Last month, some 30,000 followers of the Ahmadiyya Muslim movement gathered in London for their annual conference, dubbed the Jalsa Salana, and held a march repudiating ISIS and extemism. It is telling that the supposed paucity of media coverage is what is getting play in the "alternative" media, in gloating manner. AntiMedia's headline is "30,000 Muslims Just Slammed Terrorism — Media Silent." But of course the story links to an account from… the (mainstream) media! (In this case the Daily Mail.) Similarly Mic.com headlines: "Over 30,000 Muslims in the UK Marched Against ISIS — Of Course You Didn't Hear About It." Yet they apparently "heard about it" from their source, The Independent.
What these alterno-websites are emphasizing is that the (mainstream) media fail to sufficiently play up Muslim repudiation of terrorsm, enabling Islamophobes to portray Muslim silence on terrorism, and by extension complicity. There is some truth to this, of course. But it is equally disingenuous for AntiMedia and Mic.com not to emphasize that the Ahmadiyya are a dissident current in Islam, rejected as heretical and long persecuted by the orthodox Sunni. The march would have been far more meaningful in terms of a representative Muslim response to terrorism if it had been held by orthodox Sunni. And the reasons that it was not should be examined—not ignored.
We have noted the problems with the AntiMedia here and here. They should probably be added to our list of bogus and unreliable websites. The name "AntiMedia" is doubly disingenuous: First, as website, it is by definition part of the media. Secondly, with such an ostentatiously oppositional name, it's rather an irony that it relies for its sources on the mainstream media. We do wish the alternative media would get more serious about reportorial and analytical rigor, as opposed to cheap clicks and empty sanctinomy.
