Look at the AFP headline: “Gunmen kill 16 Shiite Muslims in Pakistan: officials.” Note how the mainstream media readily identifies the victims as Muslims, but not the perpetrators, even though they were just as Muslim as their victims, and were killing them at least in part because they regarded them as Rafidite dogs, heretics from the true Islam.
In the story also, the victims are again identified as “Shi’ite Muslims” and the violence described as “sectarian,” but the aggressors are identified only obliquely. Since the violence is “sectarian” and “the incident took place…in the Sunni dominated Charkhel area,” we can surmise that the murderers were “Sunni Muslims,” but they’re never identified as such.
This is of a piece with the mainstream media’s general tendency to whitewash violence committed by Muslims in the name of Islam. Muslims can only be victims. When they kill, they’re not Muslims anymore, they’re just “gunmen.”
“Gunmen kill 16 Shiite Muslims in Pakistan: officials,” from AFP, July 17:
PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AFP) – Sixteen Shiite Muslims were killed and four wounded Saturday in an apparent sectarian ambush in a remote tribal town in northwest Pakistan, a paramilitary spokesman and local officials said.
The incident took place early Saturday in the Sunni dominated Charkhel area on Tal-Parachinar road in the violence-hit Kurram tribal district, close to the Afghan border.
The victims were heading to Peshawar in two passenger vehicles when unidentified attackers ambushed them in a hail of gunfire, officials said.
Major Fazal-Ur-Rehman, a spokesman for the paramilitary Frontier Corps, confirmed the attack.
Local administrative and intelligence officials also confirmed the incident and said that all those killed were Shiite Muslims….