The call comes from Malaysia, but it is in response to the "Western media’s misrepresentation of Islam." Only in the eighth paragraph do we get any hint of the possibility that Muslims, and not just the Western media, might be responsible for some of the negative perceptions non-Muslims have of them.
But the key element of this story is that the proposed Whitewashing Islam courses, which is of course what they would be, given that they're coming from people who believe (or would have us believe) that negative reporting is responsible for Islam's poor image, would be compulsory. The coercive aspect of Islamic "tolerance" once again makes itself known: of course Jews and Christians are free to practice their faiths in the Islamic state, as long as they accept a humiliating second-class status, and if they protest, their "protection" is removed and they're liable to be killed. College students must be forced, similarly, to learn how Islam is peaceful and tolerant. They should not be free not to learn this.
"Call to teach journalism students proper reporting of Islam," from Bernama, July 30 (thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist):
Reporting on Islam or religion should be developed as a compulsory subject by institutions of higher learning in light of Western media’s misrepresentation of Islam.University Technology Petronas lecturer Prof Dr Ahmad Murad Merican who proposed this idea, also suggested the setting up of a centre to look into news reports on Islam and other religions, and rectify misconceptions.
He said currently the method of reporting news on Islam and other religions, was too westernised in nature because contemporary media had its roots in the Industrial Revolution.
“News reports and media began during the Industrial Revolution. The revolution emphasised materialistic concerns. The values journalists hold in their profession today reflect on timeliness, the now, to sell news, and news must have conflict to make it interesting.
“These are very capitalistic values. Religion, on the other hand, have opposite values, which are timelessness, transcendence, and peace as opposed to conflict.
“We need to learn how to report Islamic news or religious issues from an Islamic or religious point of view,” he said when presenting his paper titled “Orientalism, the Reportage of Religion and Journalism Education: Expanding the Space in the Dialogue of Civilisations”. Ahmad Murad, who spoke on the second and final day of the International Conference on the Representation of Islam and Muslims in the Media (ICORM08) today, said no university had offered this much-needed subject.
“For so many years not one university in the world has a course called ’Reportage of Islam or Religion’. Yet this (misrepresentation of Islam or religion) is the problem we face today, everyday. I know a university in India had it in the 1950’s but I don’t know what has happened to it,” he continued.
He then asserted that the misrepresentation of Islam could not be accorded solely to the Western media since Muslims too had damaged their own image....
No kidding, really?
Christianity and Judaism are far older than Islam. (Is there any major religion that appeared on the scene AFTER Islam?)
Reporting on all of these religions has been fine. The Industrial Revolution affected the means of production. It has nothing to do with the content of newspapers, only how they are printed and distributed. No other religion has blamed its coverage on the Industrial Revolution.
The values journalists hold in their profession today reflect on timeliness, the now, to sell news, and news must have conflict to make it interesting.
Without the conflict initiated by Muslims, Islam would not be in the news. It would only be in the mosque. The same argument can be made for Roman Catholicism - not that it is killing people but that the church makes the news only when it tries to change the way people live. Those who are not Catholic object. Muslims are out to change the way we all live. Apparently, it's wrong for us to object. They're doing it for our own good. We just can't see that.
“These are very capitalistic values. Religion, on the other hand, have opposite values, which are timelessness, transcendence, and peace as opposed to conflict.
What religion is more materialistic than Islam - the religion that dictates what people can own, where they can live, how much they can inherit, how much they must pay in taxes, etc. What other religion had "divine" revelations on earthly matters? What other religion has decided that IT has a right to own the world?
Some of the misunderstanding explained here:
http://sheikyermami.com/2008/07/29/ahmadinejad-misunderstood-misinterpreted/
"Christianity and Judaism are far older than Islam....Reporting on all of these religions has been fine."
-- from a posting above
You could have fooled me, and quite a few others, if by such a remark you meant to include such historical examples as Nazi Germany, 1933-1945, to name only the most extreme example of a workings-out of a mental pathology which has been an ineradicable current in the Western world (and needs therefore to be vigilantly monitored and its appeal -- to the psychically marginal -- understood, its effects recognized, and its adherents kept, as much as possible, away from positions of influence and power), a current in which at least one of those "religions" and those associated with it have hardly benefitted from "reporting" that "has been fine."
Nice page you got there Sheik, Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad certainly appears to have a severe case of misunderstandingIslamitus , Thanks for the link!
DW
These fools should realize that Westerners did not understand islam
before 9-11, l just had an instinct dislike to it, but the more we know about islam and have read from the koran, the we know its an evil cult. they can do all the "whitewashing" of islam, but they cannot deny its facts of terrorising and killilng people.
Hugh,
I'm speaking of today.
Members of the MSM have obviously already taken a course on the "correct" way to report on all things islamic.
“For so many years not one university in the world has a course called ’Reportage of Islam or Religion’."
Oh, the indignity!
Why the hell should any university in the world have special courses about reporting on Islam? I suspect Dr. Merican threw in the "or Religion" as an afterthought.
So... what? Colleges are to focus on every religion out there, with special courses for each? No, of course only Islam should be singled out for "study", so that it can be given the kind of press it wants.
If Dr. Merican gets what he asks for, I hope it isn't what he wants. Rather, I'd love to see Islam represented in the media as it is, not as Merican's fantasy says it is.
Today, then, one could say that a noticeable feature of the Western press (aside from the "anti-Israel" coverage of so many of the reporters in Western Europe who have found a socially-acceptable outlet for antisemitism) is the indifference to, or even hostility to, Christianity, the failure to recognize its significance in the history of Europe and of the West, and a hostile treatment of it -- look at how the Western press covered Pope Benedict's Regensburg speech, and misreported consistently on it. One is not impressed, either, with the endless television joking about groping priests and altar boys -- as the church frescoes in Bologna are threatened with destruction by Muslims -- or when it comes to Evangelicals, they are presented, in such European magazines as in the supercilious, or often nasty and quite comically inaccurate, coverage of the United States whenever the subject is other than economics (in such a magazine as "The Economist"), where European audiences are treated to a spectacle of America, "too-religious" America, which invites comparison with splendidly advanced post-Christian Europe and suffers by the comparison, for here, in our benighted land, the Bible belt widens with the waistlines of those waddling Americans, those gun-toting (oh, there's a machine gun in every pot, in America, don't you know?), saliva-dripping, Bible-quoting, table-thumping, troglodytic because still Christian, Americans, with their honor saved only, here and there, by the odd (very odd) Chomsky or two.
No, neither Judaism and its adherents (or those assigned to it by antisemites), for a very long time in the history of the West, nor Christianity, especially in the "post-Christian" and "post-modern" Western Europe and in much of the American press, can be described as having been covered fairly.
But it's a different story with the coverage of Islam. The craziest assertions, the ones that are given the lie by the day's news, every single day, that Islam is a "religion of peace" and of "tolerance," or that Islam "contributed greatly to the development of Europe" (it did not, save only by driving out scholars who, as in Byzantine Empire fleeing the Seljuk and then the Ottoman Turks, arrived in Italy with their manuscripts and helped lead to a renewed interest in classical antiquity, and to what used to be called, when the Renaissance had not yet been replaced by the chronological desiccation of the course-catalogue time-line "Early Modern Period," the Revival of Learning).
And merely by continuing to refer to Islam only as a "religion" (which confuses people, which inaccurately describes what Islam is)-- many in the world's media have, by ignoring or downplaying the politics and geopolitics of Islam, by continuing to pretend it is a "religion" like any other instead of telling us, enlightening us, as to all the ways it is different, is indeed, rather, a Total Belief-System that, had the tools available to the modern police-states of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia been available, would in the distant past have quite naturally assumed the aspect of, and been later recognized as, a form of modern totalitarianism -- meddling in, controlling, deciding what is prohibited and what is commanded -- in every single area of life. Yes, a totalitarianism avant la lettre.
"Is there any major religion that appeared on the scene AFTER Islam?"
posted by PMK
Sort of depends on what you mean by "major".
Anyway, there are:
Bahai'ism, founded in 1863, with ca. 5 million members.
Mormonism, founded in 1830, ca. 11 million.
Sikhism, formative period 1507-1708, ca. 23 million.
Andrew Bostom's great book The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims should be required reading in any such course. It gives a very detailed and thorough exposition of the butchery and genocide committed by muslims who invaded other countries and took those lands (the lands we now refer to as "muslim countries").
"Is there any major religion that appeared on the scene AFTER Islam?"
posted by PMK
Sort of depends on what you mean by "major".
Anyway, there are:
Bahai'ism, founded in 1863, with ca. 5 million members.
Mormonism, founded in 1830, ca. 11 million.
Sikhism, formative period 1507-1708, ca. 23 million.
Posted by: ebonystone at July 30, 2008 9:01 AM
===============================================
Also Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Assembly of God, and all of the other churches which emerged from the Protestant Reformation.
So they want them to lie? Reporting truthfully is not some evil Western invention of the industrial revolution or the Enlightenment, where scientific truths and rights of man were developed in that era. Truthful reporting is not given to some "Islamic point of view" per Mohammad's Allah universe that is different from the reality of the world. There is only one reality!
The truth is the truth, and putting an Islamic spin on it is called propaganda. So they want to teach "propaganda" at the university covering reportage? Didn't that go away with Soviet Communist journalism? Islam loves to go backwards, so teaching propaganda at the university, compulsory education, makes sense to them who are slaves. We are free, and for us only learning how to report truthfully is acceptable. If Islam has a problem with that truth about itself, make it reform.
"Dialogue of civilisations"
"Dialogue"
"civilisations"
Dr 'A. Merican'... are you sure? :)
Report Islamic news or religious issues from an Islamic or religious point of view? Yeah, right. The plain English of this is that yet another attempt will be made to put lipstick on a pig.
“For so many years not one university in the world has a course called ’Reportage of Islam or Religion’."
It's certainly a glaring omission from the academic curriculum, right up there with "Eating cream cakes; Grade 1 and Grade 2" and "Nose Blowing for beginners".
Only this morning I was discussing with my Professor of Advanced Air Breathing how remarkable it was that our educational establishment wasn't running Degree courses in "Talking About Very Important Things with People Who Apparently Aren't As Clever As You."
He's promised to look into it just as soon as he's back from his 2 week Summer Seminar on "Water. How can we make it wetter?"
Must dash. I'm sitting my finals on the subject of "Drawing straight lines without going round in circles" tomorrow and I still have loads of revision to do.
"damaged"? More like a Train Wreak with Toxic Waste.
Just a tad late to cover up the mess.
You cannot teach an old Dog new Lies. Little wonder they feel compelled to start when there Pups
MESA NOSTRA meet ASMEA (Founded last year by Professors Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami), . . .(-Spencer)(frown)
et tu, Hugh?
Come to think of it, Mohammed wasn't exactly full of truthiness.....
herroyalwhyness,
The ASMEA web site gives the criteria for full membership as follows:
It doesn't sound like you have to be a university faculty member. (There is also a category of associate membership for people who don't meet these criteria.)
Has anyone ever heard of a course on "Reportage of Christianity or Religion", or "Reportage of Judaism or Religion", or "Reportage of Buddhism or Religion"? Of course not. Why is it that only Muslims need such a course?
This is why islam will never advance. Instead of teaching in universities some useful academic subjects like math and science, they want to teach koran reading forward and backwrd, memorizing its satanic verses instead of learning something more usefull. And we wonder where do all these terrorists come from and where do they learn to be so evil. We in the West have university students, in islam world what they have is koran students.
So from now and on, when we hear about students in the islamic world we know these are koran students and not some academic students. They might as well be called mosque student instead of confusing them with university students.