The shootings in Ottawa and the US media

The media in the United States goes over the edge every time an act of terror occurs anywhere in any western country, particularly in its soil that has any assumed (which is the case almost all the time) or real link (which is almost always not the case) to the so-called Islamic terrorists or when the actors happen to be Muslims.  To the US media, the pariah word is Islam (that it mistakenly uses as synonym of Muslim) and when actors are Muslims, it does not require any investigation. Islam stands immediately condemned as a religion of terror on the basis of the action of a single or at best a few individuals who just happen to be Muslims.
However, for perhaps the first time the US media's intentions to spin any act of terror involving a Muslim, real or assumed, to create suspicion in the minds of the non-Muslims about Islam and Muslims has backfired. The shooting incident in Ottawa in which a Canadian convert to Islam Michael Zehaf-Bibaeu shot and killed a Canadian soldier before the county's war memorial and then ran into the parliament located close by where he was shot and killed was broadcast by CNN as "breaking news". That may have been fair enough. But then it covered the "breaking news" with the sensational theme "terrified capital." In contrast, the Canadian media's initial reaction to the news was "soldier dies after Parliament hill attack. Gunman also dies."
Following the initial sensational spin, CNN and other US media tried to give the Ottawa the same spin as it had done with the Boston bombings two years ago in trying to find the Islamic link. The spin did not meet with the approval of the Canadian media that expressed its disapproval with US media and its attempts to find Michael Zehaf-Bibaeu's links to ISIS/ISIL even before trying to find his actual identity. The Canadian media totally disagreed with the US media. One typical headline in the Canadian media read: "Canada's coverage of the Ottawa shootings put American Cable News to shame". The live TV coverage of the Ottawa shootings by Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's anchor Peter Manbridge has been used as an example by Canadians to show the US media how the Ottawa shooting should have been covered.  Canadians lauded Peter Manbridge for how he "and his team managed that confusion, conveying a concise and fact-based version of fast-moving events to viewers across Canada and the world." Peter Manbridge was thus able to diffuse the event in Ottawa as an act of a "petty criminal with a string of minor convictions dating back to 2001 who recently converted to Islam and dreamed to travelling to the Middle East to study Arabic".
One Canadian newspaper wrote a typical review about Peter Manbridge's laudable role. It stated that his "live bit of level-headed reporting from around 11:10 a.m. Wednesday, should be given to journalism students around the country. It basically contains everything you need to know about why CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) did its audience proud." Thus while CNN and the rest of US media tried to discover how many more terrorists there were with Michael Zehaf-Bibaeu's in the Ottawa shootings and their links with ISIS/ISIL and the other Islamic terrorists, Peter Manbridge on CBC provided the cue to the rest of the Canadian media to treat it as the act of a 32-year-old deranged individual. Individuals like him shoot others in the USA almost as a daily event in a country where buying guns is as easy as buying any consumer product out of the shelf. Thus another report on the shootings stated "our obsession with the Ottawa shooter's religion reveals more about us than about him."
In fact, the contrast in the coverage of the Ottawa shooting between Canada and the US shows that the US media continues to be a major reason why the US government that can play a positive role in making the world a peaceful one, fails to do so. The Boston shooting that occurred two years ago is an example. For the first few days while the identity of the bombers was unknown, every Muslim in USA prayed that they should be from any religion but Islam. That did not happen. When the bombers' identity was revealed, the US media spun the connection that placed the seven million Muslims on the dock like they were after 9/11. Muslims were for a second time scared to use US airports and roads and public places as they were after 9/11.
In the end, the Tsarnaev brothers turned out to have connections with Islam that were hazy and weak. They had no connections with core Islamic terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda around which the US media had spun its story on the Boston bombings. The Tsarnaev brothers had issues with Russia and its treatment of Muslim minorities in which the USA and western media had little interest. Thus the Muslims in the USA were on their tenterhooks for weeks because of the US media's spin to find links of the Tsarnaevs with the Islamic terrorists of the al-Qaeda type. The Muslims were left off their tenterhooks only after it was revealed conclusively that the brothers did not have any links with such groups.
No one would argue that Americans have legitimate concerns over those who use terror in the name of Islam. The 9/11 incidents created that concern. The horror surrounding the 9/11 attacks will take quite a while to get out of the minds of the Americans. This notwithstanding, the Ottawa shooting should encourage the US media to consider that major developments on the so-called Islamic terror have occurred since 9/11. Muslims in the USA have shown their determination to deal with anyone using the good name of Islam to create terror in the United States. Information from US intelligence sources has revealed that the Muslims themselves are coming forward to identify those among them with radical views. The same is the case in Canada that too has a substantial number of Muslims from all over the world. Mosques in the USA, numbering many thousands, are now helping Muslims convey to the mainstream Americans their belief in the ideals that make the US the most powerful nation on earth.
The US media, unfortunately, is not interested in these developments. It is equally not interested in examining why Iraq is in a mess at present with ISIS/ISIL terrorists. Did not the USA and its allies state that they invaded Iraq to establish democracy? Iraqis suffered in silence as hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children were killed as "collateral damage" in the hope that the invasion would bring democracy to the country. Now, Iraqis are dying because Muslims are fighting Muslims with the ISIL/ISIL in the lead role and democracy has turned into a joke in the killing game. Yet, because a few western individuals have been beheaded by ISIS/ISIL, acts that have been condemned in the Muslims countries as strongly as in the US, the US media is spreading fear as it did after 9/11 that the country is in imminent threat of terrorist attacks from this new terror group. The US Congress is lending its own voice to the media concerns.
The US media should take a lesson from the Ottawa shooting incident to realise how its spin to demonise even individual acts of Muslims affects the lives of many million Muslims who are as peace-loving as those whose interest it claims to represent. Furthermore, it is time for it to look at the Muslims with objective lens to try and find out whether the terror they fear from Muslims and Muslim countries is real or imaginary and the role of the United States in the turmoil occurring in countries like Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria from where it fears the imaginary terror threats. In this examination, it should keep in view what Hillary Clinton said about Osama bin-Laden and al-Qaeda. In a recent interview, she said that in Afghanistan, the US has been fighting the very "guys" it had put there in the first instance, directly accusing US intelligence for backing al-Qaeda to fight the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In fact, US intelligence was responsible for Osama bin-Laden's safe passage from Sudan to Afghanistan. There are good reasons to believe that had the US/allies not intervened in Iraq in 2003 on the pretexts that it had WMDs, there would have been nothing like ISIS/ISIL today.

The writer is a retired ambassador.
[email protected]