Seventeen-Year-Old Nabra Hassanen Was Murdered

Seventeen-year-old Nabra Hassanen is dead. She was murdered.

You may not have heard about her death.

In fact, unless you live in the area where the murder occurred, you would likely have to search for any information at all about her death.

If you did that, you would likely discover that the mainstream press is following two -and only two- narratives when talking about her death.

1) The ongoing discussion about whether she was victim of a hate crime, or just a plain, regular crime.

2) You will discover that, either way, she was, according to Fairfax police, the victim of a ‘road rage’ incident.

This is appalling. It is a plain and outright display of everything that is wrong with our terror-obsessed media.

We have all seen reporters or government officials breathing a collective sign of relief after concluding that this-or-that story does not warrant further discussion because it has been deemed to be ‘non-terrorist’ in nature.

They are saying plainly: Forget about the victims. Their deaths do not warrant further time or energy.

We have all seen the horrible footage of the blood-soaked bodies of ‘foreigners’ in foreign lands and wondered, deep down, why the Eiffel Tower does not bear the colors of Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen…

We know their blood is on our hands.

We know the blood of  seventeen-year-old Nabra Hassanen is also on our hands.

We are talking about the death of a teenager. A teenager who was Muslim.

If we cannot even begin to admit that she -and countless others around the world- have been murdered because of that fact we will never, ever even begin to extricate ourselves from this horrid governmental  ‘rule-by-fear’ decree that has taken over not just our lives, but the lives of millions of innocent people all over the world.

And the lives of innocent teenagers who just happen to be Muslim.

James Porteous lives in Toronto. He worked as Digital Librarian for Al Jazeera English for 10 years. His latest novel, Hawkins Bay, is available at Amazon and iTunes.