Western Media Not Covering Muslim Condemnation of Manchester Attack: Canadian Prof.
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – A Canadian university professor denounced Western media for not doing enough to show that Muslims have rejected a recent terrorist attack at a concert hall in the English city of Manchester, which killed at least 22 people.
“There are two things with which I disagreed in the reporting, however. I feel that the western media has not done enough to show that Muslim communities have rejected the attack. This would include all different stripes of Muslims, Shiite, Sunni, Ahmadi, etc. We have not seen enough about the Muslim condemnation of the attack although the vigil in Manchester led by the Archbishop of Manchester was a reflection of the community and included Protestant, Catholic, Muslim and other religious leaders standing together,” Mia Bloom, Professor of Communication and Middle East Studies at Georgia State University, told the Tasnim News Agency.
She added, “This was a very good symbol but the media could do a better job about showing how this is unIslamic and violated the holy Quran about the sanctity of civilians”.
“Muslim taxi drivers were giving people free rides to the hospital, the Muslim doctors were treating the wounded in the 8 local hospitals…the vast majority of Muslims were opposed to this kind of violence,” Bloom said.
The Canadian expert further said the publication of pictures of the bomb by the New York Times was the second thing that she disagreed with.
“We know from other criminal investigations that keeping this information quiet until all the perpetrators are found is important. I am ordinarily a fan of the New York Times (and a subscriber) but agree with PM May that the publication of this material might impede the investigation.”
It is wrong to assume that there is some magical combination of factors that leads to such attacks, the academic noted, adding, “…at every level, people are making decisions based on a variety of factors. Thus saying for example that poverty and alienation leads to joining a Salafi Jihadi group fails to appreciate that many Jihadis are better educated than the average or better educated than most people. Looking at the 9/11 hijackers for example shows that they had university degrees and came from wealthy families. At the same time, the one country that has generated the most foreign fighters who joined the so-called Islamic state (Daesh, ISIL, ISIS) is Tunisia. So it would not be because of islamophobia that Tunisians are going to Raqqa or Mosul.”
Responsibility for the attack in Manchester on May 23, which also wounded 59 people, was later claimed by Daesh, a terrorist group primarily influenced by Wahhabism.
