Shock Finding! News Exposure Predicts Anti-Muslim Prejudice!

Commentary on News exposure predicts anti-Muslim prejudice by John H. Shaver, Chris G. Sibley, Danny Osborne, and Joseph A. Bulbulia.  dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0174606

This refers to an article published in the PLOS journal in March 2017.  It has received significantly more attention than an earlier, similar, essay Religion and the Unmaking of Prejudice Towards Muslims in New Zealand which I commented on last year.  It used the same source, The New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study of Auckland University.

The paper shows a significant correlation between news exposure and anti-Muslim prejudice, and a trend toward increased Arab prejudice but no reliable evidence for an effect of news exposure on attitudes toward Asians. “Because most Muslims in New Zealand are Asian, these results would be puzzling in the absence of media-driven Islamophobia.”  This last statement, perhaps more than any other in the paper, shows the discontinuity and fragmentation in the understanding of Islam that pervades academia.

I don’t have the qualifications to comment on the method or conclusions that the paper draws, and I accept them on face value.  But there are deeper issues that underpin the world view that the paper’s authors present which I consider fundamentally flawed in their understanding of the contrast between Western and Islamic moral foundations. 

“Islam and Arab ethnicity are conflated among the general population.”

This echoes the statement made in Unmaking of Prejudice, “This comparative assessment of prejudice showed a conflation of Arabs and Muslims.”  Condensing my comments on that paper, it should come as no surprise that ‘Arab’, and ‘Islam’ are highly correlated since Araby provides the origin, narrative and language, the centres of education, reverence and control, the culture, heritage of violent conquest, and most of the news content concerning Islam.  This paper drops the earlier accusation of Islamic ignorance but it remains there in discrete castigation.

“The majority of Muslims in New Zealand are Asian (63.1%) whereas Arabs represent only 21% of New Zealand’s Muslims”

There is an undifferentiated use of the word ‘Asian’ throughout the paper, implying that Arabs are not Asian.  Since Asia covers Turkey in the west through to Japan in the east, Russia in the north and Indonesia to the south, separating Arabs out of Asia seems daft rather than deft. 

There is value in defining ‘Asian’ in the context of this paper.  Muslim regions can be broadly apportioned to Turkic, Arabic, central, that is, the ‘`stans’ north-east of and including Iran, the Indian sub-continent, and the southeast Asian nations of Malaysia and Indonesia.  The reader has to assume that by ‘Asian’ the authors mean the east and south, from the Indian sub-continent south to Indonesia.  Deeper analysis of the paper’s source material may show differing results of anger and warmth between the Indian sector and the Indonesian and Malaysian segments.

The south Asian contribution to Islamic culture in New Zealand is, on an empirical basis, less likely to import Islam’s proselytism, ethical conflicts and violent activities.  South Asian Muslims tend to bring attention to themselves only through the dress of the conservative female cohort.  Research on whether a lower tribal, in contrast to ethnic, identity in southeast Asia in comparison with Indian and Arabic tribalism, perhaps due to higher population densities, may indicate a reduced desire to promulgate religious belief or to manifest cultural differences, would be interesting.

However, Arab influence on south Asian Islam is sharply increasing, as a recent BBC Heart and Soul item attests.  Given the increase of fundamentalist Islam in Malaysia, Mindanao, and in Indonesia where the government is unable to control radicals in Aceh, we can pretty much guarantee a lot more news of Islamic violence from this region in the future.  Its export to New Zealand may be harder to gauge, but New Zealand’s security agencies won’t be ignoring the threat.

The fragmentation of Muslim identity in this manner, separating out cultures as a distinguishing characteristic of Islam, is an important part of Western discourse in an attempt to diffuse the importance of Islamic doctrines common to all Muslims.  For Western consumption, it dilutes Muslims’ religious identity and the strength of the ummah, the global community of Muslims.  By stressing cultural differences, criticism of specific doctrines is deflected as being part of culture, not of Islam.  There are many examples of this, often regarding treatment of women such as female genital mutilation, beating, or the requirement of head coverings.  This leads to a plasticity of Islam’s definition in order to silence meaningful debate about core Islamic practices.

It is also part of a process which distances mainstream Muslims from the speech and actions of its extremists.  Jews, as ever, are not so lucky; they get landed with responsibility for the actions of Israel wherever they live.

“The media-induced Islamophobia hypothesis”

This paper introduces the term "media-induced Islamophobia hypothesis" into the ‘Islamophobia’ studies’ lexicon.  The earlier paper made no mention of ‘Islamophobia’ whereas this mentions it 16 times, albeit without defining it.  Given that the paper uses the word ‘Muslim’ 146 times and ‘Islam’ just seven, the hypothesis begins to look unstable.

In theory ‘Islamophobia’ means an irrational fear of Islam.  In practice it is applied to any activity which is critical of Islam, or Muslims at a personal or collective level.  It can be easily argued that the ‘condition’ does not exist.  Fears expressed by all Christian communities in MENA states from the Maghreb to Bangladesh, and Buddhist societies in Thailand and Burma, are based soundly on Islam’s violent retributive subsidiarity and its cultural supremacism, and so are clearly not irrational.  Nor are Western fears of Islam’s historically well-established conquering and supersessionist activities, its supremacist doctrine, its attitudes to non-conventional sexuality, or the increasing global pressure for punishment of blasphemy.  Writers, comedians, directors, documentary makers and many others in creative fields publicly state they will not reference Islam in their endeavours due to death threats periodically reinforced by jihadi mandate.  The charge is also made against those analysing Islamic doctrine and behaviour and finding them wanting in comparison with Western moral values.  Since ‘fear’, irrational or not, plays no part for this last group, ‘Islamophobia’ is an ad hominem attack on rational debate and designed to suppress it.  The paper’s clause, “our study…does not establish causation,” is wholly inadequate in excusing the use of the strongly – exclusively – pejorative term ‘Islamophobia’.

The word ‘Islamophobia’ can have three applications in general use.  Firstly to the physical abuse of Muslims at an individual level, most often against conservative females who draw attention to themselves by their religious habit.  Since the word incorporates ‘Islam’ it depersonalises the activity, conflating the illegal and socially unacceptable activity of assault with its common usage.  These actions should be more accurately termed anti- or miso-Muslim behaviour, where reactions to extremist events overseas are visited upon such locals due to their shared religion.  This is similar to the relatively more common anti-Semitic acts, except Jews tend not to give due cause. 

Secondly, the word is given to a generic concept concerning any form of Western antagonism to Islam, and takes the form of ‘Islamophobia Studies’ now commonplace in many universities throughout the Western world, including New Zealand’s at Waikato University.  This is a form of ‘negative dawah’ designed to clear the way for unimpeded proselytising. 

Thirdly, the word is applied to any criticism, or any comment which is perceived to be criticism, in order to restrict an improved understanding of Islam or of public debate.  This is better termed ‘Islamocriticism’, and most closely applies to ‘Islamophobia’s’ use in this paper.  Of the many sources available to gain a deep and detached understanding of Islam, current affairs, as promulgated by news media, is as vital as any.  Using ‘Islamophobia’ in the way this hypothesis does, to relate a greater understanding of a subject to a gross and meaningless epithet, undermines more than just the moral foundations of this paper, but of the act of learning about Islam itself.

There is a further issue weakening the hypothesis, and that is its application to other religions.  Hinduphobia, Buddhistophobia, Shintophobia and so on are standing jokes but make the point that, for example, the violence of Buddhists in Thailand or Burma, or Hindus in Sri Lanka or India, never induces ‘phobia’ against their co-religionists elsewhere in the world.  Why?  Because unlike Islam, their religious ideology is demonstrably no threat anywhere else in the world. 

And this is perhaps the paper’s most egregious omission, notwithstanding its disavowal of causation, the consideration that Islam itself forms the foundation for ‘Islamophobia’.  It instead vilifies the messenger.  Citizens informed by the media are likely to have a better understanding of Islam’s doctrines, beliefs and goal, its history, actions and agenda, than those who gain their knowledge of Muslims and their religion from their local kebab shop, the public faces in other organisations, self-serving publicity from Islamic associations, or the somewhat desperate attempts at protection of ‘interfaith’ groups.  Media information, however, is wholly dependent on the quality of the media, and in New Zealand, it has to be said, is provincial at best and declining in relevance.  Thus, the "media-induced Islamophobia hypothesis" looks increasingly vacuous.  There is something wholly apposite about the situation from Plutarch -  

Since the first messenger who told Tigranes that Lucullus was coming had his head cut off for his pains, no one else would tell him anything, and so he sat in ignorance while the fires of war were already blazing around him, giving ear only to those who flattered him…

 

 To be continued . . .