Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Kudos to Rachel Zoll of the Associated Press for catching this excellent religion-beat story on the debate within Muslim communities on when to celebrate Eid al-Fitr, the end of the Ramadan fast. Zoll avoids using troublesome labels like “traditionalist” and “progressive” as a crutch and allows Muslims’ thoughts and beliefs to speak for themselves.
“British Muslim Leaders Facing Generation Gap,” a Los Angeles Times headline informed us on Thursday. Is this news to anyone? Aren’t most leaders in Western cultures facing a generation gap of some kind or another? I know for a fact that there are gaps between generations [insert snarky comment here].
I was reading this completely engrossing CNN story on Malika el Aroud, the widow of suicide bomber Abdessater Dahmane. He was one of the two fellows who killed Ahmed Shah Massoud, head of Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance, by pretending to be broadcast journalists. Their camera hid an explosive. Anyway, she now lives in Switzerland with her new husband running a fan website for Osama bin Laden.
I’m not one of those people who pretends I caught something on TV because I happened to be flipping through the channels.
Altering photographs is nothing new, especially in this digital era. When applied to the news business, it is a Jason Blair-style crime along the lines of plagiarism and fabrication — maybe worse because altered images are sometimes difficult to detect and images are so powerful. The media watchdogs have largely failed in covering this issue of altered and staged photographs, and they are failing the public.
There are, of course, huge differences in the two stories. Great Britain seems to be dealing with genuine terrorists bent on mass murder while the French rioters were less terrorists and more gangs intent on creating havoc, and not necessarily death, in their neighborhoods.
There is a rather interesting sort-of GetReligion piece in The Wall Street Journal today, only it isn’t written by one of us, and the author — that would be former CBS correspondent Bernard Goldberg — doesn’t really dig into the religion issues all that deeply. The piece is called “Mr. Ahmadinejad’s Neighborhood,” and it focused on that CBS interview Sunday night that pitted the aging lion Mike Wallace against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
An August 5 article in the Los Angeles Times brought to our attention that Jews and Muslims are not the only ones caught up in Middle East conflict. Christians live there too.
Naveed Haq was anything but an Islamic radical. He was a recently baptized convert to Christianity, and he expressed interest in Mormonism. His father, on the other hand, is a leader in the Muslim American community in Richland, Wash. It’s fair to say that the entire story line of a crazed Islamic radical shooting up a Jewish organization has been turned on its head.
