Danusha V. Goska

Islam, Terrorism, and the Media

This is Danusha Goska.

After 9/11, Bloomington media reassured audiences that Islam had nothing to do with that day's terrorist attacks. WFIU aired fora in which IU professors proclaimed this; the Herald Times ran articles. Other factors were to blame: Christianity, the Crusades, Judaism, Zionism, capitalism, imperialism, modernization, globalization.

This point of view is a powerful one and it must be aired. There are other points of view, though, held by scholars like Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes, the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Tom Friedman, and the Muslim-born, like author and fatwa victim Salman Rushdie and internet activist Ali Sina. Rushdie famously said, "This is about Islam."

In arguing this point, Rushdie and others are not singling Islam out for unique criticism. In fact, all major institutions and religions are routinely criticized as part of the Western tradition of free inquiry. Catholic priests were among those who argued that specific features of Catholicism may have contributed to the recent sex scandal. And, again, Americans, Christians, and Jews freely criticized their own heritages in the wake of nine eleven. The only prominent worldview segregated from free critique in our local media was Islam.

This segregation pays no compliment to Muslims. Rather, this segregation suggests that our local media find Islam so foreign and so scary that they dare not expose it to the selfsame fearless and probing analysis that America, Christianity, Judaism, capitalism, and the West are routinely, honorably, and therapeutically subjected to. This segregation, politically correct though it may be, infantilizes Muslims.

For Speak Your Mind, this has been Danusha Goska.

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