Guest contribution by Muhammad Shareef
I love the RedEye. It usually features a glimpse into what’s going on around Chicago, sometimes expanding on larger national events, but more importantly balancing its informational articles with just enough entertainment pieces to have turned me into a loyal reader each morning for the past three summers.
Yesterday morning was very different. I was shocked by the “Turban Primer” article published barely two days after a gunman shot and killed six worshippers at a Sikh Temple in Milwaukee. I usually refuse to dwell on isolated cases of racism, even those that explicitly target myself, because I recognize that almost all of the people I interact with are amazingly broad-minded human beings. But the “Turban Primer” was too blatant for me to ignore. So I write this with the simple hope of highlighting what I’ve come to notice.
The article shows five cartoon drawings of various men wearing turbans with the following descriptors: Sikh men, Iranian leaders, Taliban members, Indian men, and Muslim religious elders. The descriptors are followed by simplistic captions that are much better suited for Pokémon cards than for a publication of the Chicago Tribune. But looking beyond the ignorance in stereotypically categorizing turban “styles”, an editor at the RedEye saw it fit to educate the Chicago-area community on how to distinguish a Muslim wearing a turban as if to say that a mistake similar to Sunday’s should not happen again. [Read more...]
Repudiation of the West does not define Islam
Guest contribution by Deanna Othman
On May 1, Foreign Policy magazine published a piece by Yair Shamir with the headline “Our Shared Islamist Enemy: From Boston to Israel, radicals are attempting to destroy Western culture.”
Shamir’s piece endeavors to draw baseless parallels between the Boston Marathon bombings and the resistance of Palestinians against the Israeli occupation, what he inaccurately portrays as an “aggressive and offensive jihad, unconnected to any particular conflict or borders, which conjoins Islamist terror groups around the world.” His unabashedly Zionist agenda rears its head through this opportunistic attempt to play into the media circus surrounding the Boston bombings.
His ludicrous argument essentially states that the problem is not Hamas or Al Qaeda, the problem is not Osama Bin Laden or Dzokhar Tsarnaev: the problem is Islam.
Unfortunately, the Boston bombings have given virulent propagandists and Islamophobes a field day. While various pundits and media personalities jumped to the Tsarnaev brothers’ religious identities as the singular motive for their alleged acts of violence, they focused on them as individuals, and how their thought processes could have been perverted by purported religious radicalization. What makes Shamir’s contention particularly disturbing is his sweeping generalization that all groups and individuals affiliated with Islam, from Hamas to the Muslim Brotherhood, to the Tsarnaevs and Sayyid Qutb, all had a particular end in mind—the obliteration of Western culture. [Read more...]