When news broke out in November that a US Army psychiatrist and self-identified devout Muslim shot his colleagues at the Fort Hood military base in Texas, it didn’t take the American media long to start speculating on what role Islam played in the massacre. But five months earlier, when the American media began covering the post election protests in Iran where many invoked the name of Islam in a quest for human rights, this sort of speculation was mostly absent.
As more details of the Fort Hood story were surfacing, there was already a fierce debate on what the shooter’s motivations were. The American right and left even took it as an opportunity to blame the other’s approach to radical Islam and for allowing, or at least silently encouraging, this sort of atrocity. Always at the heart of the debate was the question of who had the correct view of Islam and how to respond to radicalism.
On a Fox News Special Report with Brett Baier, for example, syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer was particularly incensed that “the media” tried to avoid making a connection between the Fort Hood shootings and Nidal Hasan’s religious beliefs and instead pushed a more medical explanation.[1] Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum and Islamic scholar for nearly forty years, recalled his 2008 creation of the term “Sudden Jihad Syndrome,” which considers all Muslims potential terrorists, and decried any explanation of the Hasan’s psychological or psychiatric state as “weak, obfuscatory, and apologetic” in an article for Front Page Magazine[2].
Among the liberals, Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation and Co-Creator of bloggingheads.tv Robert Wright, countered that Hasan’s psychological issues were important in understanding why he turned to radical Islam in the first place. He places blame on the hawkish approach to counter terrorism and the post-9/11 environment, which “hasn’t made it easier for American Muslims to keep their balance.”[3]
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman steered clear of throwing the blame around but decided the shooting posed the perfect opportunity to challenge the Islamic world to “tell us what [Islam] is and show us how its positive interpretations are being promoted” and that they owe the West, and themselves, an explanation for why “not one [Muslim] will take to the streets to protest Muslim suicide bombers who blow up other Muslims, real people, created in the image of God.”[4] Friedman is apparently unable to find these examples on his own, so the fault must rest with the Islamic world for allegedly failing to provide.
What, then, is to be made of a mass movement of civilians engaging in nonviolent protests and acts of civil disobedience in response to government oppression while constantly employing Islamic symbols and rituals? What did these loud voices in American media say when crowds in Tehran were demanding democracy and chanting “Allahu Akbar!” (God is great!)? What did they think about clergy leaders urging their supporters to resist nonviolently and challenge the theocratic rule of the Ayatollah?
Nearly six months after the protests began, the American media has displayed either little to no interest in discovering just who these protesters are or has simply forgotten that the opposition includes many Muslims who deem their faith important to their politics.
Fox News provided little analysis on the protesters, yet opted to do an extensive review of the Iranian Hostage Crisis even as protests continued. While Fox contributor Judith Miller took some time to praise the dissidents in Iran, the important lesson she drew was that they had been “abandoned” by Obama.[5] Indeed much of the existing coverage of the unrest in Iran from Fox involves claims of Obama’s failures and projections on how it will affect US-Iranian relations. There is almost no interest in understanding who the opposition was.
CNN dedicated much more time documenting the protests and putting a face to the protesters, although they were heavily criticized for their delayed reaction. Anderson Cooper’s 360˚ even had a special report in November on remembering Neda Agha-Sultan, a young woman whose murder by the police was captured on video during a protest and subsequently became a symbol for the nonviolent civil resistance.[6] Time Magazine also featured photo essays of the protests and nominated the protesters for Person of the Year alongside President Obama and Germany’s Angela Merkel. Yet for all this coverage, there was still a lack of analysis on what the protests could mean for the future of any Islamic statecraft.
The Green Movement in Iran is not wholly uniform, and its members come from different backgrounds and different walks of life. Their own personal attachment to Islam varies greatly. But there is no mistaking the legitimacy and support they gain from proclaiming their religious devotion and their commitment to nonviolence. This kind of discussion on good governance and Islam did not suddenly appear in June, but has been simmering in Iran for a long time.
In 2003, Iranian human rights activist Shirin Ebadi demonstrated her pro-peace Islamic convictions in her Nobel Peace Prize lecture:
“I am a Muslim. In the Qu’ran the Prophet of Islam has been cited as saying: ‘Thou shalt believe in thine faith and I in my religion.’ That same divine book sees the mission of all prophets as that of inviting all human beings to uphold justice. Since the advent of Islam, too, Iran’s civilization and culture has become imbued and infused with humanitarianism, respect for the life, belief and faith of others, propagation of tolerance and compromise and avoidance of violence, bloodshed and war.”
There is also the example of Mohammad Khatami, a cleric and former president of Iran, who coined the phrase “dialogue of civilizations” and ran on a platform of liberal reform. Though he was far from perfect, his approach proved to be immensely popular. Rather than focus on Islam’s “compatibility” with democratic values, as though these values are original to the West and are now to be imitated, Khatami reminds us that they have always existed in Islam and the nation-state is just the latest model for their implementation. Both Khatami and Ebadi cite the influence of a myriad of Western and Islamic thought, demonstrating an intellectual synthesis and opportunities for cross-cultural cooperation.
But these examples tend to be absent from the US media. In further looking at these stark deficiencies in coverage, it is also important to note the tendency of all media to follow the “if it bleeds, it leads” motto. We may leave the “whys” of that to sociologists and moralists, but clearly in following this pathos we can miss crucial details that could aid us in finding solutions. Too much emphasis on Islam, and we will fail to address the real or imagined political grievances that add fuel to the fires. Too little emphasis on Islam, and we will fail to understand the symbolic power of the banner under which all these events take place.
The American media is playing a dangerous game in directly and indirectly telling the public what is and is not “orthodox” in Islam. Constant repetition of violent images with significant emphasis on the religious language involved will reinforce the idea that the only true Muslim is some wild-eyed fanatic with guns and bombs. If that is the message that is sent we will be placing ourselves in a position to make it a truth and essentially take on a good portion of the proselytizing for militant Islam. It is essential that we take ourselves out of this game if we are to revitalize our policies towards Muslim engagement and quell the threat of Islamic radicalism in Iraq and Afghanistan as well preventing it from gaining ground at home the way it is in many European countries. Much of American media is already in poor journalistic shape; we don’t need it to play God too.
The 13 Aban demonstrations in Iran commemorating the US embassy take-over in 1979 will gain greater significance as we approach the next public demonstrations on Student day: 16 Azar (December 7).
As most analysts have pointed out, it is by now clear that the post-eletion demonstrations are not going away and that there are [...]
There is a certain buzz in Iranian papers about Ahmadinejad's trip to NYC last week. Echoing Israeli newspapers criticizing of Prime Minister Netanyahu's remarks at the UN , the Iranian media is celebrating the unseating of the state of Israel's primary justification for itself.
You must log in to post a comment.