By Umer Tariq
On Tuesday three Muslim students were brutally murdered in the university town of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The cold blooded murders were the continuation of a series of attacks on Muslims that originally started in Europe, apparently as a response to the attack on French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
The majority of the mainstream Western media outlets, as expected, failed to mention the brutal murders in their coverage. Remember, it is the same media that gives hours of coverage if a Christian, Jew or any non-Muslim is killed in such an incident. Shortly after the attack on the Charlie Hebdo office in France, the militant group Boko Haram slaughtered close to 2000 people, but the Western media remain fixated on the murders in France. The ‘slaughtered 2000’ of Nigeria merely got a mention on any of the western news channels.
The conflict in Burma is another example of Western media hypocrisy; there has been hardly any coverage of the continued ethnic persecution of the Rohingya Muslims. These are the killings that have been described by Human Rights watch as ‘ethnic cleansing’, but we never hear about it on any mainstream western media outlet.
The murders of three Muslim students in Chapel Hill received similar treatment, despite the huge outcry by Muslims around the globe media outlets failed to give coverage to the murders, it looked more like a case of systematic cover-up rather than the odd channel not covering the incident. ‘Nude pic’ American tourists deported from Cambodia on CNN. Martha Stewart spills beauty secrets on ABC. The simple secret for cooking a Ribeye in a Cast-Iron Pan on Fox. France baby-swap families awarded about $2 million on CBS were few of the headlines on top American news sites shortly after the attack.
The criminal cover up by the so called protectors of human rights and free speech is something that is hard to digest, on one hand the West claims to be the only ray of light for the human race on the other hand it completely ignores the racist and militant elements in their own societies. Whenever a Muslim person is involved in any such crime the blame inevitably falls on each and every Muslim. Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch recently claimed that ‘Maybe most Muslims are peaceful, but unless they recognize and destroy their growing jihadist cancer they must be held responsible.’ Is this rule applicable only to the Muslims or the same rule applies to a Christian or Jew person as well? Is the entire white race to blame for the Chapel Hill murders or like always the media will exonerate everyone and declare the gory murders as an ‘individuals act’ that has nothing to do with the Western society.
The Chapel Hill murders came shortly after the release of the much acclaimed American movie American Sniper that glorifies American sniper Chris Kyle, a United States navy Seal, who claimed to have killed more than 250 people during his military career. This was a guy who reportedly said that he ‘loves killing people’ and it is ‘fun’. In his own version he believed that Americans are the good guys and Muslims are some kind of fanatical race capable of huge evils against humanity. Imagine if a movie called Muslim Sniper had been in the theaters and then a Muslim shot dead three people.
The western media narrative of portraying Muslims as the reason for every evil is utterly condemnable and it is time that our media also brings forth this western hypocrisy and starts holding the west responsible for the rampant anti-Muslim sentiments that have seized most western countries. The west also needs to rethink their policy and stop fuelling hate against Muslims.