Story highlights good and bad journalism
Re When words fail, Oct. 22
I just wanted to express my thanks to Jennifer Yang for her excellent article about Ayman Elkasrawy. I remember following the story when it first broke, surprised by the anti-Semitic sentiment, but knowing, too, that we live in a very Islamophobic and xenophobic world, whether we as Canadians like to admit it or not.
Jennifer Yang’s article was incredibly well-researched, well-presented and did not gloss over the uncomfortable facts of the issue. She didn’t paint Mr. Elkasrawy as a saint, nor did she paint him as a villain. She portrayed his mistake as it was: a mistake, an honest one that he admitted to, and she also portrayed the context around the statement and the blowback from it.
Mr. Elkasrawy came across as a man who was humble enough to admit his mistake and strong enough to want to change his own behaviour. And she gave a clear and heartfelt depiction of the community that worships at Beth Tzedec and the people in the Jewish community who reached out to establish a better mutual understanding.
Ms. Yang’s article portrays all that is good in journalism and reflects upon all that is bad in journalism, too. She puts the full share of the blame where it belongs, on the subjects of the story, but also on the right-wing media that picked up the story. The edited video was shocking, absolutely shocking.
Yang shows how vital it is to have higher moral standards when portraying the news and she demonstrates the violent, traumatizing impact of bad journalism written with the aim to go viral rather than to report truthfully. Melissa Beaupré, Toronto
The lesson of this story about the deliberate mistranslation of an imam’s prayer, and the resulting vilification and loss of employment he suffered, is that people should not take translations at face value. Unfortunately, most people think translation is a straightforward word-replacement exercise. There’s nothing straightforward about it. Faulty translations are common. Brian Mossop, certified translator, Toronto