It is a matter of great surprise and regret that media per se provides unbalanced coverage of events when they occur in Asia and Africa.

Take the case of the brutal massacre of 150 students in a Kenyan college mowed down in cold blood. Another 104 were injured as bullets sprayed the campus of Garissa College. To so many of us, it is like it was a passing shower and not a drenching in blood.

With Al-Shabab militants, who see themselves as an Al-Qaeda affiliate, taking responsibility for these attacks what makes them even more heinous is that most of the students were shot in the back in execution style. The horror is only two days old but has already slipped away from the news headlines to a greater extent.

The question to ask now is why are college and school campuses becoming a priority target. Whether it is Peshawar or Kandahar, Kenya or Nigeria, the twisted reasoning is that the curriculum is a western brainwash and also such assaults in some way spur recruitment from disenchanted students.

The headlines are bizarre as the death toll gets higher ... Suicide bomber in school uniform kills 47 in school near Kano, Nigeria. Seven gunmen massacre 145 students in Peshawar military school. Schools in Gaza, Iraq, and Syria have been hit by weapons and the education of thousands of children disrupted.

Much of this is beyond human comprehension. Killing unarmed young people can never really be justified for any cause. And education is only a conduit to knowledge. Today’s young people are smart enough to sift the false from the truth so the system of education is secondary to the thirst for information.

Technology is global and has no boundaries. As such, the assumption that anyone studying in an alien system is to be eliminated is frightening.

However, one has to accept that educational institutions are vulnerable, cause much anguish when targeted and the ripple effect is felt for years to come.

As the UN secretary general has said, “Schools are for learning and must never become theaters of war. They should be safe havens for boys and girls, and their violation is a crime against international law. And whatever the provocation, their militarization — by whatever means — should be outlawed.”

Everyone agrees through the 25th resolution by the UN that schools, colleges and universities should be strictly off limits in any conflict including insurgencies but the resolution has no octane if it is flaunted by militant groups that believe collateral damage is a strategy in their war.

Today, even the Red Cross and other medical support systems are not spared, that is how dangerous things have now become in troubled areas.

The intrinsic weakness is that the world cannot really protect the institutions adequately. There is really no solution except to hope that militant groups who once had a code of honor that women, children and the elderly were exempt, will again recognize this fact and back off. You cannot ever win a cause on the blood of children.

And the right to education is a protection that must be guaranteed even against the backdrop of civil war.