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| Britain |
| Demonizing the Muslim Community Doesn't Help Anything |
| 2004-08-27 |
| From Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty "The media has to be aware that the Muslim community is a new community, already socially marginalized, and by continually demonizing it, we don't help anything. We want to make sure that more and more of the community opens up, becomes part of mainstream politics, and so on and so forth. This is happening, [but] these kind of attacks actually hamper that process." Ghayasuddin Siddiqui said. Siddiqui is the leader of the Muslim Parliament of Great Britain and director of the Muslim Institute. .... Many other British Muslim leaders agree. Inayat Bunglawala is the spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain .... said the worst offenders are the mass-circulation tabloids. "They do a lot of harm," Bunglawala points out, "by implying that most Muslims sympathize with the terrorists." .... William Rees-Mogg is the former editor in chief of The Times, the respected London broadsheet newspaper. "... is the general tone of the popular press exaggerated hostility to British Muslims, as such? I don't think that, no," he told RFE/RL. He explained that, because of the war on terrorism, British Muslims are in an unfortunate position. "I think the British Muslims are in a situation one can have a good deal of sympathy with. It's rather the same as the situation which Irish people living in Britain had during the period of the IRA atrocities. British Muslims are in rather the same position in that there is a broad suspicion that if they are Islamic terrorists, that they will be members of the Islamic community. And it's inevitably so," Rees-Mogg said. Some Muslim leaders also complain that some in the British media do not always report objectively about the variety of opinions in Iraq. Hashem Ali is a spokesman for the Iraqi Community Association in London. .... He gave an example of recent coverage that he said implied that many British Muslims support radical Shi'a cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's insurgency. "A week ago, it was about this issue of two Mahdi army people who are British citizens. It might be true, whatever they have said, but this doesn't reflect the common opinion of the Iraqi community here [in Britain], and this coverage is enticing tension among communities in this country," Ali said. ... |
| Posted by:Mike Sylwester |
| #3 Enough of your lies, Gentle. We kill people who try to enslave us. That's why so many of you devil-worshippers are dying in the ME. It would be a lot more if your oil money didn't buy off so many media and academic whores in the west. The day is coming when Islamic pig-money won't matter, and then this will be settled. |
| Posted by: Atomic Conspiracy 2004-08-28 10:32:30 PM |
| #2 I agree. That should convince them of how wrong they are, and of how much the have wronged the muslims. |
| Posted by: Gentle 2004-08-28 11:47:36 AM |
| #1 The press also needs to report what is being preached in the mosques and taught in their religious classes. Then let the people decide who is demonizing who. |
| Posted by: ed 2004-08-28 1:28:11 AM |