JOHANNESBURG, March 8 (AFP) - The representation of Islam and Muslims in South Africa's news media was at times "painfully distorted" and was creating "Islamophobia," a Muslim media group told a public hearing here Wednesday.
The Media Review Network (MRN) told the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC), which is probing racism in the South African media, that there was a "growing and dangerous dimension of prejudice" against Islam and Muslims.
It said the media through its reporting was bringing about "Islamophobia" – a morbid, irrational fear of Islam and Muslims.
The 1993 bombings in Oklahoma and the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and of a Planet Hollywood restaurant in Cape Town, spawned headlines in all mainstream media demonizing and stereotyping Islam and Muslims, the MRN said.
If a Muslim group was indeed responsible for the bombings, the coverage would still not have been justified.
"The entire Muslim community had been condemned as barbaric, cruel and fanatical without a shred of evidence to substantiate any of these claims," it said.
The media's blaming of a Muslim-led anti-drugs group, People Against Gangsterism and Drugs (PAGAD), for a spate of bombings in Cape Town over the past two years demonstrated the extent of the bigotry in the media, the MRN said.
"A pattern of headlines illustrates the prevailing inherent bias that reinforced the alleged threat to our national security by Islam."
The media readily identified the religion of perpetrators of violence if Muslims were involved, but "deliberately omit the religious affiliation when non-Muslims are involved."
The media, including Agence France Presse (AFP) had a special vocabulary almost exclusively used for Muslims, including words like "fundamentalist," "extremist," "fanatic" and "terrorist."
"There is a deliberate campaign to set up Islam as an ideological enemy of the Western world," the MRN said.
The hearing, which started Monday, follows a report commissioned by the SAHRC that found that the country's media was tainted by racism, despite the ousting of the apartheid government in 1994.
