In Florida, Jose Gomez’s mother was nagging him to put some boxes in the attic. On New Year’s Eve, having had enough, he beheaded her and stuffed her body in a garbage bag. He then calmly confessed to the police. Fox News chose to ignore the story.
Fox News, however, reserved a totally different kind of coverage for another beheading in Oklahoma. Last September, Alton Nolen was fired from his place of work because of racial comments. He returned armed with a large kitchen knife, beheaded one woman and injured another.
While Fox News was quiet about the first beheading it went ballistic about the second. The only difference between the two was that the first murderer was a Christian while the second was a recent Muslim convert. The local police and the FBI said the latter murder had nothing to do with religious fundamentalism and treated it as an incident of violence at the workplace.
Fox News would have none of this talk by the FBI. They declared that the beheading was an act of Islamic terrorism, hyped him as an American jihadist on US soil and demonised Muslims during their news bulletins, commentaries and discussion programmes. They ignored the fact that Christianity and Islam had nothing to do with either murder.
During the informative discussion on Times Talk on TVM last Tuesday I did not have time to refer to these two coverages which illustrate how the media can misrepresent events and thus create dangerous stereotypes. I did, however, briefly refer to Fox News terrorism ‘expert’ Steven Emerson, who claimed Birmingham has become like a caliphate in the heart of England. British Prime Minister Cameron described this ‘expert’ as “a complete idiot”.
Journalism has got many stories wrong. Veteran journalist Lindsey Hilsum, who was the only English-speaking foreign correspondent in Rwanda when the genocide started in 1994, said that the coverage of that tragedy was “a failure of journalism”. Recently, Francesca Borri, an Italian freelancer who covered Syria, wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review that journalism had failed its readers even in this case.
The problem is that people who have never been to Syria or Birmingham or Oklahoma could believe such media reports and start looking at the Muslim next door with suspicion. Since more people in Malta, for example, have Muslim neighbours, it is the media’s role to denounce such stereotyping. Compared, for instance, to the English tabloids, the coverage given by our media, unlike the content on the social networks, is quite sane. However, the reference to asylum seekers as ‘clandestine people’ or ‘illegal immigrants’ is the sort of language the media should do away with.
It is not only the news media that is responsible for the creation of anti-Muslim stereotypes. Ever since Thomas Edison made a short film in 1897 depicting ‘Arab’ women as dancers seducing a male audience, Western-owned cinema studios have gone out of their way to propagate negative stereotypes.
Mazin Qumsiyeh refers to the “Three B Syndrome: Arabs in TV and movies are portrayed as either bombers, belly dancers or billionaires”. This synergy – albeit unplanned – between the news and the entertainment media in the West is the best feeder of the clash of civilisations.
There are two points I briefly referred to during Times Talk which I would like to register here.
The massacre in Paris was horrible and condemnable indeed. But few know that almost concurrently with the murder of 17 people by Islamic extremists in Paris, other Islamic extremists, Boko Haram, were responsible for one of their worst atrocities in Nigeria. Amnesty International described it as the “deadliest massacre”, while local leaders said that 2,000 were killed.
How many Nigerians have to be killed to get the same news coverage as 17 French men and women?
The Nigerian government, known for downplaying such massacres, set the figure down to 150.
Did anyone talk about them? Were any marches held? How many Nigerians have to be killed to get the same news coverage as 17 French men and women?
Most were journalists, and the media does look after its own, you may say. True. But even Saudi Raif Badawi is a journalist, though a citizen journalist. While the French police were hunting down the terrorists who killed the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, the Saudi Arabian government started the execution of the sentence that will probably end in the death through torture of Badawi, a Saudi blogger.
After Friday prayers (as if God finds such barbarities pleasant to watch) on January 9, he was flogged 50 times in the Red Sea city of Jeddah. He will be flogged 1,000 times in installments of 50 a week. His second flogging was due to take place last Friday but Amnesty International reported it had been postponed, apparently on medical grounds. He was also sentenced to 10 years in prison and a fine of a quarter of a million euros. He will probably die under this extreme punishment, but if he manages to survive he will end up a wreck.
The hypocritical Saudi barbaric government finds the killing of French cartoonist reprehensible but the torturing till death of Saudi journalists praiseworthy. The international media, on the other hand, did not publicise and condemn this barbarity with the severity that it should have exercised.
On my part, it was heart-warming to see world leaders and officials from Algeria, Turkey, Gabon, Russia, Egypt take time off from jailing and torturing journalists and dissidents in their own countries to march for free expression in France.
The silence about the Boko Haram is not accidental, for there is a double standard in the media. When the story does not fit the narrative of Western civilisation under attack from Islamic extremism, it is not given as much importance as it deserves.
One more question to ask is this: it seems that the lives of all human beings are sacred, but some are more sacred than others. Is the worldwide interest on Charlie Hebdo only about the attack on free speech? Not necessarily.
Only one day after Charlie Hebdo’s white journalists were transformed into martyrs for ‘free speech’, two Tunisian journalists, Sofiene Chourabi and Nadhir Ktari, were beheaded by Islamic State militants in Libya. Their sacrifice was ignored by the world.
It’s a case of double standards.
joseph.borg@um.edu.mt