Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
This is the voice of the father of Jordanian suicide bomber Humam Khalil Abu Mulal al-Balawi, who blew up himself and seven Central Intelligence Agency workers in Afghanistan in December.
News Flash: The New York Times believes that a small group of powerful U.S. evangelicals are forcing Ugandan policy makers into something they didn’t already want to do. I’m still trying to wrap my head around the front page article from yesterday on the anti-homosexuality bill in Uganda. The dateline says Kampala, but the article appears to be strung together from blog posts and could have been written from Antarctica.
Last week I read a Washington Post article about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian man charged with attempting to bomb a flight to Detroit. In the same way that some media coverage of Ft. Hood shooter Nidal Hasan explored his mental state, this Post article took the clinical approach with Abdulmutallab. Like Hasan, he was lonely and wanted to find a wife.
Remember Mollie’s post a few weeks ago taking issue with a quote in the NYT regarding Muslim terrorists and the price of beer? Well here we go again. The subject in this Washington Post article isn’t five northern Virginia men but Nidal Hasan of Fort Hood infamy.
Times continue to be tough for Christians who live and who attempt to worship in Iraq. As you would expect, several mainstream news outlets used Christmas as a hook for updated reports about this issue, which touches at the heart of human-rights concerns about the plight of religious minorities in Iraq.
How do you sum up how billions of Christians across the world observe the birth of Christ? It’s difficult to do. This Associated Press round-up begins with a completely unfazed Pope Benedict being knocked down by a deranged woman and ends with 47,000 Filipinos, displaced by an erupting volcano, eating Christmas dinner at shelters. It includes the sad news that some Christians in Pakistan fear marking the day, still scared by the Muslim riots targeting them from earlier this year.
I’m a big fan of the Reuters religion team and love that reporters there are given time and freedom to really explore stories. But I have to admit that this story about a Muslim revival in Chechnya didn’t exactly delight me from the get go. Here’s how it begins:
We’ve looked at a bit of the coverage of the Swiss ban on the construction of minarets — the spires on mosques that are sometimes used for the call to prayer. Earlier this month, I noted a single story that looked at how religious freedom is handled in some Muslim countries. Many stories didn’t bother to mention the issue even while they covered the outrage toward the Swiss ban from various leaders in these Muslim countries. Reader Mike Hickerson asked:
A few days ago we looked at some of the coverage of the American men arrested in Pakistan on suspicion of ties to terrorism. I thought one of the most interesting angles — one I hoped we’d see more coverage of — was that the Council on American-Islamic Relations said they’d put the families of the men in touch with the FBI. It wasn’t that long ago that CAIR was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial. That trial dealt with the funding of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Hamas Party in Palestine.
