Source: Just Jouralism
Following a violent take-over of an Iraqi church in Baghdad by Islamic militants on Sunday, all of the broadsheets and the BBC News website gave prominent coverage to the resulting hostage situation and stand-off between the militants and Iraqi security forces.
The targeting of the church by radical Islamists is part of a wider trend of hostility towards Christian minorities in the Muslim majority Middle East. However, across the coverage there was a noticeable lack of discussion about this, with only the Financial Times explicitly stating that Christians were being attacked by Islamic extremists. None of the articles linked the story to the wider plight of Christians in the region.
The FT’s ‘Hostages die in Iraq church rescue operation’, by Andrew England, clearly stated that:
‘Christians represent a small minority in Iraq and have often been the targets of attacks by Islamist militants.’
This explanation also linked to ‘Iraq increases security for Christians’ by Nada Bakri, an article from 2009 specifically on the issue of Christians in Iraq.
However, other coverage did not explicitly cite Islamic militancy and implied that the predicament of the Christian minority was the direct result of the US invasion in 2003.
The Daily Telegraph’s ‘Baghdad church hostage drama: death toll hits 52’, by its foreign staff, included details of the falling number of Christians in the country, and described how for the last seven years they have been ‘frequently the target of violence’:
‘Hundreds of Iraqi Christians have been killed and several churches attacked since the US-led invasion to oust Saddam Hussein in 2003.’
While the article included a quote from the perpetrators about the church being ‘the dirty place of the infidel which Iraqi Christians have long used as a base to fight Islam’, at no point did the article connect these types of intolerant belief to the years of attacks Christians had suffered at the hands of Islamic extremists.
‘Baghdad church hostage drama ends in bloodbath’, on the BBC news website, also included details of a statement by the perpetrators, where they stated that Iraqi Christians would be ‘exterminated’ if two women they believed were being held captive by Egyptian Copts were not released.
The article included a piece of analysis by Jim Muir, where he noted that churches have been damaged by bombs in various parts of the country where Christians live’ and that they ‘have also been the victims of targeted killings, while priests and others have been abducted and murdered or ransomed’, and a detailed list of attacks on Christians. Despite this, there was no explanation that it was Islamic militants that were conducting these attacks.
Jim Lewis, writing in The Independent, made the most explicit connection between the violence and the 2003 invasion. While ‘14 dead as Iraqi militants target Catholic church’ also referenced the threat by the attackers to ‘exterminate’ Iraqi Christians, the Islamic militants were referred to throughout the article as ‘insurgents’ – suggesting that violence against Christians was motivated by a reaction to the invasion, rather than religious intolerance:
‘Iraqi Christians have been frequent targets for insurgents and many have fled the country since 2003. There are now 870,000 Christians, most of them Catholics, living in Iraq today.’
The Guardian, on the other hand, included even less context about the history or motivations of anti-Christian violence. The Guardian’s Martin Chulov, writing in ‘Baghdad church siege leaves 52 dead’, noted that the hostages had been taunted as ‘infidels’, but revealed little of the true scale of the persecution that Christians had faced:
‘The massacre has left many members of Iraq’s remaining 550,000 Christians questioning whether they can remain in the war-ravaged country, which has seen numerous attacks against churches over the past eight years.’
It was The Times that included the least amount of context for the attacks. ‘Hostages held in Baghdad church killed in police raid’, by Alice Fordham, did not include even a single reference to previous attacks, or the displacement of Iraqi Christians.
Aside from the minimal discussion of the role of Islamic extremists in Iraq, there was no mention of the wider phenomenon of Christian persecution in other Arab states. This ties in with Robert Fisk’s front-page article in the Independent from 26 October, in which he devoted far more space to the challenges posed by Israeli security measures to Palestinian Christians, then to the attacks orchestrated by Islamist militants.
