The United Nations has criticized the media over its initial linking of the killings of scores of people in Norway to Muslims.
“The way in which some public commentators immediately associated the horrifying mass murder…with Islamist terrorism is revealing,” Heiner Bielefeldt, the UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief, said in statements on the UN website on Wednesday, July 27.
At least 76 people were killed and scores injured in twin attacks on a government building in Oslo and a youth training camp on the nearby island of Utoya on Friday.
Immediately after the attacks, media and pundits suggested that the killings were carried out by Muslims over Oslo’s troop presence in Afghanistan.
Right-wing websites and writers as Pamela Geller, publisher of the website Atlas Shrugs and executive director of Stop Islamization of America, also quickly pointed the finger at “jihadis”.
But hours later, a right-wing Christian fundamentalist, Anders Behring Breivik, was arrested over the double assault.
Breivik said that the attack was a self-styled mission to save European “Christendom” from Islam.
The UN Special Rapporteur said that media reports linking the attacks to Muslims were “revealing” and “embarrassing”.
The trend adopted by many media outlets to quickly point the finger at Muslims was “indeed an embarrassing example of the powerful impact of prejudices and their capacity to enshrine stereotypes,” Bielefeldt said.
“Proper respect for the victims and their families should have precluded the drawing of conclusions based on pure conjecture.”
Muslim Victims
The linking has sparked fears of revenge among Muslims in Norway.
“We called each other and said, it is not going to be safe for us here anymore,” Noor Ahmad Noor, an imam living in a working-class suburb 43 kilometers from Oslo, told the Wall Street Journal when he first watched the news.
“People were watching their TVs, afraid. So we locked our doors, and waited.”
But when it later turned out that the shooter was a non-Muslim, they were momentarily relieved.
“That was the end of one grief, because he wasn’t one of us, thank God,” Noor recalled.
“But it was the beginning of another grief, because some of those kids were ours.”
Many of those killed or injured in the attacks were Muslims, a fact that Norwegian media initially failed to identify.
Among the 600 people on the island when Breivik started his shooting spree, an estimated 70 were Muslims.
Two of them were the daughter and son of Mohamed Yasin, who fled war in Iraq a few years ago and now lives in Egersund, in western Norway.
Yasin’s son had been shot in the arm. His daughter, 20-year-old Jamil Rafal, was still missing.
“I came to Norway from war in Iraq because I thought Norway was the safest place on earth,” Yasin told Noor who is now in Sundvollen, the closest town to Utoya, to help Muslims whose children were dead or missing after the shooting.
Noor answered him that “Islam says that if you are patient, the blessings of God will be upon you.”
“It was nice that there was somebody there who could speak to me in Arabic, but I have so much on my mind right now,” Yasin said.
“I just want her to come home,” he added of his daughter.
Source: OnIslam & News Agencies
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