Mostly I was curious about the Facebook feature, as I wasn’t aware of it before this – but you are right that the west is rather discriminatory about what is deems a “terrorist” attack. It might even be an American centric view – one of the reasons Facebook activated it was because one of the places that was attacked was at a concert of a band from California. I’m pretty sure they would have had a call from the Embassy. Canadians in Paris were told to checkin with their embassy. The news coverage over here was its typical stupid repeating the same things over and over and hypothesizing about “what would we do it if happened in New York” … I was glad that several people on my Facebook stream highlighted the Beirut attacks. The New York Times just put something out – http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/16/world/middleeast/beirut-lebanon-attacks-paris.html?_r=0
I think the press was less here in part because there were less Americans in Beirut. Geography also plays a role – they are so much closer to Syria and Lebanon is often lumped in with news about ISIS and Syria as it if it were the same place.