I was reading The Model School, Islamic Style recently and had the thought, does the media only interview histrionic pretentious American Muslims?

The article is about a Muslim school outside of Chicago. To Quote

The second order of business is creating what Universal calls an “Islamic environment.” The Koran and the sayings of Muhammad are taught two days a week, Arabic three days a week. Grades 2 to 12 break for prayer once a day. Beyond Scripture, a Muslim approach influences the traditional curriculum as well. When teacher Fuzia Jarad’s English class read Romeo and Juliet, the girls wanted to know, “Is it love at first sight?” “Yes,” the teacher answered. “As Muslims, we don’t do that. The difference is lust versus love; appearance versus knowing. Islam protects you from mistakes.” For assistant principal Abdallah, who is in charge of discipline, love is a big issue. “I’ve had students come to me and say, “So and so are in love. Everyone is gossiping about the girl. Her reputation is ruined.’I tell them, ‘If you care, show respect and stop the discussions.’ Sometimes a girl or boy will tell me about a love letter they’ve received. It’s always a letter. They can’t socialize. They don’t want the letter. They don’t want to get in trouble. The feelings for each other are natural. Islam gives us a way to approach those feelings. Choose your spouse, but don’t give your body or soul to someone until you’re married.”

What’s central to the environment is a sense of Muslim family values. That’s why Mohammad (Mo) Suleiman sent his daughter Samia, 18, to Universal. “Family means the older have mercy on the younger,” says Suleiman, “and the younger respect the older.” The students seem to make an effort, but cultural isolation is impossible. “My dad will hear the word love when I play my music, and he’ll say that’s against our religion,” says freshman Ryan Ahmad. “So I’ll stop for a week. But then one of my friends will start singing some lyric, and I start up again.” When freshman Gulrana Syed watches TV, she tries to stick with family shows but gives in to the temptation to watch Fear Factor. “If swearing starts,” she says, “I turn it off and hope God forgives me.”

Though the school and the parents want their kids to be successful in America, the ambivalence of many Islamic parents sends mixed signals. The pull of their home country is a constant distraction from fitting into this one. “They are obsessed with foreign politics,” says Steve Landek, who has been mayor of Bridgeview since 1999. “I come to talk to them about better sidewalks. They want to know how to run for Congress so they can change America’s Israeli policy.” Clearly respectful, however, of the economic and cultural contributions of Muslims to the community, he regrets to say 9/11 has set them back. “I still hear comments. I’m not going to repeat them. I’m not going to perpetuate the negative.”

and

The students next door sometimes give voice to the commonplace resentment that can be found among Muslims the world over. Assigned by his English teacher to write an essay about his own American Dream, a 15-year-old wrote that the occupied territories should be returned to the Palestinians and “the Jews should be left to suffer.” More often, however, Universal’s students feel resentment about being stereotyped, both in the media and on the streets. To senior Ali Fadhli, the Fox TV show 24, which had a plot this season about a Muslim terrorist cell, is “obnoxious,” he says. “America has moved on to a new enemy. We’re treated now like the Russians were during the Cold War.” Being teenagers though, perhaps the worst slight of all is being regarded as outsiders. “The students are aware,” says Dalila Benameur, head of the social studies department, “that they are perceived as different.” Says freshman Gulrana Syed: “It’s kind of impossible to blend in wearing a head scarf.” Student Ryan Ahmad, whose dad is his toughest music critic, admits, “Americans seem to have more fun. Muslims try to be American, but we don’t know how. The cultures are so different.” A sense that U.S. life has its own contradictions provides some perspective. Senior Muna Zughayer, noting the use of women as sex objects, says, “I think it’s funny people look at us and say we’re oppressed!”

So, in other words, they go to lengths to maintain their own culture and traditions, they voluntarily segragate themselves in education, visibly and publicly remove themselves from American mainstream culture, present a monolithic public face, and have strong loyalties to other countries.

Then they wonder why they don’t fit in the with the culture they’re rejected. You can’t be different without being different.

I guess the question is: Does the media deliberately seek out these people and ignore the rest of American Muslims or do they seek out the media. With the exception of finding out the Dave Chappelle was a Muslim (also in Time magazine), I can’t remember any other mention of American Muslims where that was a detail and not the focus. One never reads about, say some dentist who invented a new method of flossing, who got the idea on the way to prayers (or something like that). To put it another way, is the only public Muslim someone who is professionally Muslim?

For the hosting data center to “reboot to fix latency they call it”, I’ll share this link on media self-absobrtion by Claudia Rosette. It’s the best article I’ve read so far about the Newsweek debacle. Money grafs”

But the chief victims to date have been the rioters themselves, some of whom died as the violence escalated. A Washington Post report Monday quoted an Afghan dry-goods salesman, Del Agha, who joined one of the riots, as saying: “We wanted to have a peaceful demonstration, but the demonstration was like a car and some people who are the enemies of Afghanistan took the steering wheel and turned it in the wrong direction.”

As recounted in the Arab News, an English-language newspaper based in Saudi Arabia, Afghans angered by the Newsweek story “have lashed out in fury in all directions. The fact that not only government and UN buildings were burned, but even mosques shows the depths of their rage. The same level of public anger has been reported from Pakistan, Indonesia, Egypt and many other Muslim countries.”

Let’s pause right there. We are hearing that Muslims, infuriated by a report of blasphemy, went on violent rampages that resulted in . . . dead Muslims and burned mosques. Meanwhile, not only is Newsweek apologizing and retracting, but the U.S. government is regretting the loss of life.

What’s really going on here is two stories. One involves Newsweek and the ups and downs of U.S. journalism. The other involves a swath of the Islamic world in which anger, fueled by years of gross political misrule, is a chronic feature of life–seeking to acquire a target. What produced these particular riots was the intersection of Islamic-world furies and that brand of U.S. self-absorption in which no subject is more fascinating to the American media than any possible misdeeds of the U.S. itself.

One media flaw that this (and every other article I’ve read) misses is that the media will not acknowledge that there are large parts of the world that are unreachable to them, yet it acts like it’s giving you the whole picture. It will not admit ignorance.

While we’re awash in celebrity stories, and the white house press pool will devote considerable time to getting their affectations right, we hear very little about the hundreds dead in Uzbekistan, and next to nothing about Darfour. Yet one never sees Peter Jennings saying “we have no Central Asian news tonight because the government won’t allow us in. Now J-Lo and P Diddy are back together….”

The two points are not entirely related but I thought I should get them on paper.