When Muslim Blood Becomes Cheap: The Murder of Aboubakar Cissé Exposes the Moral Bankruptcy of Western Media

✍️ BY: Dr. Hana Saada

A 22-year-old was brutally slaughtered inside a French mosque in a premeditated Islamophobic attack—yet global media remains deafeningly silent, laying bare the West’s selective outrage and institutionalized double standards.

Algiers, Algeria | May 14th, 2025 —  Stabbed over 50 times inside a French mosque, Aboubakar Cissé’s death reveals not only a monstrous hate crime but also the moral bankruptcy of global media that remained deafeningly silent.

In one of the most heinous crimes to unfold in recent French history, 22-year-old Muslim youth Aboubakar Cissé was slaughtered inside a mosque in the southern French town of La Grand-Combe. Cissé, of Malian origin, was viciously stabbed over fifty times—yes, fifty—by a cold-blooded killer in what can only be described as a calculated and religiously motivated massacre. Yet, the most chilling element is not just the blood on the mosque floor, but the bloodless ink of an international media machine that chose silence over outrage. In the world’s leading newsrooms, the African Muslim’s life simply did not matter.

The killer, a 20-year-old Frenchman named Olivier, from Béziers in southern France, entered the mosque early that morning pretending to seek religious guidance. He approached Aboubakar Cissé, who was performing routine cleaning duties, and asked him to demonstrate how to pray, feigning interest in converting to Islam. As Cissé knelt to show him, Olivier drew a 10-centimeter knife and stabbed him more than 20 times in the neck, then delivered 37 additional stab wounds to his body with unflinching brutality. The attacker then filmed his monstrous act and uploaded it to Instagram, turning a sacred house of worship into the backdrop of a gruesome execution—broadcast for spectacle.

Olivier fled the country and remained in hiding from Friday to Sunday before surrendering to Italian police in Tuscany. France has since issued an extradition request, expected to be processed by mid-month. But the more glaring question remains: Where was the global outcry?

Despite the scale and savagery of the attack, international and French media outlets responded with an eerie, almost complicit silence. No breaking news banners, no live coverage outside the mosque, no somber front-page headlines. The reaction was muted, sanitized, and disgracefully minimal. Compare this to the sweeping and immediate media blitz that follows any crime involving a Muslim suspect—where the word “terrorism” is splashed across headlines before investigations even conclude. The double standard is damning.

The murder of Aboubakar Cissé was not merely a hate crime—it was a media scandal. A journalistic failure. A loud and shameful confirmation that the lives of Black Muslims, especially immigrants, are deemed expendable by editorial boards in Paris, London, and New York. The absence of press attention didn’t just fail to honor a life—it legitimized the climate of hate that made this murder possible in the first place.

Western media—often self-righteous in its advocacy for human rights—became, in this case, an accessory to the crime through silence. Their refusal to frame the attack as an act of far-right terrorism, to investigate the ideological roots of such barbarity, or even to name Aboubakar Cissé in mainstream broadcasts, is not just negligence—it’s deliberate erasure. An erasure rooted in bias, hierarchy of empathy, and political cowardice.

Where were Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch? Where was the moral outrage from CNN, the BBC, or Le Monde? Not a single segment dedicated to dissecting the motivations behind the murder. Not one investigative piece on the surge in far-right extremism in France. No televised panels, no solemn vigils, no national mourning.

Yet, the statistics are impossible to ignore. According to the French National Observatory Against Islamophobia, 2023 witnessed over 182 anti-Muslim incidents, marking a 35% increase from the previous year. Of these, 72 targeted mosques directly, through arson, desecration, or physical attacks. And in just the first three months of 2025, the French Interior Ministry reported 79 anti-Muslim acts—a staggering 72% increase compared to the same period in 2024. January saw 26 attacks, February 17, and March 36. This is not random. This is systemic.

French political rhetoric, obsessed with “secularism” and “republican values,” has been weaponized to criminalize Muslim visibility. From banning abayas in schools to demonizing halal food, every aspect of Muslim life is under siege. In such a hostile environment, what happened to Aboubakar Cissé is not an aberration. It is the logical endpoint of years of dehumanization.

And still, no major Western outlet dared to call this what it truly is: an act of terrorism, perpetrated inside a place of worship. Instead, they whitewashed the killer’s intent, presenting him as a “troubled youth” and avoiding any language that might associate his whiteness with fanaticism. This stands in stark contrast to how Muslims are framed—even the most tenuous link to Islam is enough to invoke global alarm bells.

Make no mistake—Aboubakar Cissé was murdered for being Muslim, Black, and powerless in the media’s eyes. He had no powerful lobby. No Western passport. No geopolitical value. His death was not useful for shaping narratives, so it was quietly shelved. But the silence is violence. The silence is complicity.

This was not just an attack on an individual. It was an attack on the very notion of equal humanity. If the media cannot speak up for a man stabbed 50 times while cleaning a mosque—if his murder is not newsworthy—then the fourth estate has abandoned its moral compass.

To every newsroom that ignored this story: you have blood on your hands. You have shown that justice is conditional. That dignity is negotiable. That the value of a life depends on whether it aligns with your editorial priorities.

It is time for Muslim communities, human rights defenders, and all those who claim to stand for justice to demand accountability from the media. We must reject this two-tiered humanity—where one death triggers global mourning, while another barely earns a footnote.

If journalism still claims to be a pillar of democracy, then the killing of Aboubakar Cissé demands reckoning. Not tomorrow. Now!

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