January 28, 2002
Muslims seizing opportunities to tell who they are
___By Patrick Rogers
___Religion News Service
___WASHINGTON (RNS)--The pictures stream into Americans' living rooms around the clock: Islamic terrorist Osama bin Laden's bearded face, Muslim fighters battling with U.S. forces in Afghanistan or escaping to Muslim countries, and Islamic extremists ready to kill Americans in a twisted jihad.
___Between the network news and the three 24-hour cable news stations, the images are almost inescapable, and they seem to paint a relentlessly negative portrait of the Islamic world.
___It could be grim stuff if you are a Muslim in the United States and a full-on public relations nightmare if it's your job to look out for Muslims living here.
___But surprisingly, some Muslim leaders in this country say television coverage of their faith hasn't been all bad. In fact, they say, all the attention focused on Islam has given them a unique opportunity to explain the Muslim world to an American public woefully uneducated about one of the world's fastest-growing religions.
___Those leaders also say when it comes to the Islamic angle of the story, the dominant television news theme since Sept. 11 has been one of tolerance and respect for Muslims, echoing and amplifying President George Bush's message. Like Bush, television reporters have been careful to make clear distinctions between Islamic terrorists such as Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorist network and peace-loving Muslims.
___"In general, broadcast coverage has been pretty good. I would say there have been a lot of attempts to offer information about Islam, mostly accurate, some of it not so accurate, and some of it biased--but I would say on the whole not so bad," said Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American Islamic Relations.
___Television news coverage of Islam is more accurate and features more tolerance than it would have just a decade ago because even though Muslims are still a tiny religious minority in the United States, they continue to move further into the American mainstream, he said.
___He and other Muslim leaders say coverage of the Sept. 11 attacks and the conflict in Afghanistan have given them a chance to appear on television talk shows and in news stories to explain Islamic beliefs and practices. "It is clear that people are hungry for information about Islam right now," Hooper said.
___No one is hungrier for that information than television journalists, who, unlike their print colleagues, must balance the news with the sites and sounds being fed from the Islamic world.
___But according to Hussein Ibish of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, some of those reporters are failing that on-the-job course by making some staggering mistakes about even the most basic Islamic tenets.
___"The confusion is so deep that it doesn't even get to questions of theology. People cannot even recognize the difference between the Arab ethnicity and the Islamic faith. They can't even deal with that," Ibish said. "We are at such a profound ignorance that we can't tell the difference between being an Arab and being a Muslim, where the two are overlapping but not synonymous."
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