Ira Rifkin

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There's plenty of religion-news gold buried in the Olympics story -- just dig for it

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There's plenty of religion-news gold buried in the Olympics story -- just dig for it

I'm a big track and field fan so I'm looking forward to the Rio Olympics, which open Friday. And, yes, I know. The Games are rife with corruption -- so much so that I won't argue if you argue that watching the Games on TV makes me an enabler.

Sigh.

Track and field (or athletics, as the sport is called in most of the world) has major doping problems.

The Olympic organizing movement is a money-grubbing, self-serving organization.

Brazil and the city of Rio de Janeiro have made a mess of their preparations for the Games Click here for details and then click here.

Still, the Games are obviously way too big a deal for international journalists to give them limited coverage. Rather, they'll go all out covering every angle of the quadrennial circus.

Will that include religion angles? Religion journalists: What's here for us?

Actually, plenty, though being heard above the who-won-what hoopla won't be easy by any means.

Some historical context. Did you know the Olympics as held in ancient Greece were steeped in overt religious devotion?

Now read this overview piece from the Huffington Post on religion at the Rio Olympics. It begins as follows:


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Israelis back Donald Trump because of his anti-Muslim talk, right? Well, actually...

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Israelis back Donald Trump because of his anti-Muslim talk, right? Well, actually...

There's an assumption circulating among some in the news media, some American Jews, both on the right and left, and among political-geeks in general that Republican presidential nominee Donald J. Trump is favored by Israelis over his Democratic opponent, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The assumption is rooted in the belief that Trump -- based on his rhetoric (but ignoring his many contradictions) -- will be a more full-throated supporter of Israel than Clinton will be, and so of course Israelis back him over her.

How could they not? The United States is Israeli's most important international protector, so of course Israelis must want the toughest talking candidate.

As a #NeverTrump guy, I think this belief is very wrong. But this post isn't about who Israelis SHOULD support for president of the United States, but who they DO support. (Unless I state otherwise, when I refer to Israelis I'm referring in the main to Jewish Israelis. Israeli Arabs, or Israeli Palestinians, as many prefer to be called, have their own complicated political equations, be they Christian or Muslim.)

So who do Israelis prefer?

Here's a link from May to a Jerusalem Post story reporting on a survey that shows an Israeli preference for Clinton. Note that non-Jewish Israelis are included in this survey. And here's a CNBC analysis, also from May, that puts some meat on the bare-bones Post news report. 

Two salient CNBC paragraphs follow:


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Awards ahead? Top guns roll out quality work on Saudi life, female Arab Muslims in Olympics

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Awards ahead? Top guns roll out quality work on Saudi life, female Arab Muslims in Olympics

Two of the remaining big guys in news have run some excellent long-form newspaper journalism recently looking at the social impact of conservative Islam in Saudi Arabia and across the Arab world, including its hobbling of would-be female Arab Olympic athletes.

The big guys are The Washington Post and The New York Times, two of the few remaining mainstream newspapers still able and willing to invest heavily in time-consuming, difficult to produce, international stories with global religious/cultural/political consequences.

If you haven't already, take the time to read these pieces in full. They're great reads and informative. (C'mon,  put away Pokemon Go for 20-30 minutes). The requisite links are below.

Let's look first at the Times offering.

Times veteran Middle East correspondent Ben Hubbard -- his Facebook page says he "spent weeks and weeks" in Saudi Arabia exploring Wahhabi Islam's hold on Saudi society -- opens his piece with the plight of a former muckety-muck in the kingdom's so-called religious police.)

Ahmed Qassim al-Ghamdi's world turned upside down when he began questioning what he was doing, and went public with his doubts.

Here's a chunk of Hubbard's piece that explains what happened to Ghamdi.

So he spoke out. In articles and television appearances, he argued that much of what Saudis practiced as religion was in fact Arabian cultural practices that had been mixed up with their faith.


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Painful group memories and the news media's (potentially) curative powers

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Painful group memories and the news media's (potentially) curative powers

I've been semi-detached from the dread, anger, loss, and pain that have dominated American and international headlines the past two weeks while my wife and traveled across the Iberian Peninsula's north.

But only semi.

Full detachment is impossible for me (a) because of the electronic communication devices I take with me on vacation, and obviously (b) because of my obsessive newshound personality. The former allows me and the latter impels me to keep up -- at least to some degree -- with humanity's daily dose of self-inflicted trauma.

Spain and Portugal make it even easier for me to stay connected to this irrational state of affairs thanks to their particular histories. They abound with reminders of past injustices heaped upon the region's Jews, with which I fully identity. (Click here: I posted on this at the start of my trip.)

Human history seems a litany of communal hurts we never fully overcome. Not to mention that these hurts are continually updated.

In one Portuguese town -- Viana do Castello, just south of the Spanish border -- I parked next to a stone wall defaced by graffiti. The only parts of the scrawl I could decipher were the swastikas and the word "Sion," or Zion. I doubt the full message was complementary toward Jews or Israel.

Then there was this despicable anti-American, anti-Semitic and blatantly racist cartoon circulated by Spain's United Left political party, which holds eight seats in the nation's 360-member bicameral parliament (Click here for New York Times backgrounder). It was timed to coincide with President Barak Obama's brief visit to Spain last weekend. (Spain and Portugal now offer citizenship to foreign Jews of Sephardic ancestry, meaning those who can prove their families were forced out of Iberia during the Inquisition.)

I mention my experience as a prelude to commenting on a story published by The New York Times that reported international Muslim anger at perceived insufficient Western outrage and compassion toward terror attack victims in Bangladesh, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Turkey during the just completed Muslim holy month of Ramadan.


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Tunisia bucks the Islamist narrative. Why can't journalists tell its story more broadly?

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Tunisia bucks the Islamist narrative. Why can't journalists tell its story more broadly?

The Arab Spring has been an unmitigated disaster, right? Sure it has, because isn't that the primary message you've learned from wherever you get your news?

Well, yes, that's mostly true. Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Bahrain, the Arab Middle East in general; they've all gone from bad to worse. And because that which bleeds leads, media coverage of the series of national uprisings known collectively as the Arab Spring has focused by a wide margin on the news of disaster.

(Journalists take note: Try to avoid premature optimism when coming up with catch phrase-labels, particularly if you're dealing with the Middle East.)

But, in fact, the Arab Spring has not been across the board bad news. There's also Tunisia, where it all started more than five years ago, but which gets far less American media attention because, by regional standards, the violence there has been relatively-- and I emphasize "relatively" -- light.

Tunisia is often cited -- and properly so, from a liberal Western standpoint -- as the Arab Spring's lone success story.

Here's the top of a New York Times piece that lays out the Tunisian reality.

TUNIS -- The leader of Tunisia’s main Islamic political party was re-elected on Monday, winning endorsement for his effort to move the party away from its Islamist roots and stay in tune with the country’s five-year-old democratic revolution.


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Musing about Brexit lessons in the literal birthplace of the Spanish Inquisition

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Musing about Brexit lessons in the literal birthplace of the Spanish Inquisition

As the repercussions from the momentous Brexit vote play out, I find myself in the charming and more than 1,000-year-old  hillside village of Sos del Rey Catolico in northeast Spain. Ferdinand III of Aragon, who with his wife Queen Isabella I, launched Cristobal Colon on his voyage to the New World -- and the start of the destruction of the indigenous tribes of the Americas -- was born here.

The royal couple also threw the Jews out of Spain and can lay claim to the Spanish Inquisition. Pretty accomplished, weren't they?

A day earlier I was in Madrid. When I arrived, a large banner hung from Madrid's City Hall, proclaiming in English, "Refugees Welcome." The following day, Spain held parliamentary elections in which gains by the conservative establishment made for banner headlines.

And the day after that, the "Refugees Welcome" banner was gone.

Was it a coincidence? A political decision? For all I know the banner lacked official approval in the first place.

But between the banner and my stay in Sos del Rey Catolico -- which, of course has its ancient and now Judenrein Jewish quarter that persists as a tourist site -- it all feels hopelessly tribal.

I've written here before that journalists need to understand that globalization has been and is about far more than cheaper products. That its about people -- people moved by dreams and a desire, perhaps "need" is a better word -- to be the consumers of those products and no longer only the producers. If they were lucky enough to have a job, that is.


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Orlando through an Arab and (limited) Afghan media lens: Gays involved? Religion? No way!

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Orlando through an Arab and (limited) Afghan media lens: Gays involved? Religion? No way!

Just so everyone knows where I'm going in this post, and to respond in advance to those who might accuse me of burying my lede, let me state here and now that the focus of this piece is about how media in the heart of the Muslim world -- the mostly Arab Middle East -- treated the Orlando massacre.

But first, this: The coverage in the United States and most of the world has been nothing short of overwhelming. The volume of information included in news stories, analysis and opinion pieces produced across the journalistic spectrum has been extraordinary.

Of course it wasn't flawless. How could it be when it had to puzzle together -- without having all the pieces -- the complexities of international terrorism, sexual orientation, cultural and religious influences, gun control and mass murder, presidential politics, the psychology of a twisted mind, and a state of almost unbearably sad raw emotion. Oh -- and doing it while under intense time and competitive pressures, and subject to instant online criticism.

So I'd say it's fair to conclude that today's unforgiving, report-first-confirm-it-later, 24/7 news cycle worked about as well as one can realistically hope it might. I tip my hat for a job well done to all those who worked from the scene and in news rooms to deliver this story of intense public interest.

Let's not overlook the good when perfection is out of reach. 

My reading of the preponderance of the coverage by mainstream, Western-oriented news operations was that it once again self-identified with the victims in the manner that follows every ugly manifestation of terrorist mass murder these days. What else could it do?

That is not to say there weren't pointed questions about America's politically sacrosanct gun culture. Or differences of opinion about the role played in Orlando by Islam and, in particular, the influence of the Islamic State.

Today, we are all Paris, Istanbul, Brussels, Mali, Kabul, Nigeria, Tel Aviv, Ivory Coast, Egypt, Syria, San Bernardino, etc., etc. There are far too many places to list them all.

Now, we're all Orlando. Who knows who we'll be in a week or two?


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And now this: Bangladesh, the latest Muslim nation to reach terrorism tipping point?

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And now this: Bangladesh, the latest Muslim nation to reach terrorism tipping point?

You know that sinking feeling that grabs you just when you're all snugly in bed and about to fall asleep, thankful another challenging day is over, when -- suddenly -- an unsettling drip, drip, drip sound undermines your peace?

Now what? A bathroom faucet in need of tightening? Hopefully it's just that. But it's still disturbing. Haven't you dealt with enough for one day?

Forgive me for the imperfect analogy, but this image crossed my mind while pondering the exploding situation in Bangladesh. The steady drip of ongoing Islamic violence in the South Asian nation, one of the world's most densely populated, has officially become a gusher -- not least of all thanks to government inaction and incompetence.

To my mind, that equals failing to get out of bed to check, and deal with, the drip before the problem gets worse. That's what happened in Bangladesh, the latest Muslim nation to gain increased American media attention for all the wrong but not surprising reasons.

Read this Wall Street Journal article to catch up with the news from Bangladesh. Note the skepticism it displays toward the government's decision to handle its terrorism problem by rounding up what may be termed the usual suspects (an incredible 5,000 individuals have been taken into custody, as of this writing).

Time magazine reported Monday that just 85 of the 5,000 are suspected Islamists -- which begs the question of who the other 4,900-plus happen to be and what good arresting them will achieve. (Later in the day, Religion News Service moved a story that said 8,000 had been arrested, 119 of them "suspected Islamist radicals.")

The slow drip of one-victim-at-a-time Islamic violence in Bangladesh has been on the international media radar screen, though mostly in a piecemeal fashion, for some time.


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New York Times tackles the complex story of Saudi Arabia spreading influence and problems

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New York Times tackles the complex story of Saudi Arabia spreading influence and problems

Soon after I started contributing to GetReligion last year I posted a piece that ran under the headline: "Do American newspapers have the time, space and patience to cover Saudi Arabia?" I concluded that more meaningful coverage of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), as the petroleum-rich monarchy is formally known, was needed for Americans to better understand the Middle East's interrelated array of serious problems.

I'm sure my post has nothing do with it, but I'm pleased to now write that The New York Times in recent months has published a series of probing, in depth stories on the KSA that should be required reading for all.

For religion and international affairs reporters in particular, Saudi Arabia is a critically important story to follow. That's because if for no other reason, global Muslim terrorism is a deadly, ongoing phenomenon that has no end in sight.

And guess what. The KSA's brand of deeply conservative Islam known as Wahhabism is one reason for this brutal chaos.

Journalists should learn all they can about the kingdom's exportation of Wahhabism throughout the Muslim world, including its influence on the Islamic State (ISIS), Al Queda and other jihadi groups.

The Times is as well positioned as any elite, international newspaper -- and, seriously, how many are in its league to begin with? -- to report the breath of the KSA's often negative impact on global affairs.


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