This kind of revisionist history—painting Christianity and Western civilization as inherently violent, playing up those rare incidents in which Muslim rulers can be made to appear tolerant and merciful, and omitting to mention the vastly more numerous cases in which they were intolerant and cruel—has obvious political ramifications: the modern-day West must appease and make concessions to the Islamic world to atone for its own sins, and not repeat the mistakes of the Crusaders by again being critical or mistrusting of Muslims, from whom the West can learn tolerance. This is the attitude toward Islam among the West’s elite—from the highest echelons of academia on down. Those who get scholarships, grants, and positions (many of them funded by Saudi petro dollars)—in other words, those on their way to a future in the academic world—employ intellectual acrobatics to portray the Islamic world as tolerant, victimized, wonderful to its religious minorities, and so forth. Having been both a graduate student at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and an employee at the African and Middle Eastern Division of the Library of Congress, I have had direct personal experience of the bias that skews the academic study of Islam in the West.
THE MEDIA: OBSCURING THE PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS
The whitewashing of Islam that began in academia naturally metastasized to the media and Hollywood. One can list any number of supposedly “historical” movies—Kingdom of Heaven is one recent example—that contrast noble and magnanimous Muslims with intolerant, fanatical, and greedy Christians. Such movies accurately portray only the Western self-loathing that became popular in the 1970s—the same self-loathing that helped drive Muslims back to the Islamic way. These movies turn history on its head. Agora, for example, a movie set in pre-Islamic fourth-century Egypt, at the time when Christianity was becoming the dominant religion, portrays pagans as tolerant and open-minded, and Christians as indoctrinated and intolerant brutes who have long beards, dress in black, and roam the streets terrorizing and murdering anyone who disagrees with them. The “Christians” in the movie are in fact a perfect depiction of Egypt’s modern-day Salafi Muslims, who wear long beards, dress in white tunics, and roam in bands, terrorizing those who disagree with them—Christian Copts at the top of the list. In other words, at a time when Egypt’s Christians are being persecuted, Hollywood’s response is to produce a movie portraying Egyptian Christians as the persecutors.
The newsrooms of the mainstream media are sometimes little better than Hollywood. Most of the reporting being done on persecuted Christians is not from the larger media outlets, but rather from dedicated journalists—including volunteers—and smaller media agencies who understand the situation and who care more about reporting the facts than about being politically correct. To some extent it is natural that smaller media specialize in covering Christian persecution. The major newspapers, wire services, and TV networks cannot be expected to focus exclusively on this one phenomenon, but rather must take all world events into consideration, highlighting the ones that seem the most important (and get the most attention, and sell the most advertising). But even given these constraints, by and large mainstream-media journalists have been woefully negligent in their reporting.
Otherwise it would be impossible for me to break stories in the Western press, as I often do, simply by translating from Arabic-language media sources the sorts of stories that the mainstream media ignore. I have already mentioned the story about Saudi Arabia’s Grand Mufti’s assertion that it is “necessary to destroy all the churches” in the Arabian Peninsula. His claim was reported in the Arabic media where Western reporters habitually pick up their stories. But they did not seem interested in reporting on this one. As I pointed out at the time that I broke the story in the English-language press, “I have not seen this story, already some three days old, translated on any English news source, though ‘newsworthy’ stories are often translated in mere hours.”5 Many media outlets, including Fox News, subsequently picked up my translation. When the story did break into the mainstream, many wondered at the delay, asking how such a big story could have been ignored. As Clifford D. May, writing on National Review Online, put it,Imagine if Pat Robertson called for the demolition of all the mosques in America. It would be front-page news. It would be on every network and cable-news program. There would be a demand for Christians to denounce him, and denounce him they would—in the harshest terms. The president of the United States and other world leaders would weigh in, too. Rightly so.
So why is it that when Abdulaziz ibn Abdullah Al al-Sheikh, the grand mufti of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, declares that it is “necessary to destroy all the churches in the Arabian Peninsula,” the major media do not see this as even worth reporting? . . .
This should be emphasized: Al al-Sheikh is not the Arabian equivalent of some backwoods Florida pastor. He is the highest religious authority in Saudi Arabia....
None of this might have come to light at all had it not been for Raymond Ibrahim, the Shillman fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and an associate fellow at the Middle East Forum. He was the first to call attention to the grand mufti’s remarks, based on reports from three Arabic-language websites. . . .6
Other times, not only do the mainstream media fail to report on major stories that otherwise put Islam in a negative light, they even attempt to suppress those stories. For instance, when I exposed how growing numbers of clerics were calling for the “demolition of Egypt’s Great Pyramids,”7 in light of the election of Muslim Brotherhood leader Muhammad Morsi to the presidency of Egypt, the New York Times and the Huffington Post responded by portraying my report as a hoax. In fact I had translated from legitimate Arabic-language sources, and the mainstream outlets never offered any meaningful rebutting evidence. They just held the story up to ridicule.8 And while it may be difficult to believe in the destruction of the pyramids, the fact is, at the time of this writing, other less massive ancient Egyptian artifacts are quietly being targeted and destroyed by Salafis seeking to purge Egypt of idolatry—in accordance with Islam’s teachings and the prophet’s actions.9
The possible destruction of antiquities is not the only—or even the most important—story that the Western mainstream media miss, distort, or get completely wrong. Consider the recent and ongoing wars in Sudan and Lebanon. In both cases, Muslim supremacists were—and are—trying to convert, subjugate, or wipe out Christians. (It is not for nothing that Samuel Huntington observed in his Clash of Civilizations that “Islam’s borders are bloody, and so are its innards.”)10 Though religion is the primary cause of both conflicts, reports in the mainstream media focus on more peripheral factors, especially on economic ones, to explain the violence.
Worst of all, however, is when the media in the West not only obscures the suffering of Christians under Islam, but also even demonizes these victims of Muslim persecution. For example, Robert Fisk, the well-known Middle East correspondent for the U.K.’s widely read Independent , recently demonstrated why Islamic jihadis, including the late Osama bin Laden, have recommended his writings to Western readers.11
In a June 4, 2012, article discussing the turmoil in Egypt and Syria, Fisk actually blamed the abused Christian minorities of those two countries for supporting those secularist leaders most likely to protect their lives. For instance he scoffed at how Egyptian presidential candidate “Ahmed Shafiq, the Mubarak loyalist, has the support of the Christian Copts, and [Syrian President] Assad has the support of the Syrian Christians. The Christians support the dictators. Not much of a line, is it?”12
In Fisk’s naïve way of thinking, Sharia-pushing Muslims are patriotic freedom-lovers, and the local Christians are unpatriotic freedom-haters for refusing to support their movement. Truly, “not much of a line, is it?” Completely missing from Fisk’s narrative is why Christians in Egypt supported Shafiq, and why Christians in Syria would rather see the secularist Assad remain in power: because the alternatives—jihad-supporting Islamists seeking to enforce Sharia law—have been making their lives a living he
ll.
Fisk’s biased narrative was not, of course, original to him. It originates with the Islamists themselves, who, bemoaning the secularist Shafiq’s good showing in the presidential election, laid the blame on Egypt’s Christian Copts for coming out in large numbers to vote for him. Tarek al-Zomor, a prominent figure of the Islamic Group al-Gama‘a al-Islamiyya—the terrorist organization that slaughtered fifty-eight European tourists, including several of Fisk’s countrymen, during the 1997 Luxor Massacre—“demanded an apology from the Copts” for voting for Shafiq, which he called a “fatal error.”
The uncritical Fisk followed suit, portraying the Middle East’s Christians as traitors. Yet back in the real world, it was obvious why Egyptian Copts did not vote for the candidate from the Muslim Brotherhood. As one Coptic activist put it: “Did they [complaining Islamists] really expect a Christian to choose a president to represent him from those who cut off the ear of a Christian, blocked the railways in objection to the appointment of a Christian governor in Qena, burn down several churches and who are diligently working to write a Constitution which undermines the rights of Christians?”13
Even secular Muslim writer Khaled Montasser, in an article titled “The Muslim Brotherhood Asks Why Christians Fear Them?!,” pointed out that the Brotherhood’s own official documents and fatwas decree anti-Christian measures, including the destruction of churches and the prevention of burying Christian “infidels” near Muslim graves. Little wonder that Christians did not vote for the Muslim Brotherhood’s Muhammad Morsi, but rather for the secular Shafiq—they naturally did not support a platform that called for their own persecution.
In Syria, as we have seen, Islamist-led opposition forces have been terrorizing, murdering, and plundering the nation’s Christian minority and promising to enforce full Sharia if and when they overthrow Assad. Is it surprising that many Syrian Christians hope to see Assad prevail?
The Independent’ sMiddle East foreign correspondent has apparently missed all these “subtleties.” Instead Fisk bemoaned how those in Washington who support secular rulers “will want to pump up Christian fears and frighten the West with the awfulness of ‘Muslim fundamentalism.’”14
Yet even the mainstream media, ordinarily pretty blasé about “the awfulness of ‘Muslim fundamentalism,’” does report on the very worst anecdotes of Christian persecution under Islam. Those stories, such as the October 2010 Baghdad church massacre, which saw some fifty-eight Christians killed, are simply too spectacular to ignore. All too often, however, while they report the bare-bones facts of the actual persecution, they distort the context in which it occurs, sustaining an aura of moral relativism that minimizes the role of Muslims—and certainly the role of Islam—in causing the violence. Unprovoked Muslim attacks on Christians are portrayed as “sectarian strife,” a phrase that conjures the image of two equally matched adversaries—equally abused, and equally abusive. This hardly describes reality: Christian minorities being persecuted in Muslim-majority nations.
The headlines alone say it all. For example, the New Year’s Eve Coptic church attack that left some twenty-eight dead did receive prominent coverage, but under odd headlines: “Clashes Grow as Egyptians Remain Angry after an Attack,” was the New York Times headline, while “Christians clash with police in Egypt after attack on churchgoers kills 21” was the Washington Post’s—as if frustrated and harried Christians lashing out against their persecutors is the big news, not the persecution itself; as if their angry reaction to an unprovoked attack somehow evens everything up. 15
Blurring the line between the victim and oppressor is a regular tactic of the mainstream media, especially when it comes to reporting on Muslim persecution of Christians. This is especially apparent in Boko Haram’s genocidal jihad on Nigeria’s Christians. For example, a February 2012 BBC report on a church attack that left three Christians dead, including a toddler, stated the bare-bones facts in its first two sentences and immediately jumped to the apparently really important news: that “the bombing sparked a riot by Christian youths, with reports that at least two Muslims were killed in the violence. The two men were dragged off their bikes after being stopped at a roadblock set up by the rioters, police said. A row of Muslim-owned shops was also burned.... ” The report goes on and on, with a special section about “very angry” Christians, until one all but confuses victims with persecutors, forgetting what the Christians are “very angry” about in the first place: unprovoked and nonstop terror attacks on their churches, and the unprovoked murders of their community’s women and small children. 16
Similarly, the Los Angeles Times deemed it newsworthy to report the aforementioned story of the Egyptian off-duty police officer who boarded a train, identified Copts, and then opened fire on them while screaming “Allahu Akbar”—but only to exonerate him (and Islam), as is clear from the report’s headline: “Eyewitness claims train attacker did not target Copts, state media say”17—the same state media that habitually whitewashes the oppression of Egypt’s Christians.
A February 2012 NPR report titled “In Egypt, Christian-Muslim Tension is on the Rise” does fairly report on some stories, but still leaves readers with more questions than answers: “In Egypt, growing tensions between Muslims and Christians have led to sporadic violence [Initiated by whom?]. Many Egyptians blame the interreligious strife on hooligans [Who are they? What is their motivation?] taking advantage of absent or weak security forces. Others believe it’s because of a deep-seated mistrust between Muslims and the minority Christian community [What are the sources of this mistrust? Is it reasonable for Christians to mistrust Muslims?].” The photo accompanying the story is of a group of angry Christians, one defiantly holding a cross aloft—not of Muslims destroying crosses, which is what prompts Christians to such displays of religious solidarity. 18
Media also dissemble the jihadis’ otherwise obvious motivation. For example, a March 2012 Agence France-Presse (AFP) report describing Boko Haram’s many attacks on Christians and officials concludes with the following sentence: “Violence blamed on the sect [Boko Haram], whose goals remain largely unclear, has since 2009 claimed more than 1,000 lives, including more than 300 this year alone [emphasis added].”19
In fact Boko Haram has been bellowing its quite straightforward goals since at least 2007. They want to enforce Sharia law and to subjugate (if not eliminate) Nigeria’s Christians .20 And yet here is the venerable Agence France-Presse claiming ignorance about the Islamist group’s motivations. One would have thought that a decade after the jihadi attacks of 9/11—a decade in which images from all around the world of Muslims in militant attire shouting distinctly Islamic slogans such as “Allahu Akbar!” and calling for Sharia law and the subjugation of “infidels” became practically ubiquitous—reporters would know by now what the motivations of such Islamic organizations are.
Yet another New York Times report, one that appeared on December 25, 2011—the day after Boko Haram bombed several churches during Christmas Eve services, leaving some forty dead—is a good example of how the media refracts reality through the approved paradigm of political correctness, minimizing or ignoring Muslim persecution of Christians around the world (lest reporters should appear to side with Christians), while always putting the best spin on Muslim violence (lest they should appear critical of Islam).
The New York Times declares,The sect, known as Boko Haram, until now mostly targeted the police, government and military in its insurgency effort, but the bombings on Sunday represented a new, religion-tinged front, a tactic that threatens to exploit the already frayed relations between Nigeria’s nearly evenly split populations of Christians and Muslims. [Emphasis added.]21
This is absurd. Boko Haram had been terrorizing Nigerian Christians, killing them, and destroying their churches—all in the name of Islam—for several years before these Christmas Eve bombings. As a matter of fact, on the previous Christmas, December 25, 2010, Boko Haram bombed several churches, killing thirty-eight Christians.22 The New York Times�
��s characterization of these latest attacks as “represent[ing] a new, religion-tinged front” is not only inaccurate but unconscionable.
Moreover, the assertion that there are “already frayed relations between Nigeria’s nearly evenly split populations of Christians and Muslims” suggests that both camps are equally motivated by religious hostility. But where are the Christian terror organizations that bomb mosques in Nigeria every Friday to screams of “God is Great”? They simply do not exist.
The report goes on to offer more well-worn canards, including the suggestion that the Nigerian government’s “heavy-handed” response to the terrorists is responsible for their terror: “Critics of the government campaign against Boko Haram say that the effort has not only failed but has increased the sect’s appeal, because the security forces’ heavy-handed tactics have given it new sympathizers.”
The Times even manages to insert another favorite meme of the mainstream media—the poverty-causes-terrorism myth: “The sect’s attacks have been further bolstered by festering economic resentment in the impoverished and relatively neglected north, which has an exploding birthrate, low levels of literacy and mass unemployment.” This despite all the evidence that many of the most notorious Islamic terrorists are well educated and come from wealthy families, including Osama bin Laden and Dr. Ayman Zawahiri, the current head of al-Qaeda—and that the terrorists’ Christian victims are often worse off than they are.
As for those who fail to tout the party line on Islam, the mainstream media has resorted to ostracizing them. For example, in January 2011, the Washington Post’s “On Faith” blog posted an article dealing with Muslim-Christian relations, in light of recent attacks on Christians in the Muslim world. Regular contributors were invited to respond. The response of Willis E. Eliot, a retired dean of exploratory programs at New York Seminary, was rejected. Up till then, Eliot had been published on that blog almost weekly for over three years. This was his first contribution to be rejected in all that time.
Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians Page 26
