An essay about my thoughts on Islamophobia ,Terrorism and Media

An essay about my thoughts on Islamophobia ,Terrorism and Media

       In this essay I will be discussing the terms islamophobia, terrorism and the association between them and the media. Islamophobia is defined as a dislike of, or prejudice against Islam or Muslims, especially as a political force. The usage of phobia to describe hatred in these kinds of words really irritates me ,due to the fact that phobia means an extreme or irrational fear of something. Fear of spiders for instance is described as Arachnophobia ,fear of close spaces-Claustrophobia etc. and putting phobia after a word to describe hatred towards a group is silly in my opinion.




       First off I will start with a common thing I  see , which is biased media claiming that it is objective but on the other hand twists facts or even partially saves info it has, just to fit its (political) agenda. A good example is the recent terror attack that happened in NYC on 31/10 where a driver hits and murders 8 innocent pedestrians with a rented truck. On the video that I’m going to link later which is a CNN reportage of the attack we can hear that at 4:32 the journalist says  “The police know who he is, they have a description of him, I’m not going to share that at the moment” , on 7:25 another journalist states  “.. the NYPD and the JTTF ,the Joint Terrorism Task Force are debriefing him (the attacker)  now and they should come up with a motive for the attack”  and on 9:45 one of the journalists says that the police are investigating him in search of a motive, later on he continues speaking (in a vague way) that this might be a terrorist attack. Every person with some common sense can tell that this person is a terrorist, the attack was targeting multiple innocent people and it was also clearly a hate-crime (more specifically a religious hate crime) because the man who committed this atrocity was screaming “Allahu Akbar” afterwards. Although not confirmed ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack on Thursday. The suspected man named Saipov told investigators that he “felt good ”  about what he had done , and even asked to hang an Islamic State flag in his hospital room. All of the factors mentioned before ,furthermore show that this was a terrorist act targeting innocent people . However CNN refused to give out facts that proved the event was a religious hate-crime, because it wouldn’t fit their liberal agenda.




       Another good example of CNN’s subjectivity is a report on the Charlottesville marchers. The original Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia started out as a protest for the removal of the statue of Robert D. Lee. Of course there were normal protesters there but things changed when legitimate white supremacists and Nazis showed up with tiki torches to protest while shouting “jews will not replace us”. We can all agree that what the Nazis were doing there was completely wrong and even the American President  Donald Trump made a statement on a press conference saying  “We all condemn  in the strongest possible terms this egregious hatred, bigotry and violence” but of course CNN had to twist his words on 3:55 the reporter states that “he is okay with fascists, nazis and white supremacists” making him seem like a racist.  These are just a few examples of how biased medias like to twist stories so that they  can imply a political view (conservative medias are of course no exception).



        The second thing I’d like to cover is terrorism and its relation to islam and media. A report shows that Western Europe accounted for less than one percent (0.7%) of all the victims of terrorism in 2016. The total number being 269 out of 13,488. The report also shows that North Africa and the Middle East are the ones who suffered the most attacks and casualties up to 19,121 (55.5%). Reasons for Islamophobia to exist is that people are easily manipulated through religion, and radical islam itself being so violent.  A study done by BBC shows that over 5,000 people are dead because of terrorist attacks during November 2014. The countries who suffered the most fatalities were Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Syria and Yemen. This number of casualties in a month is almost 25 times larger than the number of casualties in Europe itself for a year. The main group carrying out these acts of terror is ISIS (they account for over 50% of the attacks). Furthermore 80% of the countries that suffered were Islamic ,which I think is a reason to fuel  Islamophobia (because people would picture terror attacks and bombings when thinking of islam).As we can see the vast majority of attacks that occur are not in Western Europe, but in countries far from us. If we give that a little thought, other attacks outside of Europe don’t get that much coverage. That is because the media targets stories that would get more popularity, coverage and audience. And the audience is more interested in events that happen around it, in a way events that concern it directly.


       In a nutshell ,I think that the mainstream media isn’t doing its job that great. Although claiming to be objective we see in a number of ways it can be biased. Additionally covering stories about casualties in first world countries and not writing an article about even a single one attack in a third world country creates a sense of inequality when it comes to importance of lives.

Sources :

*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9A7WV_mJGtA -CNN Breaking News: Manhattan: 10/31/17: NY Driver kills 6 in Possible Terror Attack

*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnY4jhgypTU -Vice News' Elle Reeve: Charlottesville marchers knew what they were doing (Full CNN interview)

*https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/11/03/nyc-terror-attack-islamic-state-group-claims-responsibility/828348001/  *https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/politics/100000005363413/trump-delivers-statement-at-white-house.html -Mr. Trump’s speech
* http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-30080914- Jihadism: Tracking a month of deadly attacks

* http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/08/report-07-percent-terror-victims-western-europe-170824035850113.html - Report: 0.7 percent of terror victims in Western Europe

Comments

  1. media9 November 2017 at 07:45

    Some interesting thoughts and you make a good case for your claim that CNN is more liberal than some other mainstream news outlets, drawing on evidence. You have taken an alternative approach to this essay, in highlighting how political correctness can sometimes mask facts, rather than pointing out the rather more tired evidence of Islamophobia in the conservative media. You could have made this point more explicitly. For this topic, you need to focus on newspapers- print and online versions, rather than moving image news. Vanessa

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Stanimir9 November 2017 at 14:57

      Thanks for the feedback Vanessa. I have tried to incorporate that in my work that's due Wednesday, you might want to have a look on it.

      Delete

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