Annenberg hosts discussion about image of Muslims in the media
Researchers, writers and media professionals held a discussion on misconceptions about Muslims and the role of the media, as well as political groups, in perpetuating these stereotypes Tuesday evening in the Annenberg Auditorium.
The Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership and Policy and Institute for Diversity and Empowerment at Annenberg hosted the panel, titled “Is the War on Terror a War on Muslims?”
The panel consisted of Associate Professor of Clinical Education Shafiqa Ahmadi, Executive Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Southern California Hussam Ayloush and former CIA analyst and case officer John Kiriakou and was moderated by Annenberg Clinical Professor of Communication Robert Scheer. Juan Cole, a professor of history at the University of Michigan, and Wajahat Ali, playwright of The Domestic Crusaders, were present via Skype.
The event began by discussing the issue of discrimination against Muslims, which has become more prominent in recent years. Ahmadi especially mentioned how she came across discrimination against Muslim women in Hawaii.
“They have a policy that they can’t cover their head when they went into banks,” Ahmadi said. “It was a pretext to not allow Muslim women to enter banks. It’s a paradise as a place, but discrimination happens all the time.”
She also spoke about how Muslims were profiled at airports and discussed her fears for the future.
“I look at Muslim students who are profiled, [and] my fear is about the new generation,” Ahmadi said. “My fear is more for the young individuals who are considered guilty by just being part of the Muslim community.”
Cole spoke about how Muslims were being framed as the prime topic of terrorism, while in reality, Muslims in America carried out only 3 percent of terrorist attacks.
“Terrorism is rationalized to Muslims,” Cole said. “The Muslims were under more surveillance, whereas the vast majority of attacks come from other groups, but no one talks about them.”
According to Cole, right-wing terrorism is not a part of the discussion in the United States. He also talked about how the U.S. government has committed atrocities against Muslims, which are rarely mentioned in the same context as modern-day terrorist attacks.
“No one bothered to read the book on Iraq before attacking it and trying to govern it,” Cole said. “They tried to run Iraq in English. They killed so many people for not understanding English.”
He mentioned that America has traditionally formed alliances with Muslim-majority countries, which serve both a diplomatic and military purpose.
“We have more formal allies in the Muslim world than any place else,” Cole said. “So how is it that the Muslim world is an enemy? That is bizarre.”
Ali spoke about the role of media in creating a negative image of Muslims. The information that Americans receive from media is overly negative, Ali said, and as a result, it reinforces their ignorance and shape their image of Muslims.
“Muslim labor, Muslim sweat, Muslims stories have cultivated the soil of America,” Ali said. “Even though Muslims have been in this country since 16th century, poll after poll says that 60 percent of Americans don’t know Muslims. All they know about Islam or Muslims is through media.”
Kiriakou brought up personal examples of the young Muslims he has talked to in his travels throughout the Middle East. He said that they weren’t radical, just poor and uneducated, and popular perception of Muslims does not differentiate between the two. However, he also argued that media is not solely responsible for spreading a negative image.
“It starts in the White House and goes down through media,” Kiriakou said. “Most Americans are very easily influenced; they get caught up in the feeling that they have to rally against people who are different than we are.”
The solution, according to Ayloush, is that students should educate themselves about these issues and attempt to separate media portrayals of Muslims from reality.
“The constant negative depiction of Muslims is a vicious cycle, and we should really care about perception because perception is reality,” Ayloush said.
Why, oh why would anyone ever think Muslim values – values which include jihad, the caliphate, disdain for infidels (all non-Muslims) – are any different than western or Hindu/Buddhist values?
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Fortunately millions of non-Muslims are being forced by world events to wake up to how truly dangerous Islam is. We ex-Muslims know that Mohammedanism must go the way of the dinosaur or the planet will drown in the blood of sharia as Muslims enforce the laws of Islam.
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Fortunately millions of non-Muslims are being forced by world events to wake up to how truly dangerous Islam is. We ex-Muslims know that Mohammedanism must go the way of the dinosaur or the planet will drown in the blood of sharia as Muslims enforce the laws of Islam.
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If you want to understand the enemy “Read what they say”. They constantly justify their acts with accurate and apt citations from the Koran and Hadith.
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Teach theocratic insanity, reap holy madness.
The Koran is an ideological tumor that infects and destroys the hearts and the minds of those who embrace this retrograde dogmatic lunacy.
It spreads into the world through the AIDS-like cultural immune system destruction of political correctness and moral equivalency and the denial of the survival instincts rampant in the “progressive” West.
It will vaporizer cities before the infidels shall finally awaken.
Millions dead needlessly.
Thanks to leaders afraid to be thought of as “bigots”.
Their deadly delusion is the Fifth Column.
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Yes…it’s entirely predictable. Another in the endless litany of atrocites is perpetrated by Islamist terrorists and the response is ”we must not allow this to fuel anti-muslim sentiment”.
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I don’t hate the Koran, the Koran hates me. The Koran is hate speech toward unbelievers and should be outlawed.
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• If you need to stand up for the real underdogs in this battle of ideas – stand up for the ex-muslims (muslims who have left islam) and freethinkers/intellectuals of the muslim world and in the western societies. They are the ones who are persecuted/killed and defamed and slandered by traditional muslims (even your so called moderate muslim friends) – almost reflexively like a mafia system.
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Factually, look up the punishment in the legal systems of muslim majority countries and opinion polls about blasphemy and apostasy amongst muslims living in the western world. These are facts on the ground. Historically, these human rights violations have been worse in the history of islam.
This fact makes islam unique – unlike any other. islam is also a political doctrine not just a religion – since it finds it’s way again in the constitutions of the 40-50 countries in the world. Do you even get the enormity of this? In tens of countries , leaving and criticizing islam is punishable by death.
Can you grasp it? This is the 21st century.
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If an ideology is peaceful, then its most literalist or fundamentalist adherents too would be peaceful. In the case of Islam, let alone Al Qaeda or ISIS, what the governments of Iran or Saudi Arabia do is plain for all to see. In Saudi Arabia they publicly behead people for even drug trafficking, and in Iran they hang them to death for being homosexual.
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It is no wonder that Muslims are so focused on Islamophobia. Lacking convincing arguments, charm and positive contributions to their surroundings, being feared is their only chance to gain at least some kind of “respect”, and to scare the less brave into not warning the world about Islam’s obvious genocidal nature and its prophet’s thirst for blood and underage girls.
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Again can be seen that willful ignorance of evil is worse than evil itself. These panelists are living proof of this.
Yeah, why would anyone ever be so silly as to profile Muslims?
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The following was written a year ago…
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A beheading in Woolwich, a suicide bomb in Beijing, a blown-up marathon in Boston, a shooting in the head of a young Pakistani girl seeking education, a destroyed shopping mall in Nairobi – and so it continues, in the name of Islam, from south London to Timbuktu. It is time to take stock, especially on the left, since these things are part of the world’s daily round.
Leave aside the parrot-cry of “Islamophobia” for a moment. I will return to it. Leave aside, too, the pretences that it is all beyond comprehension. “Progressives” might ask instead: what do Kabul, Karachi, Kashmir, Kunming and a Kansas airport have in common? Is it that they all begin with “K”? Yes. But all of them have been sites of recent Islamist or, in the case of Kansas, of wannabe-Islamist, attacks; at Wichita Airport planned by a Muslim convert ready to blow himself up, and others, “in support of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula”. “We cannot stop lone wolves,” a British counterterrorism expert told us after Woolwich. Are they “lone”? Of course not.
A gas facility in southern Algeria, a hospital in Yemen, an Egyptian police convoy in the Sinai – it’s complex all right – a New Year’s party in the southern Philippines, a railway station in the Caucasus, a bus terminal in Nigeria’s capital, and on and on, have all been hit by jihadis, with hostages taken, suicide belts detonated, cars and trucks exploded, and bodies blown to bits. And Flight MH370? Perhaps. In other places – in Red Square and Times Square, in Jakarta and New Delhi, in Amman and who-knows-where in Britain – attacks have been thwarted. But in 2013 some 18 countries got it in the neck (so to speak) from Islam’s holy warriors….
The Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership and Policy and Institute for Diversity and Empowerment at Annenberg hosted the panel, titled “Is the War on Terror a War on Muslims?”
Only an intellectual could think of something this stupid.