Category Archives: Journalism and Media

A Lazy, Simplistic Analogy

Islamophobia, Journalism and Media, Terrorism Issue

The Boston Globe Editorial, November 4, 2007

If language is a window on the world, a deliberate smudging of that window will make it harder to see the world clearly and comprehend it. So it is with the highly ideological term “Islamofascist,” a label that is being wielded as a blunt weapon in a left-right debate and has been carelessly bandied about by some presidential candidates.

Recently, the former leftist turned rightist David Horowitz promoted something called “Islamofascism Awareness Week” on college campuses. The implication was that the academic left has so lost its bearings that it can no longer recognize its historic enemy, the old fascist wolf, under that beast’s new disguise. Another apparent aim was to discredit scholars who insist on making careful distinctions among the various movements and ideologies that are grouped under the rubric of political Islam. Continue reading A Lazy, Simplistic Analogy →

A True Culture War

Afghanistan, Anthropology/Sociology, Ethics, Journalism and Media, Terrorism Issue


[Photograph taken in Afghanistan by Sergey Maximishin, 2001.]

[Webshaykh’s Note: It is a rare day when an anthropologist’s commentary is published in the New York Times. Here is yesterday’s op-ed by Richard Shweder of the University of Chicago, reproduced below. I invite readers to post their views here. I gave my own view of Anthropo covertus in an earlier post.]

by Richard Shweder, New York Times, October 28, 2007

IS the Pentagon truly going to deploy an army of cultural relativists to Muslim nations in an effort to make the world a safer place?

A few weeks ago this newspaper reported on an experimental Pentagon “human terrain” program to embed anthropologists in combat units in Iraq and Afghanistan. It featured two military anthropologists: Tracy (last name withheld), a cultural translator viewed by American paratroopers as “a crucial new weapon” in counterinsurgency; and Montgomery McFate, who has taken her Yale doctorate into active duty in a media blitz to convince skeptical colleagues that the occupying forces should know more about the local cultural scene.

How have members of the anthropological profession reacted to the Pentagon’s new inclusion agenda? Continue reading A True Culture War →

Dropping a Word Bomb

Islamophobia, Journalism and Media, Terrorism Issue

[The following is an editorial in the Centre Daily News, about a visit to Penn State by the Islamo-Fascist Awareness Weekers, brought to my attention by Jonathan Brockupp in the Department of History and Religious Studies.]

As the world, the country and even formerly placid Happy Valley desperately need unity and understanding, rock star Rick Santorum brought his Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week tour to Penn State this week, spreading his divisive “us vs. them,” “Christians vs. pagans” message.

“Thank youuuuuuuuuuu, State College. You’re a great audience. Here’s one you may have heard before. …” Continue reading Dropping a Word Bomb →

The Clash of Knuckleheads Theory

CyberOrient, Islamophobia, Journalism and Media, Terrorism Issue

by ARSALAN IFTIKHAR
Published in Islamica Magazine, September 2007

For seven of my twenty-nine years, my existence as an American Muslim public diplomat and human rights lawyer has revolved around being an honest public voice to the masses since the tragedy of 9/11. From high-level political delegations to regular TV appearances as the ‘Muslim Guy’ on international media (either condemning terrorism or swashbuckling notorious Islamophobes who demonize Muslims); a simple Google or YouTube search will have my record speak for itself.

I have condemned terrorist knuckleheads like Osama bin Laden & Company. Notwithstanding the categorical prohibition of suicide and civilian attacks in Islam, these murderous knuckleheads have done nothing but add madness to already existing madness in our world. From Bali to Madrid to London, my seething disgust increases exponentially each time their irreligious attacks occur. When a 9-year old child (anywhere in the world) is considered to be a ‘legitimate target’, you know that these maniacs have lost their bloody minds committing ungodly acts of mass murder. Continue reading The Clash of Knuckleheads Theory →

Reporting the Golf between Us

Afghanistan, Journalism and Media, Photography

What might be the top story coming out of Afghanistan today? Another Korean missionary kidnapped by the Taliban, a new estimate of a bumper poppy crop, yet again a suicide bombing in Kabul? These are too obvious to be news anymore. How about the largely unused and downright laughable Kabul Golf Course? This is the front-and-center story with two color pictures on the front page of today’s New York Times. And for those who can click a mouse, there is a slide show with thirteen (not a lucky number for an amateur) photographs.

This is no ordinary golf course, which is one of the reasons it makes the first page. Here is the description reported today by Kirk Semple:

It is the Kabul Golf Course, Afghanistan’s only one, and Mr. Abdul, who picked up a putter for the first time when he was 10, is its director and golf pro.

The nine-hole course is extraordinarily rugged by any standard. Continue reading Reporting the Golf between Us →

Right along with the Bible”: Innocents Abroad

Books You Should Read, Humor and Satire, Journalism and Media, Travel


[Mark Twain, left; early cover of ‘Innocents Abroad’, center; Hilton Obenzinger, right]

by Hilton Obenzinger, Stanford University

Innocents Abroad’s manufacture of “Mark Twain” as the surrogate for the reader’s “own eyes” was immensely popular. The travel book, whose sales reached 100,000 even before the second anniversary of its publication, launched, even more than his celebrated jumping frog, Mark Twain’s national career. “Popular as are Mark Twain’s books at home,” an unidentified correspondent for the Hartford Courant reported in 1872, Innocents Abroad is “still more so abroad.”

“It sells right along just like the Bible,” Mark Twain remarked to William Dean Howells. Indeed, half a million copies had been sold by Twain’s death in 1910, at which time Innocents Abroad, with its central organizing principle of “Mark Twain” as “one of the boys” joined Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer as the titles (and two other boys) most commonly worked into political cartoons memorializing the author in the press. Today Innocents Abroad, still a pleasure to read despite the complications and vexations of history, remains durable, continuing to be hailed as “the most popular book of foreign travel ever written by any American.” Continue reading Right along with the Bible”: Innocents Abroad →

Hear Ye, Hear Ye

Ethics, Islam and Christianity, Islam in America, Islam in Europe, Islamophobia, Journalism and Media, Terrorism Issue

One of the most common complaints about “Islam” from politicians and other truth-bending members of our society is that mainstream Muslims do not speak out when fellow Muslims commit atrocities such as suicide bombings. Muslims do, of course, both to their friends and neighbors and in forums that usually fail to reach the public at large. But often no one takes the time to listen or to find where these voices can be heard loud and clear. So it is not fair to ask why Muslims are failing so speak out against extremism without also asking why so little attention is paid in the mainstream media when they do. Well, hear ye, hear ye, there is a letter to prominent Christian leaders, including Pope Benedict and the leader of the Baptist church, from a broad spectrum of Muslim intellectuals and leaders, as reported Thursday on the BBC and The Guardian.

A pdf version of the English translation of the letter can be found on a website dedicated to the letter. The letter begins:

“Muslims and Christians together make up well over half of the world’s population. Without peace and justice between these two religious communities, there can be no meaningful peace in the world. The future of the world depends on peace between Muslims and Christians.”

Continue reading Hear Ye, Hear Ye →

Blackwater vs. Backwater

Ethics, Iraq War, Journalism and Media, Somalia

“All the News That’s fit to Print.” This is the masthead mantra of The New York Times, one of America’s most important and best funded newspapers. For college professors like myself, it is the paper of choice, if it must be a paper. Long Island’s Newsday is local and closer to Little League than Big League for this Yankees fan; as a periodical Newsday is a great source for buying used cars and finding the nearest cinema. I avoid The Post, except to fill in the chortle gap now left by the demise of once super-marketed Weekly Wierdo News (or whatever…). I also listen to PBS, which all things considered actually tries to grapple with issues rather than just sensationalize how far a baby can fall from a window and still survive. But, my comments today are not really about a particular news outlet. Liberal or conservative is not the issue; a gut reading reaction is. I start with the premise that news media are all in the same boat, sinking in cyberspace apart from the Times Elite crowd and its pay-for-view ilk, which is steaming over an ocean of ignorance on one fuel: profit. It may still be possible to try to limit news items to what is “fit to print”, but most of us have a fit with a lot of what does get printed across the spectrum of right, left, up and down.

It is the choice of fit in today’s NYT that I noticed. Continue reading Blackwater vs. Backwater →