Western commentators ignored religious politics in Israel and America while condemning Iran’s.
Evidence
Ironically, only a few commentators on “Islamic” atavism and medieval modes of logic in the West noted that a few miles to the west of Iran, in Begin’s Israel, there was a regime fully willing to mandate its actions by religious authority and by a very backward-looking theological doctrine. An even smaller number of commentators decrying the apparent upsurge in Islamic religiosity connected it to the upsurge in the United States of television religions numbering many millions of adherents, or to the fact that two of the three major presidential candidates in 1980 were enthusiastic born-again Christians. — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 156
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the standing ADDENDUM on ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ and moral-panic asymmetry across cultures, and to the broader bias in media framing.
- SEED: An essay contrasting how the press frames religious politics when the country is friend vs. adversary.
Related
- Press singled out Islam while ignoring identical views among Israeli religious authorities. (similarity 0.80)
- Said judged Western media coverage of Muslim executions as worse than the executions (similarity 0.79)
- Western press praised illiberal Christianity but blamed only Islam for violence. (similarity 0.78)
- US media replaced Iranian history with a repetitive loop of reductive cultural stereotypes (similarity 0.78)
- Western commentators frame Muslim leaders as irrational while granting Israelis and Americans rationality (similarity 0.78)