Since there will be a lull in voting until 6 March’s Super Tuesday primaries, I’m going to suspend my analysis of the Republican presidential campaign a little bit, and instead will discuss the increasingly violent situation in Syria – and my concerns about the news media bias I detect in coverage of this tragic conflict.
When the Arab Spring protests first erupted last year in Tunisia before spreading to Egypt, they were led and facilitated by young liberal secularists. At the time, Islamist leaders in both countries were nowhere to be seen. But as the results of the first democratic elections in those countries have shown, they were very quick to take advantage of the changes sought by the protestors.
The Islamists have since succeeded in winning substantial electoral majorities in Tunisia and Egypt, and more recently in Morocco, where King Muhammad VI tried to avoid the fate that befell Tunisia and Egypt’s autocrats by appointing an Islamist leader as the country’s prime minister. Given the fact that Islamists are also likely to win a majority in the upcoming elections in Libya, it stands to reason they will also likely take control in Syria if the Assad regime is ousted. So it also isn’t surprising that Christians, Alawites, Shiites and members of other non-Sunni Muslim sects in Syria live in fear of what will happen if Islamists ever take power.
For decades Christians have routinely been persecuted and mistreated throughout the Middle East, particularly in countries governed by Islamic extremists such as the Shiite Muslim ayatollahs in Iran and Taliban mullahs in Afghanistan. But in the wake of the Arab Spring, attacks on Christians and other religious minorities have been on the rise. For example, Sunni Muslim Hamas policemen wearing masks beat and arrested members of Gaza’s small Shiite community in January, while in Egypt thousands of Coptic Christians have fled their homes during the past six months in response to a wave murders, rapes and church burnings by Islamic extremists. More recently, Sheik Mohammad Ahmad Ouf Sadeq, a Sunni Muslim imam who has spoken out against religious extremism, was assassinated by armed gunmen linked to Islamic extremists trying to oust the Assad regime.
Unfortunately, most of the western news media portray the conflict as strictly being about the Syrian government’s violent repression of peaceful demonstrations in favour of democracy. While this may have been the case in some areas of Syria, western media outlets also downplay or ignore the level of support that exists for Assad’s secular regime in Syria’s two largest cities. So while there is plenty of news coverage devoted to anti-Assad demonstrations inside and outside of Syria, as well as Syrian troops’ use of violent force, there is little or no mention of pro-Assad demonstrations in Damascus and Aleppo or the death threats and assassinations attributed to Syria’s Islamists.
Closer to home, on Sunday 5 February a small group of Syrians gathered at the Spire on O’Connell Street to show their opposition to Islamic extremism and their support for the secular Syrian government. But they were quickly confronted, and their lives threatened, by a much larger group of anti-Assad Saudis, Libyans and Pakistanis.
These verbal assaults and death threats were witnessed by several members of the Irish news media, who had also interviewed the pro-Assad Syrians. Yet this pro-Assad demonstration was never reported in the news. Maybe I’m wrong, but isn’t this evidence of western – and Irish – news media bias?
Charles Laffiteau is a US Republican from Dallas, Texas who is pursuing a PhD in Public Policy and Political Economy. He previously lectured on Contemporary US Business & Society at DCU from 2009-2011.
