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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
News reports are obsessing about how the terrorist attacks happened, but not why.
Sep 25, 2001 | Islamic and Middle Eastern experts who have spent their careers attempting to educate Americans braced for the worst in the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. They feared an immediate backlash in the press. Americans have historically expressed low regard for Islam, given the violent political struggles it's been associated with, and the press has often catered to public ignorance and distaste.
These experts' verdict on the press to date, however, has been mixed. Many are heartened: Coverage of Islamic issues has been better than some expected, suggesting the possibility that America's general understanding of Middle Eastern and Muslim issues has improved, even if only slightly. Yet at the same time, there is a growing consensus that the press has fallen well short when it comes to exploring and explaining the all-important question: Why? Why did suicidal hijackers attack the U.S.?
"In terms of reporters and editors, there is a much better understanding of what Islam really is," says Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American Islamic Relations, comparing current coverage to what occurred during the Gulf War a decade ago.
"I've been fairly pleased," adds Charles Kimball, an Islamic scholar who is chairman of the religion department at Wake Forest University. He's been fielding dozens of phone calls from journalists, says Kimball, who "aren't looking for sound bites, but who want a better understanding."
Scholars also point to President Bush's visit to a Washington mosque, his strong words in support of tolerance and the close attention the media has been paying to Muslim-related hate crimes at home as welcome developments.
"I'm gratified by that," notes Yvonne Haddad, professor of Christian-Muslim relations at Georgetown University.
Taking a broader perspective, her Georgetown colleague John Voll, professor of Islamic history, notes that there has been steady improvement over the past several decades. "I really think the level of information, on the part of the average person on the street, is higher and more sophisticated than it was at the beginning of the 1960s," he says. "I've heard no mention anywhere of this [attack] being a communist plot. That sounds silly now. But ideologically at the beginning of the Iranian Revolution in late '60s and early '70s, [religious leaders] were labeled communists disguised in black robes. Islam is now taken seriously by the American public and not seen as a cover for something else."
That's the good news. The bad news, according to the same experts, is that the mainstream American press has largely been ignoring what many experts see as the root cause fueling Islamic terrorism: America's own foreign policy. Even as media executives are publicly defending on-camera displays of flags and patriotic slogans, insisting that these fits of patriotic fervor don't affect actual news coverage, skeptics are charging that the press has so far been studious in avoiding serious examination of past American policy failures, and in questioning Bush's rhetoric.
