Jihad Watch （http://www.jihadwatch.org）
Malaysian Foreign Minister: We must correct Western media's misperceptions of Islam, 9 June 2008
You want to correct Western perceptions of Islam? Stop blowing things up and cutting off peoples' heads while shouting, "Allahu akbar." Turn your energies to stopping the Muslims who are blowing things up and cutting off peoples' heads while shouting, "Allahu akbar," rather than to making Western non-Muslims stop noticing.
"We Must Correct Western Media Perception On Islam, Says Rais"
KUALA LUMPUR, June 9 (Bernama) -- The key to ensure better relations between the Muslim world and western nations is by correcting the foreign media's perception of Islam as a religion of terror synonymous with the Al-Qaeda movement, Foreign Minister Datuk Seri Dr Rais Yatim said Monday.
"One of the stumbling blocks is the power of the media in the West that doesn't seem to give a margin for us to come in into understanding Islam more objectively.
"The coverage they give is more about sensational news about terror, about captivity, about war and not on the other side of Islam which I have always been stressing -- the life of Muslims.
It is not up to the news media, even if this were true, to show Muslims being good. That isn't news, any more than it would be news if anyone else is being good. But the oft-repeated contention that the mainstream media isn't interested in non-terrorist Muslims is completely belied by the facts. In fact, the media is avid to find Muslim moderates, and often features pleasing moderate Muslim fellows, many of whom have their hearts in the right place but who actually have no following among Muslims and do not express an orthodox Muslim point of view.
"Therefore, the tenets of Islam urging us to be calm and be appreciative of beauty and the world have never been put forward in a manner that is coercive enough or effective enough. There lies the problem," he said in his welcoming remarks at the "Third International Conference On the Muslim World and The West: Bridging the Gap".
Maybe, but the problem is that these beautiful tenets haven't been enough to stop jihadists or Islamic supremacists. If they had succeeded in doing that, Rais might have a stronger case.
Rais stressed this point owing to rising Islamophobia among westerners. Rais said even the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) and other Islamic organisations and associations had never taken steps to correct this wrong point of view painted by the western media which equates Muslims and Islam with the Al-Qaeda.
What a lot of hooey. What Western media ever does this? I don't do it, and I am high on the spurious and propagandistic list of "Islamophobes." I don't know of anyone else who does it either.
"Actually, this is not the reality, it is a political movement by the Al-Qaeda. Islam is not Al-Qaeda. This notion has not been dispelled by any group, be it the OIC or regional Islamic organisations in the world.
Indeed.
"As such, every time when the Al-Qaeda issue crops up in Britain, it is equated with Islam. This is the wrong perception which we need to address.
Fine. But you should be addressing it among Muslims who approve of al-Qaeda, not among non-Muslims.
"How do you do this? I think it is only with the concerted efforts of our own Islamic media to project the truth. We have to have the forum, we have to have the media treatment and we have to have the political will among OIC members to project this sort of idea and image," he said.
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