Press TV has interviewed Shabbir Hassanally, an activist and Islamic scholar from London, to discuss the recent bloody crackdown on Shia Muslims in Nigeria as well as the Western media’s deafening silence on this.

The following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: Do you find it alarming that the mainstream Western media have remained silent on the attacks in Zaria?

Hassanally: I find it disturbing; I do not find it alarming because at the end of the day everyone is aware of what the mainstream media is. Unfortunately, there is a racist flavor to the Western media. Mush as people do not like saying it, even I do not feel comfortable saying that the Western media is racist. Reality is reality. You know 'If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it is a duck!' So this is the problem, but I think it is a little bit deeper than that. In your previous report, you had said that it seems that the Western media is in cahoots in some way with Boko Haram, this Takfiri mentality and actually this is the reality of the problem. This Takfiri mentality is not a group; I think it is a mistake to say that there is this Boko Haram or this Daesh or all of this. All of these are strategies. The people who are implementing the strategies, they are mercenaries controlled at Washington and Tel Aviv and sadly London. It is a neo-colonial strategy. If you look at where it goes, what it does. Why is Boko Haram suddenly you know massive inside Nigeria? Why is the Nigerian government doing nothing about it but instead hitting innocent Muslims? They need to create this chaos and one of the ways they do it is sectarianism, which is why i feel that we should not be falling into trap of saying it is a Shia genocide, or the Shias are being killed. These are Nigerians; these are Muslims, Christians are also affected by this who are being harmed and they are Nigerian people, they are being harmed because they are the oppressed. The fact that they happened to be a Muslim group is actually by the by. If there were any other group that supported the Palestinian resistance and that worked against or spoke out Zionist, you can be certain they would also be targeted.

So we should not allow ourselves to fall into the trap that is being set for us the Western powers that be, by the strategy known as Boko Haram, Daesh, al-Qaeda whatever you know flavor you want to give it and we should not say it is a sectarian thing. It is a fight; it is a war that is the same as the battle that is happening in Syria, that is happening in Iraq, that is happening in Palestine. It is a battle of the oppressed against the oppressor and it should always be seen like that.

But the Western media will never say anything about this because the Western media is completely in the hands of bankers and financiers in big business which are completely controlled by [being] subservient to the Zionist imperialist projects.