The 2015 and 2016 European Islamophobia Reports published by SETA Foundation documented several Islamophobic incidents in various sectors of the Italian society, such as education, employment, politics, media, cyberspace and judiciary system.11 In this paper we focus on the media sector, which in our opinion has played and continues to play a decisive role in spreading Islamophobia. In recent years two issues have dominated the media agenda: the link between terrorism and immigration and the economic and social costs from immigration; according to the above mentioned surveys, both these issues have gradually become a major source of concern for Italians.
Our analysis will focus on the first issue, as it targets specific-ally Muslim migrants rather than migrants in general. Before discuss-ing in detail the presence of the migration-Islam-terrorism nexus in the Italian media, however, it is useful to start from a general analysis of some problematic words used by Western media. This issue was re-cently the subject of the UNESCO paper Terrorism and the Media: A Handbook for Journalists.12
9 Chatham House Europe Program, What Do Europeans Think About Muslim Immigration? (2017), available online as pdf.
10 Ipsos-Mori, Perils of Perceptions 2016, available online as pdf.
11 G. A. Siino, N. Levantino, “Islamophobia in Italy, National Report 2015”, European Islamophobia Report 2015, E. Bayrakli, F. Hafez (eds.) (Istanbul: SETA, 2015); C. Giacalone, “Islamophobia in Italy. National Report 2016”, European Is-lamophobia Report 2016, E. Bayrakli, F. Hafez (eds.) (Istanbul: SETA, 2016).
12 UNESCO, Terrorism and the Media: A Handbook for Journalists (2017).
In his famous book Covering Islam, E. Said showed that the Western media were considering Islam as a kind of scapegoat for everything unpleasant that was happening in the Muslim world and he identified a series of words-container-useful to direct the public opin-ion-to illustrate these “pre-judgments” in the media, such as Islam, nation, democracy, Christianity.13Said's reflection was based primar-ily on the experience of the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the incident involving 52 Americans held captive for many days in the US em-bassy in Tehran in January 1981. Therefore it was influenced by the historical events of that period. In an interesting analysis, L. S.
Battaglia wonders: “if Said were to rewrite this essay today which words would he focus on? In other words, talking to the Western me-dia, which are the empty shells which immediately resonate with meaning and guide public opinion towards a precise reading of the facts of international news?”. In her opinion, the words used to trans-fer bias in the media, in the narrative of the Middle East, are: Islam, terrorism, fundamentalism, sectarianism, jihad, Muslim Brotherhood, Al-Qaeda and, most recently, Islamic as an adjective associated with State.14 We focus on Islam, fundamentalism, terrorism and jihad/ji-hadism, as these appear to be the central keywords whose characterization has a decisive influence on the specification of all others.
As for the term Islam, it is undeniable that even today all the political, social, economic and cultural shortcomings of Muslim soci-eties are hitched together and to Islam with a capital “I”. Islam then becomes the source and the prime mover of all contemporary history in a vast and differentiated territory that extends from the Philippines to Morocco and from Scandinavia, if we take account of Muslim minorities in Europe, to South Africa. As Mohammed Arkoun clearly explained, it is true that the sort of Islamic discourse common to the various Islamic movements defined as “fundamentalists” proposes the powerful image of a single, eternal Islam, the ideal model for historic action to liberate the world from the Western, imperialistic, materialist model. But it is also true that “Western media seize up this monolithic
13 E. Said, Covering Islam: how the media and the experts determine how we see the rest of the world (New York: Vintage Books, 1981).
14 L. S. Battaglia, “Bias in the media: covering Islam after 9/11” (2016).
view and transpose it into a discourse suitable to the social imaginary of Western countries” without any critical inter-mediation from the social, historical and religious sciences.15
Western reporting about terrorist attacks, for example, almost always notes a connection to Islam. But it often ends there. As Philip Seib points out, “many journalists shy away from religious topics, and this creates a vacuum of public knowledge that leads to defining a reli-gion of 1.6 billion people by the acts of the few who spill blood in a Manchester arena or a Baghdad marketplace. And because there is such limited understanding of Islam in the non-Muslim world, many news consumers are prone to accept the idea that Islam-equals-terror-ism”. After all, Islam usually disappears from the news until the next tragedy.16
When journalists want to differentiate within Islam, they usu-ally just talk about “moderate” Islam or “moderate” Muslims, but these expressions implicitly suggest that Islam is generally and essen-tially not “moderate”. A few examples in the Italian media: “#NotIn-MyName: la campagna social dei musulmani moderati” (#NotInMy-Name: the social campaign of moderate Muslims, La Repubblica);
“C'è un Islam moderato amico delle donne e della democrazia” (There is a moderate Islam friendly with women and democracy, Il Corriere);
“L'Islam non è moderato ma molti musulmani sì”, (Islam is not mod-erate but many Muslims are, La Stampa).
Moreover, as Laura Silvia Battaglia writes, “[…] to be serious, moderate Islam does not exist in the sense that there exists a historical traditional Islam in the context of which what is defined as radical/political Islam of the Wahhabi and the successive Salafi type, is considered by traditional Islam a crystallized and literal interpreta-tion of the Qur'an”.17
Fundamentalism is another wrong category applied to Islam;
the term was created in the 1920s in the United States to designate Protestant Christians and in the years between 1920 and 1978 the cat-egory “fundamentalist” was almost never used except in reference to
15 M. Arkoun, Rethinking Islam, Common Questions, Uncommon Answers (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994), p. 7.
16 Philip Seib, Superficial, Speculative, Breathless: Outdated Terrorism Re-porting Must Change (2017).
17 L. S. Battaglia, “Bias in the media: covering Islam after 9/11” (2016).
them. This began to change in 1979 when the Iranian revolution de-posed the Shah. Starting with that event, Muslims have been and con-tinue to be characterized as fundamentalists with great frequency, to the point that the term is today used almost exclusively to refer to Muslims. Leaving aside the discussions on the correctness of the term to define the variegated galaxy of extremist movements,18 it is un-deniable that the word fundamentalism, like the word terrorism, is now frequently associated with the adjective Islamic.
Fundamentalism and terrorism are thus regularly identified as essentially “Islamic”, thus connecting Islam as a whole to the actions of those who claim to follow it to wage their war. However, usually no one classifies as “Christian” or “Western” terrorism the violent actions of white supremacists and far-right extremists like the Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik.
Another word often abused by the media is jihadism.
This term is increasingly used, if only to avoid using the expres-sion “Islamic terrorist”. However, the word jihad means “effort”, not
“holy war”, and it appears 41 times in the Qur'an, often in the idio-matic expression “effort on the path to God” (al-jihad fi sabil Allah).
This effort can be peaceful or warlike, but it cannot be identified with the narrow and aggressive concept of jihad used by terrorists.19By fo-cusing on the latter, the Western media has inadvertently reinforced the link between terrorism and Islam within the Western conscious-ness and contributed to the negative perception of Islam held by an in-creasing percentage of the Western public.