Ira Rifkin

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Farewell, after 20 years: Why we did what we did

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Farewell, after 20 years: Why we did what we did

If you know anything about world religions, then you know that Easter is a big deal in Christianity.

In Eastern Orthodox churches, the Big Idea is stated this way, over and over, in rites for Pascha (Easter): “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life” (see this flash mob celebration in Lebanon).

I don’t bring this up as a matter of evangelism or some other #triggerwarning behavior. I am noting that this is an essential fact about Christianity, the world’s largest religious faith. Easter isn’t a “bunny” thing.

This brings us to one of the more unusual “religion ghosts” we spotted several times during the 20-year history of GetReligion. Here’s a case study at Newsweek and another at Facebook news. However, the classic version of this ghost appeared in the holy (in journalism terms) pages of The New York Times in this 2014 feature: “Hoping War-Weary Tourists Will Return to Israel.” Here is the key passage:

On a recent afternoon in the Old City of Jerusalem, while fighting raged in Gaza, Bilal Abu Khalaf hosted a group of Israeli tourists at his textile store in the Christian Quarter — one of Jerusalem’s tourist gems. …

“That’s the first group I’ve had here in more than a month,” Mr. Abu Khalaf said. “There have been whole weeks when no one has been inside the shop. I’ve sold almost nothing the entire summer. Business hasn’t been this bad since the first intifada in 1989, when the Palestinian groups ordered us to shutter our stores.”

Nearby, the vast Church of the Holy Sepulcher marking the site where many Christians believe that Jesus was buried, usually packed with pilgrims, was echoing and empty.

Now, what’s unusual about that? Well, it helps to know that the printed version said:

Nearby, the vast Church of the Holy Sepulcher marking the site where many Christians believe that Jesus is buried, usually packed with pilgrims, was echoing and empty.

It’s all about the word “is,” isn’t it?

Inquiring minds wanted to know: Was there anyone in the editorial chain at the world’s newspaper of record who knew the essential fact that traditional Christians don’t believe Jesus is buried anywhere? It’s that whole “Easter” thing.


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Clouds of images, blood and chaos, as old-school news chases the digital Hamas blitz

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Clouds of images, blood and chaos, as old-school news chases the digital Hamas blitz

The following is not a normal GetReligion post.

It is not a critique of the powerful religion ghost that is haunting the coverage of the crisis in Israel and Gaza in the wake of the Hamas terrorist attacks. Julia Duin has already written that post: “Important religion-news angles are everywhere, as Hamas triggers war with Israel.”

No, this post is about the lens through which people in Israel were forced to view the hellish opening hours of that crisis, a digital lens so clouded by blood and the fog of war that the people caught in the middle of the chaos could SEE pieces of what was going on, but had no NEWS they could trust.

In other words, this post is about what happens when a major event in the real world is seen through social-media ALONE. Also, a hat tip to former GetReligion colleague Ira Rifkin for sending me this stunning Haaretz essay — it’s more like a scream of pain — by Yonatan Englender. Let’s start with the long, angry double-decker headline:

How Telegram and Twitter beat TV to cover the Hamas-Israel war as it happened

An hour after Israelis understood they were under attack, it was clear the news knew nothing. On TV, they reported sirens in central Israel and reports of Hamas militants crossing from Gaza. Reports? On social media I already saw them riding around in Jeeps

In a way, this Haartz essay is a depressing update on my recent piece for Religion & Liberty: “The Evolving Religion of Journalism,” which focused on how digital technology is changing both the content of our news, the business model that produces it and, of course, the audience for all of that.

But I was writing about “normal” life, as in ordinary chatter about politics, politics, politics and the other related subjects that matter to most journalists. Early in the piece, I wrote:

Politicians, parents, pastors, and plenty of other people are struggling to understand what is happening in their lives while turning to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Parler, BitChute, Gab, Gettr, Rumble, Telegram, and Truth Social. And there are darker corners of this world, such as 4chan and the “Dark Web.” And never forget this crucial journalism reality: Opinion writing is cheap, while hard-news content is expensive.

Oh, and in a war zone, hard-news content is dangerous.


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Thinking about AI and faith: Can a computer 'get' what it means to be truly human?

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Thinking about AI and faith: Can a computer 'get' what it means to be truly human?

Every now and then, I get an email from Ira Rifkin, who for many years wrote “Global Wire” posts for GetReligion about journalism issues in international events and trends. He signed off about half a year ago with an edgy post called, “Ciao, GetReligion: Thanks, all, for my tenure. Critic that I am, though, here are some final thoughts.”

With his unique mix of Jewish and Buddhist disciplines, Rifkin was also a keen observer of new ideas and concepts linked to what mass media tends to call “spirituality,” as opposed to more conventional forms of religious faith.

Several weeks ago, he send me a URL for a Los Angeles Times feature that ran with this headline: “Can religion save us from artificial intelligence?”

I immediately put it into my “think piece” file, but held on to it for a while to put some cushion between it and my podcast/post with this title: “When is preaching a 'news' story? Ah, the temptation of ChatGPT sermons.” Here is a byte of that:

Right now, one of the hot topics in the public square is the rise of artificial intelligence and, to be specific, the ChatGPT website. Thus, this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in) focused on several “newsy” angles of the recent Associated Press story that ran with the headline, “Pastors’ view: Sermons written by ChatGPT will have no soul.” …

During the podcast, I riffed on the whole issue that different kinds of technology can shape the content of communications in different ways. If ChatGPT sermons have a sense of “soul,” it would be a “soul” that is defined by the creator of the software and the tech platform.

The Los Angeles Times story that Rifkin sent me opens with an AI sermon hook — but the issue at the heart of the story is much, much bigger than that.

Nevertheless, it helps to start this “think piece” recommendation with that feature’s overture:

Sometimes Rabbi Joshua Franklin knows exactly what he wants to talk about in his weekly Shabbat sermons — other times, not so much. It was on one of those not-so-much days on a cold afternoon in late December that the spiritual leader of the Jewish Center of the Hamptons decided to turn to artificial intelligence.


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Plug-In: Can a high school coach pray at 50-Yard line? Five SCOTUS hearing takeaways

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Plug-In: Can a high school coach pray at 50-Yard line? Five SCOTUS hearing takeaways

The case of Joseph Kennedy, a Bremerton, Washington, high school football coach who wants to kneel and pray at the 50-yard line, made it to the U.S. Supreme Court this week.

Arguments took nearly two hours, double the time scheduled. Here are five key takeaways:

1. The issue: “The case pits the rights of government workers to free speech and the free exercise of their faith against the Constitution’s prohibition of government endorsement of religion and Supreme Court precedents that forbid pressuring students to participate in religious activities,” the New York Times’ Adam Liptak explains.

2. The significance: It’s “one of its most significant cases on prayer in decades … in a clear test for how the court's new conservative majority may rule on prayer in public schools,” Newsweek’s Julia Duin reports.

Duin adds:

The case focused on whether a high school coach could openly pray after the end of a football game. Arguments included examples from elsewhere in the sports world, with mentions of former Denver Broncos football player Tim Tebow, known for kneeling on the field in prayer, and Egyptian soccer player Mohamed Salah, who kneels in a thanksgiving prayer to Allah after he scores a goal.

Read Plug-in’s past coverage of Tebow’s controversial prayers. Also, see this Duin post — “Coach Joe Kennedy goes to the Supreme Court and the media coverage gets a B+” — here at GetReligion.

3. The hypotheticals: “The U.S. Supreme Court justices spun more than a dozen hypothetical prayer scenarios during oral arguments,” Christianity Today’s Daniel Silliman notes.

The Associated Press’ Jessica Gresko highlights some of those scenarios:

A coach who crosses himself before a game. A teacher who reads the Bible aloud before the bell rings. A coach who hosts an after-school Christian youth group in his home.

Supreme Court justices discussed all those hypothetical scenarios.


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Plug-in: Press handles religion differently in news coverage of Ginsburg and Barrett

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The big news this past week was, of course, the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the furor over President Donald Trump’s intention to nominate a replacement before the election.

There were faith angles galore and — for added intrigue — questions over whether journalists applied different standards to the religion of Ginsburg, the liberal icon, and that of 7th Circuit Judge Amy Coney Barrett, the justice’s possible conservative successor.

For example, Religion News Service extolled Ginsburg as “passionate about Judaism’s concern for justice,” while characterizing Barrett as a “controversial Catholic” — a designation questioned by Religion Unplugged’s own Clemente Lisi. (P.S. Don’t miss Lisi’s fact check on Barrett’s faith.)

“Yes RBG’s religion shaped her approach,” RNS’ Bob Smietana said on Twitter. “And yes if (Barrett) is nominee it will be controversial. We can report both things.”

A Reuters story about “a self-described charismatic Christian community” to which Barrett purportedly belongs also drew scrutiny. At the conservative National Review, Ramesh Ponnuru pointed out a series of edits to the wire service’s original report.

“We all know what this means, in terms of press coverage,” GetReligion’s Terry Mattingly argued in a post in which he singled out praise for a story by New York Times religion writer Elizabeth Dias and her colleague Adam Liptak. “Many of the same reporters who are perfectly comfortable calling Joe Biden a ‘devout’ Catholic — while his actions clash with church doctrines on marriage and sex — are going to spill oceans of digital ink warning readers about the dangerous dogmas that dwell loudly in the heart and mind of Barrett.”

However, the focus on religion in the battle over the Supreme Court concerns Ira Rifkin Of GetReligion.org, a former RNS national correspondent who has covered domestic and foreign religious issues since the 1980s.

“It should not be about Amy Coney Barrett’s traditional Catholicism any more than Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s key attribute was that she was an ultra-liberal Jew. Or Martin Luther King Jr.’s liberal liberation Protestantism,” Rifkin said on Facebook.

“It should not be about ‘bad’ religion vs ‘good’ religion,” he added.


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BuzzFeed plumbs satellite photos for exhaustive report on China's persecuted Muslims

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I knew that BuzzFeed News was trying to expand its reach, but I didn’t think it would take on as complex a project as in-depth reporting on China’s insane genocide of its Uighur Muslims.

Then last week, the site dropped two stories that emerged after Megha Rajagopalan, their Middle East correspondent, spent major time in neighboring Kazakhstan interviewing those Muslims who had managed to get out of China.

The first of a two-part expose starts off with satellite photos of the prison camps of western China and this statement: “China rounded up so many Muslims in Xinjiang that there wasn’t enough space to hold them.” And then:

In the most extensive investigation of China’s internment camp system ever done using publicly available satellite images, coupled with dozens of interviews with former detainees, BuzzFeed News identified more than 260 structures built since 2017 and bearing the hallmarks of fortified detention compounds. There is at least one in nearly every county in the far-west region of Xinjiang. During that time, the investigation shows, China has established a sprawling system to detain and incarcerate hundreds of thousands of Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim minorities, in what is already the largest-scale detention of ethnic and religious minorities since World War II.

How was this done?

BuzzFeed News identified 268 newly built compounds by cross-referencing blanked-out areas on Baidu Maps — a Google Maps–like tool that’s widely used in China — with images from external satellite data providers. These compounds often contained multiple detention facilities.

Adding that it had employed Alison Killing, a licensed architect as one of the reporters on the story, BuzzFeed was able to figure out that these were buildings that could easily hold 10,000 inmates each. This story even went into what these places looked like inside.

Unlike early sites, the new facilities appear more permanent and prisonlike, similar in construction to high-security prisons in other parts of China. The most highly fortified compounds offer little space between buildings, tiny concrete-walled yards, heavy masonry construction, and long networks of corridors with cells down either side.


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New York Times blockbuster uses leaked files to expose new horrors in China's war on Islam

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Early in my journalism career, a veteran investigative reporter gave me a piece of advice I have never forgotten: The hotter the story, the more you want a document of some kind that you can verify and then show readers. This will build trust.

You can see this principal at work in the blockbuster religion story of the weekend — that New York Times foreign desk report about ongoing and even expanding efforts to lock up and, if need be, brainwash or execute a million or more Uighur Muslims in what can only be called reeducation or concentration camps.

The dramatic double-decker headline includes a nod to the document stash at the heart of it all:

‘Absolutely No Mercy’: Leaked Files Expose How China Organized Mass Detentions of Muslims

More than 400 pages of internal Chinese documents provide an unprecedented inside look at the crackdown on ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang region.

As always, it’s good to tell readers as much as you can tell them about the sourcing, to hang on to as much trust as possible; Thus:

Though it is unclear how the documents were gathered and selected, the leak suggests greater discontent inside the party apparatus over the crackdown than previously known. The papers were brought to light by a member of the Chinese political establishment who requested anonymity and expressed hope that their disclosure would prevent party leaders, including [President Xi Jinping], from escaping culpability for the mass detentions.

This is a stunning, must-read story and it deserves the acclaim that it is getting.

However, I would like to note one religion-shaped hole. A theme running through the report is that Chinese officials are divided over whether or not they will be able to produce a safe, compromised, easy-to-control version of Islam — similar to their own state-sanctioned Christian churches.

The bottom line: It would have required only an extra line or two in this report to note that Chinese officials have also unleashed attacks on independent, underground churches, as well as the crusade against Uighur Muslims. As a rule “conservative” reports on persecuted Christians in China mention the horrors being inflicted on Muslims. Why not take a similar approach in this Times blockbuster?

But back to the crucial documents at the heart of this report.


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Unlike the media, Muslim leaders are downplaying China's persecution of their fellow believers

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Unlike the media, Muslim leaders are downplaying China's persecution of their fellow believers

The American media, and Muslim groups, remain vigilant in championing the safety and religious liberty of Islamic believers around the world.

But what about the large population of Muslims in China, where atheistic Communists are currently inflicting what’s probably the biggest program of religious persecution anywhere? Reports on the relentless campaign to suppress or “Sinicize” Islam say that a million or more Muslims of Uighur ethnicity have been shipped to re-education camps, amid reports of e.g. forcible pork-eating or renunciation of the faith.

Mainstream journalists have performed quite well on this, despite shrinking resources for foreign coverage and China’s efforts to bar reporters from Muslim regions. But what are Muslims and Muslim nations doing? GetReligion’s Ira Rifkin wrote a Feb. 12 post noting that China’s Muslims have “been largely abandoned by their powerful global co-religionists” due to “blatantly self-serving political considerations.”

Wall Street Journal Asia columnist Sadanand Dhume aims that same complaint (behind paywall) specifically at Pakistan. Prime Minister Imran Khan is quick to denounce “Islamopobia” in the West, he wrote October 4, but “China’s wholesale assault on Islam itself elicits only silence.” He explained, “Hardly any Muslim country wants to risk angering China’s touchy rulers by criticizing their policies.”

Journalists should be quizzing Muslim spokesmen, organizations, scholars and diplomats about this noteworthy anomaly. Such calculated silence, so much in contrast with Christian and Jewish activism on religious freedom, stands out because most Muslim nations fuse religion with state interests.


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Spot the news here: First openly gay presidential candidate in 'Arab' or 'Muslim' world?

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To answer a question I hear every now and then: Yes, we do hear from Ira “Global Wire” Rifkin from time to time. If you follow him in social-media circles you know that he is doing well, especially when hanging out with his lively family.

Also, he sends us URLs and cryptic hints when he bumps into GetReligion-ish stories linked to international news. Take this Washington Post story, for example: “An openly gay candidate is running for president in Tunisia, a milestone for the Arab world.”

How important is this story? Rifkin had this to say: “This is not nothing, though I think his chances of ending up in exile in Paris (or dead or in jail) are greater than his winning.”

There are several interesting angles in this story, as far as I am concerned. All of them are directly or indirectly linked to religion. However, I’m not sure that the Post foreign-desk squad wants to face that reality head on. Here is the overture:

Lawyer Mounir Baatour officially announced his candidacy for the Tunisian presidency …, becoming the first known openly gay presidential candidate in the Arab world and heralding a major step forward for LGBT rights in a country that still criminalizes gay sex.

Baatour, the president of Tunisia’s Liberal Party, presented his candidacy to the country’s election commission a day ahead of a Friday deadline to qualify for the Sept. 15 election. He received nearly 20,000 signatures in support of his candidacy — double the required number — according to a statement posted to his Facebook page.

“This enthusiasm already testifies to the immense will of the Tunisian people, and especially its youth, to see new a political wind blowing on the country and to concretely nourish its democracy,” the statement said, calling Baatour’s candidacy “historic.”

OK, is the newsworthy hook here that we are talking about political “first” in the “Arab” world or in the “Muslim” world? Yes, I realize that the answer could be “both-and.” But that is a different answer than simply saying “Arab” and leaving it at that.


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