While in Vienna, I spoke with Ingrid Steiner-Gashi from Austria’s Kürier newspaper. The interview has not been posted on the Kürier website, but I have a .pdf for you in case you didn’t bother to look at it the first time.

I finally got around to getting a translation! For those of you who don’t speak German, my friend Dianna Fisher was kind enough to provide me with an English version:

Muslims are increasingly victims of discrimination and violent according to the report published by the US Foreign Ministry.

As examples, the Minaret ban in Switzerland and the scarf ban at German schools. Also Austria does not come through unscathed. Public discrimination toward Muslim women who wear the veil and who are treated with hostility is no rarity, the judgment is Islamophobia. Media critic Fatemeh Fakhraie says in the Kürier conversation– on the other hand that the USA also has problems with hostility to Islam.

On her website Muslimah Media Watch (the watcher of media reports of Muslim women worldwide), Fakhraie judges the representation of Muslims in western media is shown negatively. “[The media] gives very few positive pictures. The prevailing picture is unfortunately always negative: the dangerous, insidious Muslim woman, the suicide bomber. The large majority of the western media draws a bad picture. Many stereotypes have changed–but the picture that Muslim women are strange and different, that did not change.”

The representation in the media does not improve with contact with Muslims in Europe and in the USA certainly, believes the young American with Iranian roots. “Muslim men often are also represented in stereotypes: either as with terrorism or as an oppressor of women.”

The USA is self-critical and compares with Europe. In one place in the report, it is stated that many governments use “wide interpretations of terrorism and need ordinances in order to restrict” rights of prisoner and to curtail human rights.

A disputed law the fight against terrorism-the so-called “patriot Act” – was extended when it expired in February. The anti-terror laws were established under George W. Bush after the 9/11 attacks. It gives the government and the justice authorities’ larger latitude to the detainment of terror suspects.