“It just seems now that all we ever get in the media is Muslims and Islam. The working class seems to have been forgotten. (Some) 25 years ago, I didn’t know what a Muslim was or that Muslims followed Islam. Now we can’t escape hearing about Muslims.”
– A disgruntled reader commenting on a recent Guardian piece

NEGATIVE coverage of Islam and Muslims in the media is no secret and it’s making people averse to Islam, not to mention the amount of hassles innocent Muslims are facing with authorities in non-Muslim countries. The revelations of how MI5 is blackmailing British Muslims; the case of award-winning Pakistani writer, Mohammed Hanif, being detained for over two hours at New Zealand airport last week; the case of Indian actor Mammootty being grilled for two hours at New York airport earlier this month; and the dramatic arrest and subsequent release of 12 Muslim students in Britain over suspicion of terrorism last month are examples of what is happening everyday around the world.
Further, communities are totally disconnected from the reality and truth about Islam and Muslims. A joint survey by Gallup and Coexist Foundation published in the first week of May 2009 found that European Muslims are more loyal than other citizens to their respective countries. But only a small percentage of non-Muslim citizens trusted Muslim citizens for their loyalty. For example, 76 percent of British Muslims believed in the integrity of the justice system as opposed to 55 percent of the general populace and 82 percent of them said British Muslims were loyal citizens, but only 36 percent of their neighbors believed Muslims were loyal citizens. What a total disconnect!
After 9/11, negative reporting of Islam took an unprecedented shift. What were once extreme abusive criticisms by a selected minority of right-wing neoconservatives began to be accepted in the mainstream media. The Pentagon invested heavily in information warfare. The 2003 Pentagon document “Information Operations Roadmap” signed by the then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (declassified in 2006) revealed US military plans for psychological operations, including: public affairs officers who brief journalists, psychological operations troops who try to manipulate the thoughts and beliefs of an enemy, computer network attack specialists who seek to destroy enemy networks. (BBC, Jan. 27, 2006) The objectives were clear and the investment was huge. Islamophobia entered every medium of communication, from major media outlets to bloggers, movies to soap operas and popular sports to video games – nothing was spared.
Result? The Guardian reported a UK study in 2007 that “91 percent of articles in national newspapers about Muslims were negative.” Research into a week’s news coverage found only 4 percent of the 352 articles positive.
A survey conducted by the Pew Research Center last month found that a large percentage of Americans believed Islam encourages violence. When Americans were asked about the single word that best describes Islam, 30 percent used negative words like “terrorism”, “fanatic” and “radical.” This is not surprising as these words are regularly used whenever the word “Islam” is mentioned in the media.
Further, only 43 percent of Americans hold a favorable opinion of Muslims and nearly 47 percent believe Islam encourages violence! Compare this with the 76 percent favorable view of Jews and Catholics. Only 9 percent held a negative opinion of Jews and 14 percent of Catholics. If terrorism in the name of Islam is to be blamed for the negative image, then Jews should have been the most negatively viewed community because of what Israel has been doing in the name of Judaism for the past 62 years!
The report “Smearcasting: How Islamophobes spread fear, bigotry and misinformation” by FAIR (Oct. 2008) described this phenomenon quite well: “After all, reporters managed to cover the Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy McVeigh – an adherent of the racist Christian Identity sect – without resorting to generalized statements about ‘Christian terrorism’. Likewise, media have covered acts of terrorism by fanatics who are Jewish – for instance the Hebron massacre carried out by Baruch Goldstein – without implicating the entirety of Judaism.”
Unfortunately acts of terrorism by people who may have nothing to do with Islam except a Muslim name are tagged along with the entire religion resulting in a degradation of the entire community. When a Muslim student in India went to the Supreme Court because he was objected by his Christian missionary school principal for sporting a beard, the justice told him: “We don’t want Talebans (sic) in the country. Tomorrow, a girl student may come and say that she wants to wear a burqa. Can we allow it?”
Since when has practicing Islam become synonymous with the Taleban? What the Taleban allegedly do is a product of their tribal customs, not Islam. Their militancy is mainly due to nationalism, not Islam. Graham E. Fuller, former CIA station chief in Kabul and former vice-chair of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council, wrote in the article “Obama worsening Afghan-Pak state” (SG, May 10):
“The Taleban represent zealous and largely ignorant mountain Islamists. They are also all ethnic Pashtuns. Most Pashtuns see the Taleban – like them or not – as the primary vehicle for restoration of Pashtun power in Afghanistan, lost in 2001. Pashtuns are also among the most fiercely nationalist, tribalized and xenophobic peoples of the world, united only against the foreign invader. In the end, the Taleban are probably more Pashtun than they are Islamist.”
Burning down schools, throwing acid on female students and killing civilians are acts influenced by their age-old traditions, not Islam. Even before Taleban, women were sold in Afghanistan, literally. Pashtuns from Afghanistan and the north western parts of Pakistan share these tribal traditions. A Muslim man and woman who get legally married as per the Islamic Nikah but against the wishes of the family could both be put to death by family members for disrespecting their traditions!
Islam has nothing to do with such radicalism. Muslims there are as much in need of Islamic education as Muslims in India who worship saints instead of God. – SG

So does Islam really promote violence? This will be addressed tomorrow while answering well-known criticisms.