Reporters are 100 times more likely to associate Islam with terrorism or militancy than all other faiths combined, an article quoted a word search on news stories published in major newspapers over the past decade as concluding.
“Such lopsided portrayal is indicative of deep-seated misunderstandings about Islam, and sometimes just plain prejudice,” said Parvez Ahmed, chairman of the board of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in an article on Monday. “Surely, all terrorists are not Muslim. Neither are all Muslims terrorists.”
The European Union had noticed resentment among Muslims to the “objectionable juxtaposition of Islam and terrorism”, and was distributing new guidelines to its 25 members that recommended using “non-emotive lexicon for discussing radicalisation”, Ahmed said in his article titled ‘A sensible way to describe terrorists’. EU officials say that the guidelines, which are not legally binding, would ask European governments to shun the phrase ‘Islamic terrorism’ in favour of “terrorists who abusively invoke Islam”, Ahmed said. Other terms being considered by the review include “Islamist”, “fundamentalist” and “jihad”, he said. He praised this “first of its kind effort” to separate terrorism from its perceived roots.
“Associating the criminal enterprise of terrorism with the faith of 1.4 billion Muslims, 99.99 percent of whom will never come near any act of terrorism, much less use Islam as a justification for their crimes, is just plain wrong,” he said. Ahmed said the 9/11 attacks had “brought home the horrors of a new form of suicidal terrorism”. “More and more scholarly writings are delving deeper into this issue and offering us new insights,” he said. “The pioneering instigators and the largest purveyors of suicide terrorism are the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, a Marxist-Leninist group whose members are overwhelmingly Hindu.”
Quoting Robert Pape’s book ‘Dying to Win’, Ahmed writes: “‘From Lebanon to Israel to Sri Lanka to Kashmir to Chechnya, the sponsors of every campaign have been terrorist groups trying to establish or maintain political self-determination by compelling a democratic power to withdraw from a territory they claim,’” Ahmed quotes Pape as saying. He said that occupation is the primary motivator and religion, at best, is an “aggravating” factor. “Considering this, the Iraq war has only amplified the problem,” he said.
“Falsely associating Islam with terrorism weakens the efficacy of these efforts by creating the impression that the global war on terror is merely a euphemism for a war on Islam,” Ahmed said. “Terrorism is stateless and yet trans-national. ... it will never be defeated through force alone. It will have to be fought ideologically by attempting to win the hearts and minds of those vulnerable to terrorist manipulations,” Ahmed said. |