Persecution

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Who is calling who a 'crusader'? Obama enters a minefield at the National Prayer Breakfast

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There is an old saying in baseball that "nothing good ever follows a walk."

In the world of religion, that's how I feel about references to the Crusades and the Inquisition. (Oh yeah, and comparing public figures to Adolf Hitler.) We are talking about very complicated and controversial historical subjects, here. It's hard to turn the Crusades and Medieval theological disputes (yes, some leading to combat) into modern one-liners.

President Barack Obama and his speech-writing team are learning about that right now, after he used the Medieval C-word in his address at this year's National Prayer Breakfast. Here is a key early slice of The Washington Post report:

... At a time of global anxiety over Islamist terrorism, Obama noted pointedly that his fellow Christians, who make up a vast majority of Americans, should perhaps not be the ones who cast the first stone.
“Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history,” he told the group, speaking of the tension between the compassionate and murderous acts religion can inspire. “And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”
Some Republicans were outraged.

Note how the piece immediately turns this into a political story. That's refreshing, isn't it?


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Memory eternal: Human-rights activist and, yes, Christian journalist Kenji Goto is gone

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First there was the beheading of Haruna Yukawa, a military consultant who had -- by all accounts -- lived a unique, if not troubled, life leading him the Middle East as a military consultant. Now, it certainly appears that veteran journalist Kenji Goto has also been beheaded, on video.

Who is Goto? What is the media reporting about his life? As I noted in my first post on this topic, the force at the heart of Goto's life and work depends on the publication that you read. If you look in conservative and Christian media, you will see language similar to the following from the Christian Broadcast Network:

The slaying of Goto, a devout Christian and  freelance reporter whose work focused on refugees, children and other victims of war, shocked this country, which until now had not become directly embroiled in the fight against the militants.
 
"I feel indignation over this immoral and heinous act of terrorism," Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told reporters after convening an emergency Cabinet meeting. "When I think of the grief of his family, I am left speechless," he said. "We are filled with deep regret."

Was this simply an issue of Christians mourning the loss of a fellow Christian, who just happened to be a veteran and respected journalist? Well, maybe not.

Consider the following material -- a lengthy passage from the English-language website of The Japan Times:


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Theodicy and the Auschwitz anniversary: If you cite the Kaddish, why not quote the Kaddish?

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Readers may recall that, on the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, I put up a quick post lamenting that I wasn't seeing much mainstream-media coverage of this haunting event. I also noted that hoped we would see more coverage -- logically -- on the day after, with news stories focusing on the content of the anniversary events.

I hoped that would happen and that was, at quite a few publications, precisely what happened.

As you would expect, The Washington Post -- in the same city as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum published a local-angle story, hooked on the events in the Hall of Remembrance.

The newspaper's foreign desk also contributed a stunning story -- "A Nightmare Revisited" -- reported from Auschwitz, where 300 survivors returned to what it called the "bloodiest site of the Holocaust." And there was a sidebar listening to the voices of Auschwitz survivors.

I recommend these stories highly. Yet, I do so even as I note that the news stories failed to dig into the impact of this singular event, this singular vision of evil, on the lives of post-Holocaust Jews as religious believers and on the Jewish faith in general.

The timeless theodicy question, of course: Where was God?

OK, I will ask: Where were the God issues in these otherwise fine news reports?


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Think piece for a sobering day: 'The Forward' dissects New York Times coverage of Israel

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Today is the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, an event that -- to my surprise -- is getting very little coverage in the mainstream press on this side of the Atlantic.

Why is that? Any theories?

Perhaps the coverage will be tomorrow, focusing on news events linked to the anniversary. Maybe.

Anyway, this made me think about a piece of journalism-related material that I had hoped to post this past weekend in one of my usual "think piece" slots, but other news jumped ahead in my priorities.

While there is, let me stress, no direct connection between the issue of Holocaust coverage and current debates about coverage of Israel, I thought that this piece from The Forward was very interesting.

I don't know about you, but I often get tired of the usual left vs. right debates in politics, media, religion and culture. In this case, we have a liberal Jewish publication offering a serious critique of the newspaper -- The New York Times, of course -- that serves as holy writ for the cultural left. The headline: "The New York Times and its Israel Bias --The Gray Lady's Blind Spot."

This piece, in turn, opened with a Times hook -- a column by Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan in response to waves of letters from readers about this topic.

The key is a topic that your GetReligionistas hear about all of the time from our readers: How are people supposed to believe that the EDITORIAL perspective shown in social media and columns is completely separated from the worldview that drives the hard-news coverage in the same publication?


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Yo, Washington Post editors: Do faith issues matter to the Islamic State death crews? Maybe they do ...

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Once again, we are seeing the dreaded orange jumpsuits on our television screens during the news. Once again, it appears that we have an Islamic State video threatening the lives of hostages, if a Western power does not give the terrorists what they want.

This time, it's Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe who is facing the threats made by the YouTube-seeking terrorist with the British accent.

And who are the two hostages? What are there stories and, this time around, will journalists dig into the poignant details?

In The Washington Post, readers were told early on:

Japanese officials declined to discuss whether they would consider paying for the release of the hostages: journalist Kenji Goto Jogo and self-styled military consultant Haruna Yukawa.

The Post team doesn't tell us much about Goto, but is truly interested in the details of the story behind the "self-styled" -- what a loaded term -- military consultant.

Goto, 47, a well-respected Japanese journalist, was last heard from Oct. 24. He had told friends he was traveling to Kobane, a flashpoint town on the Turkish-Syrian border, but it is unclear exactly where he was kidnapped while covering Syria’s multiple conflicts.

And Yukawa? That's another story:


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Your weekend think piece: Concerning the ratio of Paris coverage to that of Boko Haram

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I am not a Calvinist, but it became very clear this past week that my "think piece" entry this weekend was predestined to be about this question: Why did the Charlie Hebdo massacre receive so much more coverage than the massacre of thousands of Christians and moderate Muslims in Nigeria?

On Twitter, I tried to point this out with a simple appeal: #IAmANigerianChristian. There weren't many takers.

How bad was this latest wave of death and destruction by Boko Haram? By the end of the week, GetReligion readers were sending in URLs about the fact that the best way to assess the damage was through satellite images. Check this out in The New York Times:

DAKAR, Senegal -- Thousands of buildings were burned, damaged or destroyed in northern Nigerian towns in recent days when Boko Haram militants stormed through, using scorched-earth tactics against civilians, according to a new analysis of satellite images by human rights groups.
In a succession of attacks, fighters from Boko Haram, an Islamist insurgent group that has gripped northern Nigeria and battled the government for years, have swept through a cluster of villages along the shores of Lake Chad in a “systematic campaign of arson directed against the civilian population in the area,” according to Human Rights Watch.
About 57 percent of one town, Doro Gowon, the location of a now-destroyed military base, appears to have been leveled, probably amounting to several thousand residential and commercial structures, Human Rights Watch said.
Amnesty International, which has also analyzed the satellite images, said Thursday that about 3,100 buildings in the town had been damaged or destroyed, demonstrating a “deliberate attack on civilians whose homes, clinics and schools are now burnt-out ruins.”

How bad was it? Eventually, journalists were so tired of hearing questions about the imbalance between the coverage of these two big stories -- almost always framed as lots of coverage of white, French secularists vs. minimal coverage of black, Nigerian Christians -- that some journalists began to fight back.


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Big question in the background: What is terrorism's long-term impact on world Islam?

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Big question in the background: What is terrorism's long-term impact on world Islam?

The news media are understandably consumed with Muslim terrorists’ deadly attacks on a satirical weekly’s office and a Jewish grocery in Paris. Europeans are soul-searching over national security, anti-Semitism, and outrage against Muslims, with no evident enthusiasm for restoring any Christian vitality. Tough coverage logistics meant there was scant notice that in the same week Boko Haram destroyed a town in Nigeria and slaughtered hundreds, even as many as 2,000, inhabitants.  

There’s the usual journalistic confusion here over how to characterize the religious aspect. Just before these latest atrocities,  the journal First Things published an article on “Challenging Radical Islam” that’s must reading for reporters. Author John Azumah, a Christian expert on Islam at Columbia Theological Seminary, carefully balances the ideological complexities. Contra the left, he says “key aspects of the ideology of radical violent Muslim groups are indeed rooted in Islamic texts and history.” Yet he criticizes the right, contending that in principle Islam or the Koran or the Prophet Muhammad aren’t the real problem.
            
Azumah notes that “Muslim leaders around the world have repeatedly and publicly denounced” al-Qaeda, Boko Haram and Islamic State (ISIS). The Religion Guy addressed this last September 27 in “Who speaks for Islam in a time of terrorism?”


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African agony: AFP story and photos keep our eyes on Muslim-Christian strife

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So virulent are outbreaks of violence like the shootings at Charlie Hebdo magazine, and the Middle Eastern plague known as ISIS, it's easy to forget or overlook slow-burning fevers like the religio-Civil War in the Central African Republic.  But Agence France-Presse has not forgotten.

AFP's Miguel Medina spent three weeks in the battle-scarred land, coming back with a story and photos that are at once gripping, insightful and despairing.

In 10 photos and 1,000 words, Medina paints a picture of battling factions in towns like Bangui. There are the Seleka, a Muslim rebel force, and the "anti-balaka," the Christian militia organized against them. And there are the French and African soldiers brought in as peacekeepers, who themselves often do killings of their own.

One paragraph especially illustrates the randomness of the violence. Medina describes a massive explosion in a neighborhood, then:

Some Burundi soldiers had hurriedly evacuated two women, Christians who’d been hit by shrapnel, toward a neighboring shack. The attack had injured three other people - a Muslim, a Burundi troop and a young man I didn't know anything about. This is how it is at the moment in Bangui. Christians and Muslims recognise each other and randomly attack one another. It's an infernal cycle of attacks and counterattacks. No one is safe.

He photographs a Chadian Muslim family cowering against a wall, saying that only French parachutists kept an angry crowd of Christians at bay. "Tensions are so high that taxi drivers -- whether Christian or Muslim -- risk being killed by people of their own faith if they dare take a client from the other community," Medina says.


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Pod people: Looking at Top 10 religion-beat stories, through the eyes of the late George W. Cornell

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Anyone who knows their religion-beat history knows this byline -- George W. Cornell of the Associated Press.

When he died in 1994, the national obituaries called him the "dean of American religion writers" and that was precisely the role that he played for decades, especially for those of us who broke into the religion-news business back in the 1970s and '80s.

However, when I did a series of interviews with him in 1981, for my graduate project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ("The Religion Beat: Out of the ghetto, into the mainsheets") he simply described himself as the AP's religion writer for all of planet earth. How would you like to try to handle that job? (The Vatican bureau didn't count, he explained, because editors tended to view that as a political and international-news bureau.)

George had a private tradition in which, every year, he analyzed the Associated Press list of the world's top 10 stories and counted the ones that -- seen through his veteran eyes -- were built on facts and history rooted in religion. He never saw a year with fewer than five of these stories, he told me, and frequently there would be more than that.

Ah, he explained, but were the religion facts and angles in these stories (a) covered accurately, (b) presented in a way that could be understood by the general public or (c) covered AT ALL?


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