Posted on 08/25/2003 9:33:18 PM PDT by Utah Girl
Sitting in Cairo in a flat borrowed from a friend. Turn on the TV and catch the news on BBC World: six stories in 15 minutes. Iraqi guerillas blow up a couple of pipelines. European hostages released by Muslim guerillas in Mali. Nigerian peacekeeping troops in Liberia. Rioting between Muslim sects in Pakistan. Iceland resumes whaling. Islamist terrorists arrested in Indonesia. End of world news.
Four out of six: that's how many of the stories were about Muslims who do violent things. That would make sense if two-thirds of the world's people were Muslims, and most of them were violent. Because only one-fifth of the world's people are Muslims, and many of them don't even spank their children, it calls for an explanation. Especially because the international news is like this most of the time.
BBC World is not particularly bad. In fact, from Minnesota to Moscow to Manila it is the preferred source of TV news for people with an interest in the world, a knowledge of English and access to cable. It is serious about delivering "balanced" news to a multi-national audience, and yet it is doing an absolutely terrible job. Why?
Consider the four "Muslim" stories among the BBC World six I listed at the top of this article. The Iraq story is legitimate. When the world's greatest power is sinking into a political and military quagmire, it is going to get coverage. But why Muslim hostage-takers in Mali rather than politically motivated kidnappers in Colombia? Why sectarian clashes between Muslims in Pakistan rather than inter-caste violence among Hindus in India?
The story of suspected terrorists arrested for the Marriott hotel bombing in Jakarta is of legitimate interest, but there's a lot less follow-up when suspected Basque terrorists are arrested in Spain, or when a resurgent Sendero Luminoso blows something up in Peru. The BBC is not anti-Muslim, but it is responding to a definition of international news that makes "violent Muslims" more newsworthy than violent people in other places.
It is largely a Western definition, following an agenda set mainly by the dominant U.S. media. It is rooted in Western perspectives on the long-running Arab-Israeli conflict, and has been vastly strengthened by the Islamist terrorist attack on the United States two years ago. It is also a steaming heap of horse-feathers.
I am not preaching pious nonsense about Islam being a "religion of peace." The only peaceful religions are dead religions. And I am not denying that the Muslim world has a big historical chip on its shoulder. Having run one of the most powerful and respected civilizations on the planet for the first 1,000 years after they burst out of Arabia and conquered large chunks of Europe, Asia and Africa, Muslims have spent the past three centuries being overrun, colonized and humiliated by the West. But the image of Muslims that the rest of the world gets through international news coverage is deeply misleading.
For the past month I have been wandering around the Middle East with eight other members of my extended family. For some, it was their first time in the region; others of us have lived here or visited often enough to be able to lead everybody astray. And we gave less thought to our personal safety -- and much less to petty theft -- than we would have done on a comparable trip across America, or even through Europe.
I won't go on about how kind and friendly most of the people we met were, because most people are like that everywhere. I would point out that every single person I discussed current events with was against the U.S. invasion in Iraq, but that I nevertheless encountered no personal hostility although I am easily mistaken for an American. (Would an Arab doing a similar trip around the United States have the same experience?)
If Iraq gets completely out of hand, the patience and tolerance that still prevail at street level in the Muslim Middle East will be severely eroded, and even Asian Muslim countries may end up taking sides against the United States and Britain. But for the moment Samuel Huntington's nightmare vision of a coming "clash of civilizations" is still a long way off, and the most striking thing is the sheer ordinariness of daily life in the Muslim world. Don't be misled by television.
...I disagree
"Remember Allah inspired the angels: I am with you. Give firmness to the believers. I will instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers: you smite them above their necks and smite all their fingertips off of them." (Sura 8:12)
In the interest of fairness, some Muslims do not take this injunction as a command for present-day action because (a) Allah was speaking to angels, not men, or (b) this passage refers to a historical event (battle of Badr).
So when you meet in battle those who disbelieve, then smite the necks until when you have overcome them, then make (them) prisoners, and afterwards either set them free as a favor or let them ransom (themselves) until the war terminates.
Again, the ordinary Muslim does not read this and then goes out of the house, scimitar in hand, to smite unbelievers.
What the clerics preach is another matter. As we all know the Quran also contains peaceful passages, yet the orthodox Islamic interpretation is that many of them have been abrogated by more violent ones written when Islam had become more powerful.
Yeah.
That's the ticket.
Who are you going to believe? Me or your own lying eyes?
It's more like 20% minimum.
Now figure out what that comes to out of 1 billion claimed...
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You seem to go out of your way to explan away the seriousness and intent of these proclamations. Why are you an apologist for this crap?
Yeah, when I started, it seemed FR was about taking a critical look at a news story, ripping it up if wrought with crap, etc. It was a fun exercise. Now, everybody expects to simply read articles that are preaching to the choir, or to simply read jokes.
But, all terrorists are muslim.
10% wasn't my figure, I was just questioning the math.
Because white people are just stump ass stupid
thereby revealing far more about about himself than "white" people, or Christians.
"metalboy's" credibility = ZERO.
Why are you an apologist for this crap?
Hahaha.
I said that some Muslims do not take these passages literally as a present-day injunction. That does not make me an "apologist" for Islam anymore than people like Bernard Lewis and Daniel Pipes are "apologists".
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