American terrorist murders three innocent Muslim students on campus

Crescent International, Abba Gada

Rabi' al-Thani 21, 1436 2015-02-11

Daily News Analysis

by Crescent International, Abba Gada

When is an act of terrorism not terrorism? When the perpetrator is not a Muslim. The corporate media in the West, especially the US, is on a Crusade to demonize Muslims but virtually ignores acts of terrorism against innocent Muslims as happened at White Chapel, NC, February 10 where three young American Muslim students, a young husband and wife and her sister (photograph on the left), were brutally murdered by a man shown in photo on the right.

White Chapel, NC,
Wednesday February 11, 2015, 11:03 EST

Three American Muslim students were shot and killed at the University of North Carolina campus yesterday evening (February 10) by an American terrorist.

The terrorist has been identified as 46-year-old Craig Stephen Hicks and is in police custody. He was to make a court appearance today after being held at the Durham County Jail overnight, according to local police. The victims were identified as 23-year-old Deah Shaddy Barakat, his 21-year-old wife, Yusor Mohammad, and her sister, 19-year-old Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha. All three were shot in the head at a housing complex off campus where a lot of graduate students live. The complex is known as a quiet place.

Deah Shaddy Barakat was a second year dentistry student at the university while his wife Yusor was about to join in the fall. Her sister was attending North Carolina State University in White Chapel but they shared the apartment. While the police have not released a motive for the shooting, the corporate-controlled media’s lack of coverage is absolutely appalling and shows scant regard for Muslim lives.

One can imagine the media hysteria if the accused were a Muslim and had shot three white Christian Americans, for instance. The media led by Fox News would be screaming “terrorism” every five seconds and condemning all Muslims as terrorists. Attacks on mosques and Islamic Centers across the United States would have followed as has happened on numerous occasions. These were witnessed in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris (January 7) and when the takfiri terrorists murder westerners in their custody.

The hashtag #ChapelHillShooting went viral after the murders were first reported last night. Almost all tweets criticized the US and other Western media for failing to report the murders. Some Americans commenting on the terrorist attack tried to justify it on the grounds that such murders are common in the US. Given the prevalence of guns in the hands of millions of Americans, this is true but there is also another factor that is ignored in this explanation.

There is officially sanctioned and media-generated Islamophobia in the US. Muslims are constantly portrayed as the “enemy” within. Bobby Jindal, the Indian (as in the Indian subcontinent) origin governor of Louisiana, has openly condemned Muslims and said if they do not accept American values, then they are invaders!

If Muslims are involved in some violent incident anywhere in the world, their religion is immediately linked with it. Ignored is the fact that most Muslims repeatedly and loudly condemn such acts but the corporate media simply ignore them. There are constant demands of Muslims to condemn such acts. As Baroness Sayeeda Warsi of Britain pointed out, Muslims would condemn such acts when they are heard.

If Muslims are involved in some violent incident anywhere in the world, their religion is immediately linked with it.

If Christians and Jews are involved in violent attacks against Muslims, their religion is seldom if ever invoked. One cannot escape the conclusion that there is a deliberate attempt to demonize Islam and Muslims. It is also likely that when non-Muslims are involved in such terrorist acts—whether against Muslims or others—they are often portrayed as being emotionally disturbed or crazed. The most striking example of this kind of justification was the mass murder perpetrated by Andre Brievik in Norway in 2011. He shot and killed 77 youth at a camp yet he was not denounced as a Christian terrorist. He was not even called a neo-Nazi, he clearly is a neo-Nazi, and had close links with rightwing neo-Nazi and Zionist groups in the US and Britain.

Last month, Chris Phillip was arrested in Ottawa, Canada with chemicals and explosives. He planned to attack a number of Federal Buildings. He has also not been called a terrorist. The “terrorist” label is applied only and only to Muslims. Were a Muslim driver to hit a pedestrian on a street, the corporate media would perhaps call it an act of terrorism.

A Christian, Jews or Hindu could take a gun and murder innocent people in cold blood, as just happened in White Chapel in North Carolina and that would not be an act of terrorism but the act of a crazed individual.

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