“Religion is only between you and heaven”
Journalists who took part in a panel on Friday morning at the Perugia’s International Journalism Festival explained how to report on religious issues
The conference started with a tribute to Vittorio Arrigoni, 36-year old Italian pro-Palestinian activist, whose body was found in the Gaza Strip on Friday morning. Arrigoni was kidnapped on Thursday by an al-Qaeda-linked radical group. The captors had posted a video of the captive Italian activist on YouTube and demanded the release of two of their leaders from a Hamas prison in exchange for Arrigoni’s life.
The speakers represented two different confessions and attempted to demonstrate that their faith did not prevent them from working as objective journalists.
“Yes, I’m a Muslim, I’m from Iraq, but first of all I’m a human, especially when I’m working as a journalist. Religion is a relation between you and heaven. Even after my sister was killed by the occupants, I still gave both Americans and locals an opportunity to speak on my reports,” said Laith Mushtaq, a camera operator working for Al Jazeera. He came to Perugia from Baghdad.
One of the speakers claimed that Western media portray Muslims in a biased way. Lamis Andoni, a Christian from Bethlehem singled out coverage on September 11th 2001, after the attack carried out by terrorists belonging to Al-Qaeda against the World Trade Center in New York.
“The media focused on Islam, which was presented as the religion of violence. And Al-Qaeda doesn’t represent only Muslims and certainly not all of them,” Andoni explained.
As examples of biased coverage, Andoni mentioned reports on the invasion of Bethlehem by the Israeli army in 2002, when the Christian and Muslims inhabitants of the city, together, took refuge from the fighting inside a church.
“I saw that reports on this event were headlined “Muslims are in the church.” The fact, that we had been bombed was reported only by the alternative media.”
Many journalists do not regularly cover religious minorities unless a catastrophe happens. Western media broadly covered the attack on a Coptic church in Egypt on New Year’s Eve, 2010, in which 21 Christians were killed, but only some of them mentioned the fact that, on Christmas Eve, many Muslims had gathered around the church to protect praying Copts.
“Christians and Muslims can cooperate. The best and most recent example is the Egyptian revolution, where followers of both religions protested together against the regime,” said Laith Mushtaq.
According to both speakers the differences between religions are often intentionally exploited by politicians. They mentioned the ongoing investigation regarding the Iraqi Minister of the Interior. The minister is being accused of provoking a conflict between Christians and Muslims in Iraq because he wanted it to appear that a dictatorship is necessary in order to maintain peace in the country.
When reporting on religious issues, journalists have to remain impartial.
“We have to keep in mind that religion is a very sensitive issue. We can either help to stop religious hatred or we can end up making it worse,” was Laith Mushtaq’s conclusion.
Karolina Drogowska
