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The
Western Media and Muslim-on-Muslim Violence
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Originally published under the title, "Only Muslim
Schoolchildren Lives Matter?"
Earlier I looked at how Western mainstream media enable
Islamic terrorism by employing an arsenal of semantic games, key
phrases, convenient omissions, and moral relativism to portray such
violence as a product of anything and everything—political and historical
grievances, "Islamophobia," individual insanity, poverty and
ignorance, territorial disputes—not Islam.
Another strategy that recently came to the fore consists of
highlighting Islamic terror attacks that target other Muslims. The logic
here is clear: How "Islamic" can such Islamic groups be if they
attack and kill fellow Muslims? In other words, whatever the motivation,
it surely cannot be Islam, since those being killed are themselves
Muslims. This suggests that the terrorists themselves cannot be true
Muslims since Muslims are generally forbidden by Islam to kill other
Muslims (caveats exist).
Muslim persecution of Christians
... throws a wrench in the media's narrative that Islamic violence is a
product of anything and everything but Islamic hate for non-Muslims.
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A recent example of this is the December 16 Taliban attack on an army
public school in Peshawar, where 145 people were killed, the majority
being schoolchildren age 18 and under. This incident was reported all
over the mainstream media, and rightfully so.
Yet this begs the question: why do similar attacks, when directed at
non-Muslims—especially Christians—rarely if ever get the same sort of
media coverage?
For example, in Nigeria
on November 10,
A suicide bomb attack in a Christian
secondary school in the town of Potiskum in Yobe state, north-eastern Nigeria,
has killed at least 47 people on Monday as the students gathered for
morning assembly. Boko Haram is thought to be behind the blast, having
carried out several attacks on schools giving a Western-style education.
Translated from Hausa, Boko Haram means "Western education is
forbidden" of which this latest school attack is a stark reminder.
Earlier in the year in Nigeria "Boko Haram claimed the lives of 59
students at a Christian school … Some 50 men ambushed the school,
then beat and shot staff and students. Once finished, they set fire to
the buildings, with many students still inside. It's the fourth attack of
its kind since May of last year."
On October 1 in Syria, at least 41 Alawite children—all under 12—were killed:
The massacre was one of the most severe
in terms of children who died since the beginning of the conflict in
Syria. According to official Syrian sources, a car bomb and a suicide
bomber caused two explosions when the children came out of school, in the
suburb of Akrameh inhabited mainly by Alawites, with the targeted
intention to cause the highest number possible of deaths among children
of the same religious community to which the Assad family belong.
Here is the testimony of an eyewitness to another Islamic attack on a
Christian school in Syria, where 12 people—mostly children—were killed:
I want to tell you about Tuesday. It
was a terrible day. We cried and prayed all day. Tuesday they were
bombing Bab Touma, the old city of Damascus. A lot of Christians live
there. There is also a Christian school—a private one. We know a lot of
people in that school. Some children from our area also go to school
there. When those kids went to school on Tuesday, gathered at the square
like they always do, a mortar fell in their midst. Some friends passed by
the school and saw that parents and teachers were carrying their wounded
children out of the school, dripping with blood. They saw them running to
the hospitals in panic. For me, as a mother and a teacher, I can hardly
bear to imagine what these people must be going through right now. Twelve
people lost their lives in that school, most of them children from the
elementary school. Many more of them have lost arms and legs or have
other injuries.
As for Islamic attacks on Christian schools that do not lead to
casualties, these are quite common. Thus, on November 5 in Bangladesh,
hundreds of Muslims, some armed with knives and machetes, attacked a
Christian school. They
torched its library, burned Bibles and hymnals, and committed other
wanton acts of violence. According to a source, "A wave of panic
swept through the school and traumatized everyone. Many students became
sick in the following days." The reason for this particular attack? Muslim
projection: a rumor started that the Christian school was converting
Muslim students to Christianity.
How many of those Western people who could not help but hear about the
Peshawar attack—considering its widespread coverage—also heard about
these Islamic attacks on schools some of which also took large numbers of
children lives? Not very many, I would wager.
The reason, again, is obvious: reporting Muslims killing Muslims does
not contradict the mainstream media's narrative but ostensibly enforces
it. For—so the simple logic goes—Muslims who kill fellow Muslims cannot
be "real" Muslims to start with, and must in fact be, as
Western politicians habitually characterize them, mere
"criminals."
Thus, the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in
Afghanistan issued a statement
condemning the Peshawar attack, adding, "The barbaric actions of the
Taliban illustrate their lack of value for human life and lack of respect
for the Islamic faith. These attacks only prove their selfish desire for
power and willingness to murder to reach their self-serving goals."
On the other hand, it is more difficult for the media to dissemble the
motives of Muslims who intentionally target and kill "the
other"—outnumbered and defenseless "infidel"
minorities—simply because they are "the other."
Whether small numbers or large—whether four
children decapitated for refusing to renounce Christ or whether the
largest massacre of Christians in Syria—Muslim persecution of
Christians will rarely if ever get MSM coverage, for it throws
a wrench in the media's narrative that Islamic violence is a product
of anything and everything but Islamic
hate for non-Muslims.
Raymond
Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom
Center, a Judith Friedman Rosen Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum
and a CBN News contributor. He is the author of Crucified
Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians (2013) and The
Al Qaeda Reader (2007).
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