Terrorism

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The good, the bad and the funny in media coverage of Ted Cruz's 'Muslim neighborhoods' remarks

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Once again, Muslims in America are the focus of intense scrutiny — and they're not exactly happy about it.

Even in the immediate aftermath of Tuesday's Brussels terror attacks, we knew this storyline was coming, of course.

In our post yesterday, we stressed:

Key, again, is factual reporting that highlights the various strains of Islam (as we have said a million times, there is "no one Islam") and avoids the simplistic "Islamophobia" propaganda that plagued so much of the coverage last time.

As the world focused its thoughts and prayers on the Belgium victims, the U.S. presidential race took no break at all.

In case you missed it — and I promise this is not from the satirical newspaper The Onion — Republicans Donald Trump and Ted Cruz engaged in a Twitter spat over each other's wives.

But that wasn't the only news the candidates made Tuesday: How to prevent terrorism on U.S. soil again dominated the GOP rhetoric, and Muslims again figured heavily in the discussion.


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In wake of more terror attacks in Europe, factual reporting of #Brussels news is crucial (updated)

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Like many of you, I woke up to news of the terror attacks in Brussels.

Notifications about the bombings flooded my iPad screen as I opened my eyes.

As the disturbing headlines struck me, I saw a note on Facebook from a fellow Christian, Paul Brazle, a missionary to Belgium with whom my Christian Chronicle colleague Erik Tryggestad and I stayed during a 2009 reporting trip.

Brazle's note said:

'Ik ben veilig!' (I am safe - We are safe.)
With this message, folks in Brussels airport or metro can - via Red Cross data centre - inform family or friends who can't reach them that they are OK. Others... are not so lucky, to be able to say that.
As you wake up today to news of Bombings in Brussels....
we want you to know that we are safely well out of any harm's way, but listening to the news carefully and waiting for news of any in our network who may have had reason to be in the airport today, or near the one metro station in the Europa district where bombs went off.

The Associated Press reports that "there was no immediate claim of responsibility for Tuesday's attacks." Other news organizations — such as NPR and CNN — make no mention of a potential religion angle in their initial accounts.


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A mysterious murder: An ISIS wannabe and the case of the generic burning Buddhas

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Journalists need to face this basic fact: It's hard to cover the Islamic State and its victims without talking about religion. This is especially true when a story involves a convert to ISIS and its radicalized form of Islam and the convert's story in set in a neighborhood in the American Bible Belt. 

Consider the following short item from The Charlotte Observer that caught the eye of a GetReligion reader. It's a tragic story about an ISIS convert, his family and his victim and it's easy to sense that readers are not getting all of the details.

For example, try to figure out the timeline of the tragic events in this report. Here's the top:

Prosecutors announced ... that they will seek the death penalty against a Burke County teen and ISIS supporter accused of robbing and killing his neighbor to get an assault rifle so he could commit mass murder.
Justin Nojan Sullivan, 19, was arrested last June and is accused of plotting to kill up to 1,000 people in support of ISIS, an Islamic terrorist organization. Court documents unsealed last month link him directly to the previously unsolved 2014 murder of John Bailey Clark, 74, who lived down the street from Sullivan and his parents on Carswell Road in Morganton.
Court documents said Sullivan planned to use the money he stole from Clark to buy the rifle. Clark was shot several times in the head. Deputies found him in a shallow grave on his property.

So there was an unsolved murder in 2014. Then Sullivan is arrested in June of 2015. What linked the young man to the earlier murder?

At this point, the story adds another rather fascinating date to the timeline.

The investigation started after a 911 call in April 2015 from Sullivan’s parents who said their son was pouring gasoline over their religious items.


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Did a familiar religion-news 'Blind Spot' shape coverage of ISIS genocide declaration?

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Did a familiar religion-news 'Blind Spot' shape coverage of ISIS genocide declaration?

Back in 2008, I was part of the editorial team that produced a book called "Blind Spot: When Journalists Don't Get Religion" for Oxford University Press. The whole idea was to look at a number of big national and international news stories and demonstrate that journalists could not do an accurate, informed, balanced job covering them without taking religion seriously.

I know. That wasn't a shocking thesis for a project linked to this website. What is shocking, nearly a decade later, is that most of the book's case studies remain amazingly relevant.

Hang in there with me on this. I'm providing background on the discussion that host Todd Wilken and I had during this week's "Crossroads" podcast (click here to tune that in). This was recorded soon after the declaration by Secretary of State John Kerry that, yes, the Islamic State was committing "genocide" in its slaughter of Christians, Yazidis, Shiite Muslims and other religious minority groups. This followed a 393-0 vote on a U.S. House of Representatives resolution on this topic.

As you would expect, mainstream news coverage focused on the politics that framed this issue. This story was all about Republicans trying to hurt Democrats in an election year, "conservative" religious groups trying to embarrass the White House, etc., etc.

Same old, same old. Politics is real, while religion is not all that important. For example, why not talk to the leaders -- here in America -- of churches that are directly linked to the flocks being massacred in Iraq and Syria? For Christians from the Middle East, there is more to this tragedy than election-year politics.

As I noted in a GetReligion post on this topic -- " 'Aides said' is the key: Why it was so hard to say ISIS is guilty of 'genocide' against Christians" -- the Kerry announcement received very low-key coverage, which is probably what the U.S. State Department wanted. The story then vanished from the mainstream press, while coverage in religious-market outlets continued.

This is, you see, a "conservative" news story that gets covered at places like Fox News. But why is that? Human rights used to be a liberal cause. Correct?


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'Aides said' is the key: Why it was so hard to say ISIS is guilty of 'genocide' against Christians

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If you are looking for the Washington Post story about the remarks on ISIS and "genocide" by Secretary of State John F. Kerry, don't look through the 50 or so stories promoted on the front page of the newspaper's website. This story wasn't that important.

You're going to need a search engine to find it. To save time, click here to get to this headline: "Kerry declares Islamic State has committed genocide."

But that headline doesn't capture the real news, since no one has been debating whether the Islamic State had committed "genocide" against the Yazidis. That was settled long ago. So the real news in this story was the declaration that that the word "genocide" also applied to members of the ancient Christian churches in this region, as well as other religious minorities.

Why did this step take so long? And why wasn't this an important story to the editorial masters of Beltway-land? Actually, you can see clues in a crucial passage way down in the Post story. Hold that thought, because we will come back to that.

First, here is some key material up top:

After months of pressure from Congress and religious groups, Kerry issued a finding that largely concurred with a House resolution declaring the Islamic State guilty of genocide. The resolution passed 393 to 0 on Monday night
Kerry said a review by the State Department and U.S. intelligence determined that Yazidis, Christians and Shiite groups have been victims of genocide, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing by the radical al-Qaeda offshoot, a Sunni Muslim group also known as ISIS, ISIL and Daesh, its Arabic acronym.
“The fact is that Daesh kills Christians because they are Christians; Yazidis because they are Yazidis; Shia because they are Shia,” Kerry said in a statement he read to reporters at the State Department. “Its entire worldview is based on eliminating those who do not subscribe to its perverse ideology.”


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House says (393-0) that Christians are victims of ISIS genocide, but key voices are missing

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Clearly, "bipartisan" has to be the last adjective any journalist would use to describe the current political climate in the United States.

Thus, a 393-0 vote on a resolution in the U.S. House of Representatives is an eyebrow-raising moment, no matter what issue is involved. In this case, it's crucial that the issue is linked to the Islamic State and its hellish massacres of religious minorities in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere -- including Orthodox and Catholic flocks that have lived and worshiped in these lands since New Testament times.

ISIS has destroyed ancient monasteries and churches, has razed or looted irreplaceable ancient libraries and sacred art. It has become rational to consider that Christianity may be wiped out in the region in which it was born.

So here is my question: Yes, this is a political story. But, for most readers, is this JUST a political story? Here is the top of the Associated Press "Big Story" report:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Ratcheting up the pressure on the Obama administration, the House has overwhelmingly approved a resolution that condemns as genocide the atrocities committed by the Islamic State group against Christians and other religious and ethnic minorities in Iraq and Syria.
The non-binding measure, passed Monday by a vote of 393-0, illustrated the heavy bipartisan support for action on Capitol Hill. Secretary of State John Kerry is leaning toward making a genocide determination against the Islamic State and could do so as early as this week, when a congressional deadline for a decision has been set.
But the Obama administration officials have cautioned that a legal review is still under way and said it is likely Kerry will not meet Thursday's deadline.


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Fighting radicalism: Los Angeles Times offers glossy look at new Muslim efforts in Sweden

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It's one thing to light a candle rather than curse the darkness. It's another thing to ignore or gloss over what could very well be darkness. The Los Angeles Times comes close to the latter in its feature on Muslim efforts at peace in Malmo, Sweden.

The article begins with the three-year-old Islam Academy, which attempts to make young students not only better Muslims, but better Swedes.

In other words, this is a madrasa with a difference:

Like other madrasas, as Muslim religious schools are known, the academy teaches the Koran, traditional Sunni Islamic spirituality, sharia law and Arabic.
Unlike many, it also teaches secular topics. Among them: the Swedish language, nature and sports activities, and social responsibility. The last of these includes interreligious dialogue, especially with the Jewish community.
"All our education programs have the effect of immunizing our youth against radicalization," said Barakat, a 34-year-old imam, who was sitting in his office above the academy's prayer hall dressed in a pale, ankle-length robe and skullcap.

The story, which was funded by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, continues with a briefing on Malmo, the point of entry for most immigrants to Sweden. "About 20% of Malmo's 300,000 people are Muslim, making it one of the most Muslim cities in Western Europe," the Times says.

But the Rosengard district, where many of the Muslims finally settle, is the focus of this story. Rosengard was the site of riots in 2008 and 2011. Many outsiders regarded the area as a "no-go zone," hazardous for non-Muslims.

Clearly, the goal of this Los Angeles Times piece is to change that image:


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Did gunmen in Yemen kill the four Missionaries of Charity for any particular reason?

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So what would Pope Francis, stepping into a media-critic role for a moment, have to say about this BBC coverage of that slaughter at the retirement home in Yemen?

We don't know what he thinks about the BBC report in particular, but it is quite similar to the other mainstream news reports about this incident that I have seen. Please watch the BBC report (at the top of this post) or read this brief BBC summary, taken from the Internet.

The key question appears to be this: Did religion have anything to do with who died and who lived in this attack? To state the matter another way: Should these nuns be considered Christian "martyrs"? Here is the entire BBC summary:

Pope Francis has condemned a gun attack on a Catholic retirement home in southern Yemen which left 16 people dead.
Four nuns from the Missionaries of Charity, founded by Mother Teresa of Calcutta, were among those killed.
Local officials in the port city of Aden are blaming the so-called Islamic State group, as David Campanale reports.

Actually, if you seek out the Catholic News Agency report about the attack you will find that Pope Francis did more than lament the attack itself. He is upset about the lack of coverage. Here is the top of the CNA story:

VATICAN CITY -- On Sunday Pope Francis lamented the world’s indifference to the recent killing of four Missionaries of Charity, calling them the ‘martyrs of today’ and asking that Bl. Mother Teresa intercede in bringing peace.


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Update on status of Samuel P. Huntington's predicted 'Clash of Civilizations'

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Update on status of Samuel P. Huntington's predicted 'Clash of Civilizations'

The global news continues to grow grimmer. The great unraveling seems to be accelerating even faster than it can be Tweeted.

The primary focal points are the Middle East, North Africa and Europe -- the last largely as a result of the mass dislocations caused by war and poverty in the first two. Some sub-Saharan African nations -- Nigeria and hopelessly dysfunctional Somalia, to name just two -- certainly may be included.

Thanks to our globalized media, all this misery, fear, murderous depravity and loathing flows into our homes and awareness in real time. And we call this progress, a communications revolution.

An explanation for this meditation seems necessary.

Perhaps a good place to begin is by reflecting again on what has been labeled the "Clash of Civilizations." The term is most often attributed to Samuel P. Huntington, the late Harvard international affairs professor and Carter administration national security adviser, even though it was actually used years earlier by the Nobel Prize-winning writer Albert Camus and others.

For those unfamiliar with the term, the clash spoken of is the cognitive and emotional gulf that sets one portion of humanity apart from another, leading to hostility rooted in conflicting values generally expressed in religious, political and economic terms. Civilization refers to the sum total of a group's world view, its professed religious values acting as a cultural cornerstone.


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