'Anti-Islam'? Not quite
National Post
Friday, February 14, 2003
ADVERTISEMENT
It's becoming a tradition. Every year, the Canadian Islamic Congress publishes a report arguing that Canada's media is filled with anti-Muslim bias. And every year, this newspaper debunks it.
As with the 2002 installment, this year's Anti-Islam in the Media survey, released Thursday, singled out the National Post for its "persistent use of anti-Islam terminology." But what does "anti-Islam terminology" mean? According to the CIC, a Waterloo, Ont.-based group run by a university professor named Mohamed Elmasry, a media outlet need not actually denigrate Muslims to qualify as "anti-Islam." Rather, the CIC's "newspaper grading criteria" assign bias points for each use of such terms as "Muslim terrorists," "Muslim militants" and "Muslim extremists." Mr. Elmasry's presumption is that the religion of Middle Eastern terrorists is incidental to their actions -- and so citing their Muslim identity is a gratuitous gesture that reflects bias and promotes hatred.
But, of course, this presumption is absurd. Al-Qaeda, like dozens of like-minded organizations in South Asia and the Middle East, is engaged, by its own proud admission, in a Muslim jihad. As we argued in an editorial on last year's CIC report, "Islam is their raison d'etre, their inspiration, their call to battle, their means of recruitment and, in the second before they explode themselves, their great comfort."
To appreciate the specious nature of the CIC's campaign, consider just one of the many bogus examples of "bias" cited in its report -- an Aug. 1, 2002, column in which Mark Steyn wrote that Saudi Arabia is "the principal underwriter and fomenter of Islamic terrorism." The last two words count for 80 CIC "bias points." But let's review the facts: Saudi Arabia is a self-proclaimed Muslim theocracy whose state constitution is the Koran. Its government and leading charitable agencies raise money for Palestinian terrorists through Zakat, a form of giving mandated under Muslim religious law. Millions of dollars are then sent to Hamas, a group whose name is an Arabic acronym for "Islamic Resistance Movement," whose goal is the creation of a Muslim state on Israel's ashes, and which recruits bombers by telling them Allah will provide them 72 virgins in a Muslim heaven. Hey, Mr. Elmasry -- notice a theme?
As a sidebar, it is instructive to consider what sort of journalism Mr. Elmasry holds up for commendation. His model publication, apparently, is Crescent International, a Markham, Ont.-based Islamic newsletter that praises Iran's fundamentalist regime, reprints the communiqués of Hamas, and labels Canada a "fully paid-up member of the Anglo-Saxon mafia, which is responsible for most of the recorded genocides in the world." Last year, Mr. Elmasry presented Crescent International's founder the CIC's award for media excellence.
The CIC's contention that "there appears to be no balance of coverage regarding news or views related to Islam and Muslims" is equally baseless. Since 9/11, every major Canadian media outlet has bent over backwards to provide human-interest coverage of the West Bank, Iraq and other Arab lands. Writers inevitably couch their reports on the latest call to jihad with disclaimers indicating that the "vast majority" of Muslims do not support terrorism. (Such disclaimers are belied by Muslim opinion polls. But we politely ignore them.) Sympathetic treatment of Canada's own Muslim communities is ubiquitous. Indeed, one of the most hackneyed post-9/11 stories in Canadian journalism is the profile of the hijab-clad Muslim woman -- with a great emphasis on the allegedly intolerable psychic pain resulting from the occasional "suspicious looks" she receives in public places.
In his report, Mr. Elmasry writes that anti-Muslim bias has created a "national crisis" that "manifests itself in loss of identity and self-esteem, feelings of inferiority, and even suicidal tendencies, especially among teenagers." But if Mr. Elmasry wants to understand Islam's poor standing in the West, he might want to focus more on the "suicidal tendencies" exhibited by his co-religionists in the ranks of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. What really creates negative associations with Islam is not this or that noun phrase used in the National Post, but the sight of thousands of Muslims blaspheming Allah by waging terrorist attacks in his name.
© Copyright 2003 National Post |
