Here’s All the News on TV that Fits the Muslim Stereotype

I AM sitting in Cairo in a flat borrowed from a friend. I turn on the TV set to catch the news on BBC World. Six stories in 15 minutes: Iraqi guerillas blow up a couple of pipelines; European hostages released by Muslim guerillas in Mali; Nigerian peacekeeping troops in Liberia; rioting between Muslim sects in Pakistan; Iceland resumes whaling; Islamic terrorists arrested in Indonesia.

End of world news.

Four out of six: That's how many of the stories were about Muslims doing violent things. That would make sense if two-thirds of the world's people were Muslims and most of them were violent. Since only one-fifth are Muslims, and many of them don't even spank their children, it calls for an explanation. Especially because the international news is like this most of the time.

BBC World is not particularly bad. In fact, from Minnesota to Moscow to Manila, it is the preferred source of TV news for people with an interest in the world, a knowledge of English and access to cable. It is serious about delivering 'balanced' news to a multi-national audience, yet it is doing an absolutely terrible job. Why?

The BBC is not American, so it's not following the White House's agenda. It is not pandering to the paranoid belief - quite widespread in the United States since the Sept 11, 2001 terrorist attacks - that Islam is a more violent and dangerous religion than, say, Christianity. Its selection of stories is genuinely driven by what it thinks will be of interest to its audience of 100 nationalities on five continents, a great many of whom are Muslims. Yet its selection of international stories turns out to be not that different from Fox News.

The bias in favour of 'violent Muslim' stories is less obvious on domestic news channels, where the foreign items are buried under a far larger number of domestic stories. But it is the same. Wherever you are in the world - apart from Muslim parts of the world, of course - try keeping track for a few nights. You'll find that at least half the foreign stories are about violence committed by or against Muslims.

Consider the four 'Muslim' stories I listed earlier. The Iraq story is legitimate: When the world's greatest power is sinking into a political and military quagmire, it is going to get coverage. But why Muslim hostage-takers in Mali, rather than politically-motivated kidnappers in Colombia? Why sectarian clashes between Muslims in Pakistan, rather than inter-caste violence among Hindus in India?

The story of suspected terrorists arrested for the JW Marriott Hotel bombing in Jakarta is of legitimate interest, but there's a lot less follow-up when suspected Basque terrorists are arrested in Spain, or when a resurgent Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, blows something up in Peru.

The BBC is not anti-Muslim, but it is responding to a definition of international news that makes 'violent Muslims' more newsworthy than violent people in other places.

It is largely a Western definition, following an agenda set mainly by the dominant US media. It is rooted in Western perspectives on the long-running Arab-Israeli conflict and has been vastly strengthened by the attack by Islamic terrorists on the US two years ago. It is also a huge, steaming heap of horse-feathers.

I'm not preaching pious nonsense about Islam being a 'religion of peace': The only peaceful religions are dead religions. And I'm not denying that the Muslim world has a big historical chip on its shoulder: Having run one of the most powerful and respected civilisations on the planet for the first thousand years after bursting out of Arabia and conquering large chunks of Europe, Asia and Africa, Muslims have spent the past three centuries being overrun, colonised and humiliated by the West. But the image of Muslims that the rest of the world gets through international news coverage is deeply misleading.

For the past month, I have been wandering around the Middle East with eight other members of my extended family. For some, it was their first time in the region; others have lived here or visited often enough to be able to lead everybody astray. And we gave less thought to our personal safety than we would on a comparable trip across America, or even through Europe.

I won't go on about how kind and friendly most of the people were, because most people are like that everywhere. I would point out that every single person with whom I discussed current events was against the American invasion in Iraq, but that I nevertheless encountered no personal hostility, even though I can be easily mistaken for an American. (Would an Arab making a similar trip around America have had the same experience?)

If Iraq gets completely out of hand, the patience and tolerance that still prevail at street level in the Muslim Middle East will be severely eroded, and even Asian Muslim countries may end up taking sides against the US and Britain.

But, for the moment, the nightmare vision of Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington of a coming 'Clash of Civilisations' is still a long way off. What's striking is the sheer ordinariness of daily life in the Muslim world. Don't be misled by television.