August 13, 2015 – San Francisco, CA – PipeLineNews.org – Raymond Ibrahim, an authority regarding the history of the Middle East, Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and a fluent Arabic speaker, recently delivered a speech on Capitol Hill dealing with the horrific persecution of minorities, especially Christians, throughout the Muslim world, but particularly in the Middle East.
Mr. Ibrahim is also the proprietor of Islam Translated.
The event at which Mr. Ibrahim spoke was the Sixth Annual Coptic Solidarity Conference and his remarks dealt primarily with the way the legacy media has and continues to manipulate reporting regarding Islam, especially its supremacist ideology which drives the global jihad.
A selected partial transcript:
“What I’d like to focus on is the media, the so-called mainstream media in the West…You have to understand that the media as we know it today…has played an enormous role in shaping the world view of people, their epistemology if you will.
…and it’s just not news that I’m talking about, it’s just watching a TV show, it’s watching any kind of program, reality shows…all these things work to condition and to further a particular narrative that many people in the West have embraced as being real, and reality.
[referring to the “chaos and the death and destruction” facing Christians and other minorities in the Middle East]…and you wonder that this is not even remotely being covered…Most people [the general public] trust the media and they assume if there’s something very important going on in the world then surely you know that CNN will tell me about it, or BBC or Fox News or the New York Times.
…but today the media, I think is playing a political role, they’re giving you the facts that fit in with the narrative that I was discussing earlier…a narrative that’s been built, and has become part and parcel of the world view of Western people and Americans in particular in this context
…First of all, I would argue that the reason today you know about the horrific atrocities [committed by]… ISIS…you know about them not because the media wants you to know about them, you know about it because they want you to know about it, because they videotape it and they disseminate it and you see it
…So this is not because the media has been doing their job…and I guarantee you that if it wasn’t for the Islamic State doing what they are doing and showing it to the world you would still not know about it, you would only know only a very small percentage and it would be very hygienic, it would not at all be graphic.
…And the media if anything has responded by giving us a plethora of editorials trying to convince us that what ISIS is doing is not Islamic. So, that has been the media’s actual response in the context of what is happening with ISIS
But it’s even worse than that because sometimes the media lies straight out and I will give you one example. The 21 Coptic Christians who were kidnapped and abducted and eventually beheaded in Libya…they were kidnapped apparently in two different groups…one group was 13 people and another was 8 on two different occasions. When the 13 were kidnapped, a few days later the BBC issued a report, and I’m going to quote it, saying, ‘13 Coptic Christian workers from Egypt have been freed after being seized in Lybya an official said.‘ And the whole report actually goes on in this way.
And then a few weeks later we got the video of their being beheaded.
So not only does the media, you need to be aware, whitewash things or omit things they actually actively put out false information as in this case. To me it’s just shocking that they made it sound like these people had been freed, it’s not a problem forget about it and then you see them being beheaded a few weeks later…”
We believe that Mr. Ibrahims’s observations are penetrative.
Imporantly, they help to provide some context when it comes to understanding how the Western media actively works to inculcate the public into the message, or narrative, which the press considers ideologically useful, rather than what is really happening regarding the Islamic jihad.
This is specially true as it applies to the Muslim persecution of Christians and Jews, the dimensions of which genuinely constitute a genocide.
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