Greece – Major Newspaper Presents Quran in Biased Manner
This article is part of the Media Monitoring Highlights of June, a monthly overview of the most significant results of our monitoring of traditional and new media in Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, and the United Kingdom.
Date of publication: 24 June 2020
Media outlet: in.gr, a popular and one of the oldest news website in Greece, owned by a new media tycoon who also owns other media, television, websites and historical newspapers.
Author: Andreas Andrianopoulos
Headline: “Is Islam compatible with democracy?”
Link: https://bit.ly/2VmTyXn
Description of the anti-Muslim content: This article was written in response to a recently published book titled “Islamic foundation of a liberal society". The author of this article, Andreas Andrianopoulos, is a former politician and now well-respected author. He leads the article with: “Islam (=submission) is based on devotion to the words of the prophet”, followed by the opening sentence: “Lately, efforts have been made to embellish Islam in relation to its compatibility with freedom and democracy”. Andrianopoulos then goes on the pick out and ‘analyze’ a few verses of the Quran, claiming that the issues of “replacement”, “deceptions” and “movement” are key to Islam. He states: "As for the "movement", which is now expressed with migration flows, it is a cornerstone of the Islamic religion, in which Muslims follow the example of Muhammad and his first followers, who moved from Mecca to Medina to dominate. The Qur'an clearly speaks of this obligation of "moving for the purposes of Allah" (Qur'an 2: 218).” With this, he is essentially claiming that Muslim migrants are only coming to Europe to spread Islam. Andrianopoulos also talks about the Islamic concept of ‘Taqiyya’ which he claims allows believers to deceive non-believers, that is, to do things they do not believe in order to defend Islam.
Myth debunked: Nowhere is the article are Andrianopoulos’s theological or historical accreditations mentioned, because he does not have these. Yet, the author presents himself as someone with a deep knowledge of the Quran. This article is a classic case of cherry-picking, which is when someone selectively presents ‘evidence’ to prove a certain point, ignoring significant other evidence which could contradict or disprove their point. In this case, Andrianopoulos clearly wants to make the claim that Islam is not compatible with democracy, and therefore does not belong in Europe. To ‘prove’ this claim, he picks certain verses from the Quran which he believes show that Muslims deceive and lie in order to ‘further’ Islam. What he fails to do is present the larger case of the Quran: as with all holy books, there are versus which could be deemed problematic in the Quran, but we cannot analyze these without providing full context, which would be best done by an expert with a theological background. Similarly, we could pick out verses from the Bible which show violence and intolerance, but this would not be accurate without providing context.
Andrianopoulos mentions the Islamic principle of ‘Taqiyya’ in his piece, a topic which we have covered in the past. In December 2019, Melanie Phillips wrote a piece for The Times in which she referenced ‘Taqiyya’ without providing proper information or context, resulting in a sensationalist claim being made. A lack of religious literacy in clear in both these examples, and it shows a need for more training for journalists and writers, and to give space to experts on these topics. Yes, religion and it’s principles should be open to discussion, but it must be done in an informed way in order to avoid misinformation and sensationalism.
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