Går media islams ärende?

Läser Bruce Bawers "Surrender -- Appeasing Islam Sacrificing Freedom", från 2009.

I ett kapitel om media nämns bl a hur PBS (amerikansk icke-vinstdrivande TV-kanal) i serien America at a Crossroads om islam i väst stoppade avsnittet "Islam vs. Islamists". Det handlade om moderata muslimer och islamister och skildrade striden mellan dem inom islam, med islamisters strävan efter inflytande bland muslimer och hur de driver på för parallella shariastyrda samhällen. TV-seriens högsta ansvarige beslöt dock att ta bort avsnittet. (Bloggade om det 2007 här.)

Bawer nämner även en serie av tre 2-timmarsprogram från CNN, God's Warriors, som gick några månader senare:

...perhaps the archetypical TV treatment of Islam in the post-9/11 era. In service of the thesis that Christian and Jewish extremism is as widespread and dangerous today as Muslim extremism, the producers seemed to have sought out the most radical Christians and Jews they could find, the cameraman filmed their gatherings in ways plainly designed to make them look even more radical, and Christiane Amanpour asked accusatory questions that emphasized their fanaticism. Meanwhile Amanpour apparently did her best to make jihadists sympathetic. Indeed, the very concept of jihad was absent from her picture of God's Muslim warriors, whom she depicted not as fighting to conquer the world for Islam but as reacting to west bank settlements. "Muslims, like people everywhere, abhore terrorism," she said. "The small minority who resort to violence is symptomatic of something many of us have failed to understand: the impact of God's Jewish warriors goes far beyond the se rocky hills. The Jewish settlements have inflamed much of the Muslim world." In short, if it was not for Jewish warriors -- that is West Bank settlers -- there would be no Muslim warriors.

Vet inte om detta som fenomen är väsenskilt SVT:s satsning på propagandistiska Gazas tårar, som Anna Ekström beskrev i denna UNT-artikel. Nåväl, i mainsteram media fick, skriver Bawer, God's Warriors med få undantag positiva omdömen. Bl a Alex Safian (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America) var kritisk och påpekade att...

..."two apolitical segments" in God's Muslims Warriors featuring "appealing devout Muslim woman who talked about why they wear head covering and how Islam enriches their lives." There were no similar segments segments in the series about charmingly pious Jews or Christians.

En medieprofil som faktiskt kritiserade serien var MSNBC:s Dan Abrams. Han beskrev serien som "shameful advocacy masked as journalism" och noterade att Amanpour...

...equating "Jewish and Christian political movements, even Jewish lobbyists in Congress" with Muslim terrorists -- the exception being that she strove to "understand" the latter. Abrams noted that even as Amanpour "portray[ed] Muslims as victims," she accus[ed] evangelical Christians of playing the victim" -- an upside-down picture that is, of course, standard in today's media.

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(Parentetiskt och kanske irrelevant, men nämnde Amanpours konstsmak här.)


Andra bloggar om: samhälle, islam, islamisering, media, mediekritik, USA, Bruce Bawer