In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful.  May the peace and blessing of Allah be upon you.

I was asked to describe my personal feelings or my observations as a student of conflict resolution.  Certainly the media is a useful tool in the information age and I’ll agree with my brother Ahmed Younis that the media has made great strides in the fact that there is some representation of Muslims in the media and also I’m standing here in front of you today.  And while there have been great strides in attempting to present both sides of the stories in conflicts, there is still a great amount of questionable media coverage on topics in which the western societies are less aware of today, particularly Islam and Muslims.

While media should be used as a tool to disseminate information to the public, the media can be used as a tool for conflict escalation.  Misinformation is truly a disservice to the people.  But the media has an ethical responsibility to be more careful about accurate reporting to prevent misperceptions as much as possible.  There is a need for media to exercise further justice in reporting so that there can be a sustainable peace.  I was only given 15 minutes, so I’ll try to cover as much as possible, but certainly this topic can be fully covered more in-depth.

There are four types of media to be considered: the Internet, satellite with foreign channels, corporate-owned outlets, and nonprofit outlets.  The Internet provides for the widest array of information and thus gives various perspectives in which to analyze information, and the same can be said about satellite dishes, which provide individuals with the ability to listen to perspectives from across the world.  Looking at corporate-owned media versus nonprofit media, we find that among the top seven news outlets, audiences of corporate media such as CBS and CNN showed the highest levels of misperceptions on key subjects such as Iraq, as opposed to those viewing nonprofit outlets such as NPR and PBS.  This is according to the Political Science Quarterly, winter 2003-2004 edition, which can be found on the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) website.  In fact, the misperceptions among Fox and CBS viewers were as high as 80 percent, and this is while NPR and PBS audiences had only 23 percent of misperceptions. 

There are two basic problems in corporate media news coverage which leads to the high levels of misperception.  You have bias in the news coverage and the lack of true expert opinion on matters related to the Muslims and Islam.  Recently authors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt came out with their findings on the severe levels of influence by the Israeli lobby in America.  I quote from their works, “The Israeli Lobby and US Foreign Policy” from March 2006.

“The Lobby strives to shape public perception about Israel and the Middle East…  Pro-Israel organizations work hard to influence the media and academia because these institutions are critical in shaping our public opinion…  The Lobby’s perspective on Israel is widely reflected in the mainstream media in good part because most American commentators are pro-Israel.”  The concern is that the media is allowing this biased influence.  This is not a conspiracy theory.

We can look to the recent Israeli invasion of Lebanon where the media was only showing the conflict as starting in July with the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers.  It did not include discussion on the Israeli occupation of Lebanese territories and that these kidnappings occurred on that disputed territory.  The conflict was not portrayed as having been a continuous tit-for-tat conflict which was escalated by the Israeli air strikes on Lebanon, which it was.

The effect that the media has had on my personal life and that of my family and friends has been very dramatic.  I was born in Iran.  I moved to France at a young age and I lived in France for several years before I moved to the U.S.  I attended all my schooling here, and my family is Muslim but they are not as religious and practicing as I am today.  I started to personally explore religion late in high school and once I started college I decided to embrace practicing Islam.

My perceptions of Islam were much attuned to growing up in America and the veil which I’m now wearing in front of you was a sign of oppression to me.  In fact, I wrote my college entry statement about the oppressive nature of the hijab.  So I was truly deceived by the media myself.  And until I started exploring the truth via interaction with Muslims on campus and eventually reading books and reading the Qur’an, of course, you can see that I changed my views and I liberated myself. 

I have a friend who converted to Islam and was writing to me about her difficulties in dealing with the misperceptions of her Christian family about Islam.  In fact she withheld from telling them that she converted for some time, and now that she has told them, this is what she wrote me, saying, “The situation is now that they are so angry and it is affecting my studies.  I am not allowed to fast in the month of Ramadan, but I will do it anyway since they can’t force me to put food in my mouth.  The thing is that they keep bothering me about their concern and how scared they are of Muslims.  They think I will kill them or that Muslims I know will kill them.  They even call me in the middle of the night to talk with me, and they tell me over and over again how scared they are and how much they hate Muslims.  I tell them not all Muslims are the same and they are exaggerating.”  When I asked her, what do you think is the source of all these misperceptions that your parents hold, she said, “They really only know about Islam through the media.” 

The media has truly dehumanized Islam and Muslims and has created a social problem.  In the case of news coverage of Iran, the media has been incredibly biased, particularly when providing translations of speeches by Dr. Ahmadinejad, which have been so poorly translated that they have resulted in the escalation of conflict.  And as a Farsi speaker, I have listened to the original Farsi speeches and compared them to the English translation and there is truly a big gap. In fact, CNN had to issue an apology earlier this year for its blatant mistranslation of a quote of President Ahmedinajad as saying, “Iran has a right to nuclear weapons,” when in fact he said that Iran has a right to nuclear technology.

Another example is the “wipe Israel off the map” quote.  I’m sure you’ve all heard this one.  It was a misquote and a mistranslation and has resulted again in the escalation of conflict.  He never said that.  Also, President Bush had issued some statements claiming to side with the people of Iran and to be in support of their opinions.  However, the media rarely includes, particularly in that same article, the actual Iranian’s opinions.  Regular Iranians are hardly ever quoted or polled in mainstream media so that we can know what it is that President Bush is claiming to side with, or whether Iranians agree with President Bush.

Another example of poor coverage of Islam in the media is the Muslim integration in Europe.  Last year when there were riots in France, which included setting cars on fire, the media portrayed it as a potential act of terrorism by angry immigrant Muslims.  However, the conflict had nothing to do with Muslims or immigration.  In fact, it was a riot based on unemployment, which is a rampant problem in France, as was displayed by recent protests from students in regards to employment law.  And I also witnessed an unemployment protest when I was recently in France a few months ago.

None of these cases have anything to do with Muslims, nor were they close to the magnitude that the media has been portraying it to be.  In fact, it was just a few isolated incidents, but it looked like the French Revolution all over again.  My brother was actually in Paris at the time of the riots and I have several members of my family who live in and across France and they never witnessed any of those things that we saw in the media.

Prior to my recent trip to France I was actually really scared of how I would get treated in France based on media coverage, which suggested a hostile atmosphere to Muslims in France.  In fact, my experience in day-to-day life in France and that of my family was actually much more pleasant than my experience in America.  Islam and Muslims are more socially acceptable in France, and better understood, treated without suspicion in the street and in stores just like anybody else, where in America Muslims have been so tainted in the media that I am faced with strange reactions toward me on a daily basis here where I live.  That was my personal experience.

The second problem is the lack of expert opinion on Islam in the media.  Those who are considered expert on the subject of Islam in the media are not truly expert and are misrepresenting the population and the cause of further misunderstanding which has led to increased conflict.  Unqualified experts are turning conflict into faith-based conflict and blaming religion as the root cause, when the conflict is almost never started based on religion.

The media further adds to this injustice by presenting biased and unbalanced views.  Recently on CNN there was a debate over the comments of the Pope.  They invited a priest of the Catholic Church to defend the remarks of the Pope.  But yet they invited a Middle Eastern journalist to express the views of the Muslims.  There is obviously something wrong with this picture.  Since when do journalists express their opinions, and are invited to do so on behalf of a peoples?  Just as in Christianity or Judaism there is a defined process in becoming a religious leader and scholar; there is such a process in Islam.  The media fails to understand this, and thereby tends to invite anyone who seems to have some knowledge of Islam, or maybe has written a book or two.
 
While these type of people may be great academics and great people, they are not experts and it is a mistake to introduce them as such.  There is a certain defined process in Islam for becoming an Islamic scholar and a Ph.D. is not enough.  Unfortunately this is becoming a popular trend in the media, to invite recent authors of books on Islam and to introduce them as scholars and present their ideas as if they represent all of Islam and Muslims. 

We also see this mistake being echoed in official matters when the media is trying to resolve the conflict over the Pope’s speech and invited state representatives to a meeting designed to clarify the words of his speech instead of Islamic scholars.  This was an issue of academia.  The Vatican should have engaged in dialogue with the academics – the Islamic scholars, not politicians.  In the latter case, the media does not try to go after moderate opinions.  It only goes after radical people and this is a distortion of reality.

I want to present to you the resolution.  In order to achieve a sustainable peace we must practice justice and equality in the media.  One-sided heavy coverage distorts reality, rendering events into something that is not reality.  This turns the media into part of the problem.  So in order for the media to facilitate peace, it must present both parties equally with the same amount of air time and fair coverage.  The media must find and identify reliable scholars and agencies, by way of giving each party a fair chance to represent their views. All we have now are pseudo-representatives who incorrectly speak on behalf of Islam and we get incomplete truths and non-truths.

IIC, the Islamic Information Center, can help in this matter by identifying qualified scholars for the media to consult with and use as experts on matters related to Islam and Muslim populations.  PBS recently had mistakenly reported how Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani breaks his fasts with wine.  Wine and alcohol is incredibly forbidden in Islam and no scholar would ever do such a thing.  So it was a mistranslation and lack of professional editing.  IIC discovered this issue and brought it to the attention of PBS and they apologized and corrected the mistake.  However, there should be proper checks in place prior to publishing such misinformation.

One of the positive exposures of Islam in the media was the program “30 Days” by Morgan Spurlock where a 33-year-old Christian man from West Virginia named Dave Stacey attempted to live life as a Muslim in Dearborn, Michigan for 30 days.  His and his families misperceptions about Islam were so great at the beginning that his family actually called to warn him about going to Dearborn, Michigan, a place in America, because they were afraid that he was going to get killed.  This was not about going to Iraq, this was Dearborn, Michigan.  By the end of the show, however, his perception had changed so much because he interacted with Muslims and he said Muslim people are good people and we need more of them in America.   This is only after he spent time with Muslims, not by viewing them through the media.

Finally, the bottom line is this, that durable peace is derived from justice.  Otherwise any talk of peace is hollow and it’s just verbiage.  There must be less outside influences on corporate media in order to eliminate the level of bias and more emphasis on identifying the true experts and scholars of Islam to speak on matters related to Muslims and Islam.  Thank you.