On May 29 a shooter walked into the Chicken Land restaurant in Mississauga. When the shooting stopped five people were shot, one fatally.
The Peel Regional Police Homicide squad is handling the file. They have named three suspects: Anand Nath, Naqash Abbasi, and Suliman Raza (pictured). Two of the suspects were subsequently arrested and charged, but Nath tried to flee, boarding a flight to Montreal. He ultimately turned himself in and was flown back to Mississauga. Peel Police have since charged him with first degree murder as well.
Now you’d almost think that this sort of shooting attack would attract a lot of media attention. But it didn’t. Unless you’re a voracious news consumer, it’s likely you never heard of any of this.
I scoured the internet to find information about this incident but had precious little success.Tom Quiggan has been following this story on his excellent podcast The Quiggan Report. But where’s the mainstream media?
The shooting victims were, all but one, members of the same family which operated the restaurant. Naim Aki, 25, was killed in the shooting rampage. His dad, 56, Jihad, mom Rania, 44 and brother Daniel, were also shot but not fatally. A shot was fired at the 13-year-old sister Sandra, but fortunately missed. A 58-year-old male employee of the restaurant was also shot.
The victims were members of the Lebanese Druze community while the suspects are Sunni Muslims.
It looks like the shooting was targeting the family and appears to have been a bid to eradicate them. Why? Well, we don’t know. The police have only released basic information. And the media have been conspicuous in their silence.
A brazen daylight shooting in the suburban city of Mississauga in which five people were shot and it is all but ignored by the media. Contrast this to another brazen shooting in North York in 2004 in which bystander Louise Russo was shot and paralyzed in a botched mob hit at the California Sandwiches shop.
There have been thousands of media stories about that case, the most recent being in 2018 by CBC extolling her virtues as an anti-violence advocate.
But in another brazen daylight shooting just a few miles west of there, crickets. So, what’s the difference? Is it because in the one case the suspects were Italian and in the other Sunni Muslims?
In the same week as the police announced the arrest of the shooter in the Chicken Land attack, the Prime Minister was tweeting up a storm about how Canadians are Islamophobic and announcing a summit on Islamophobia.
And, as with most things relating to this Prime Minister the mainstream media are carrying his water and ensuring their coverage dovetails with whatever propaganda message the PMO is touting.
Now, I take nothing away from Russo who was merely trying to get a sandwich when she was hit sentencing her to a lifetime in a wheelchair. It was a tragic incident committed by some Italian mobsters. But, I fail to understand how the brazen Chicken Land shootings that left one man dead and three other members of his family wounded could cause the media to turn a blind eye.
To get the names of the other family members I had to go to the Canadian Druze Society website. They were not reported in the few media reports of the incident. It was three years ago when a radicalized Muslim attacked innocent people having dinner in Toronto’s Danforth neighbourhood. That was a case of radicalized Islamic terror. But to this day no one in the media would call it what it was.
Was the attack on the family that owned and operated the Chicken Land restaurant the result of radicalized Islamic terror? We don’t know.
The accused are all Iranian nationals. Iran is the largest sponsor of Islamic terror in the world. Was this an Iranian sponsored terror attack? We don’t know.
There is so much in all of this we just don’t know. And if we wait for the bulk of mainstream media to do their job we never will know.
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