Muslim life just isn’t worth as much as Christian life.

I remember back when Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh was brutally stabbed to death, there was quite a bit of outrage around the world.  And rightfully so; he was murdered in cold blood by an extremist.  As offensive as I and others found his anti-Islamic bigotry, the reality is that he was not hurting anybody else by being a bigoted idiot and in fact he was living in his home country where people are (for the most part) allowed to say anything they want; thus, he was breaking no laws.  While the Western media focused heavily on the noisy minority of extremists within the Muslim world reacting positively to this man’s murder, the outrage and condemnation was not exclusive to the West as most Muslims – including the person whose blog you’re reading – were disgusted first at a cold blooded killer and second at a cold blooded killer claiming to act on behalf of our religion.

What I find quite sad is that the tables have been turned now, and the two-facedness of the popular media in the Western world has been revealed.  Marwa Sherbini, an Egyptian pharmacist living in Germany with her family, was stabbed to death by an extremist of a different flavor.  Not enough for you yet?  She was pregnant at the time this murderer attacked her.  Want to up the ante a little more, so to speak?  She was stabbed in the middle of a courtroom, the representative of justice within the Federal Republic of Germany.  Still not enough?  She was surrounded by bystanders and multiple police officers, who did not prevent the man from stabbing her eighteen-effing-times.  Enough?  You sure you don’t want more?  When her husband tried to intervene, not only was he also stabbed by the attacker but the police shot the husband instead of the attacker.  With her three-year-old son watching.

And this is the crux of my argument.  The murder of Theo Van Gogh was abhorrent and disgusting, but this is just downright tragic; after harassing this woman with racial and religious slurs for months and even previously assaulting her, she took him to court for this harassment and the murderer was somehow allowed by the baliff (or its German equivalent) to get close enough to this person, who was already a victim of him previously, to physically attack her.  And then they shoot her husband when he tried to save her, saying it was an accident?  Letting a defendant get close to the plaintiff at any time itself is a mistake; shooting the man who is clearly not the perpetrator (the fact that the attacker was also stabbing him should have been a clue) is beyond evil and more akin to police bruality against blacks as witnessed in the United States.  Yet, with the tragedy of this case, there has been only a tiny mention of this in the Western media.  Theo Van Gogh’s murder was a huge issue for the media in Europe and North America; what about the brutal stabbing of a pregnant Muslim woman in a courtroom in full view of the police?  She’s a pregnant woman!  You figure that, given the sensationalism of the Western media, the fact that she was pregnant would have at least overridden the anti-Muslim bias visible in that part of the world.

We no longer need to play the whole “turn the tables” game here.  We don’t need to ask the rhetorical “what would the media do if a Muslim man stabbed a pregnant Christian woman to death” question, which in other cases would still garner accusations of scaremongering and playing the “clash of civilizations” card by the political right and even some of the center in the West.  We don’t need to ask that at all because it’s already happened!  In fact, as evil as Theo Van Gogh’s murder was, I would put forth the argument that the brutal murder of a pregnant woman in the presence of the police is far more outrageous than even the brutal murder of a man in secret.  You would think that the Western media could thus put forth even equal attention, yet this is beyond less; this is almost none!  Comparatively, you could say it is none.

Being a skeptic myself, I was never one to cry about media bias or systemic Islamaphobia as I regarded those as emotional scare tactics.  But when something this hideous, this disgusting, this hateful comes around then it’s hard not to see that the life of a Muslim is not considered equal to the life of a Christian in the eyes of the West.  While the same could be said for the attitudes of prejudiced individuals in the Muslim world, it is Europe and North America who posit themselves as the defenders of equality and human rights, with the right to lecture and scold the rest of the world about these things.  If there was any proof of the governments and media in the Western countries having a double standard on these points – as the silence speaks volumes – then this is it.