest military sponsor, overshadowing Assad's support from Hezbollah and Shiite Iran.

Yet despite these issues, all of the civilian victims could have been brought into the same circle of world concern.

Western empathy for France was stoked by the Western media, which offered extensive details on the victims, personalizing the dead. Their lost lives were shared in emotional and exhaustive detail.

Instead of doing the same for the Arab civilian victims, the mainstream Arab and Muslim media focused on the politics and news aspects of the Beirut violence.

French people reacted by flocking to the sites of several of the terrorist bombings in Paris as the entire country rose up in defense. They gathered for prayer, commemoration, rallies and remembrances of the dead.

How many Arabs and Muslims gathered at Burj al-Barajnah to place flowers and candles and other memorial items in memory of the civilian victims? Most Americans don't even know Burj al-Barajneh is a former Palestinian refugee camp established following the Israeli occupation of Palestine in 1948.

Is that the fault of the West or the Arab and Muslim worlds?

I don't know. But I do know that if the Arab and Muslim media focused more on the victims of the Beirut terrorist attacks, rather than on the politics of the Daesh-Hezbollah rivalry, maybe the humanity of the tragedy would have impacted attitudes in the West, including in America.

The Arab world needs to see the rising violence more as a human tragedy and they need to do a better job of telling that story to American audiences.

Ray Hanania is an award-winning American Palestinian columnist and managing editor of The Arab Daily News at www.TheArabDailyNews.com. He writes for Al Jazeera English on American Arab issues. Follow him on Twitter @RayHanania. To find out more about Ray Hanania and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com.

 Courtesy AP Photos