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Despite improvement, stereotyped

portrayals of Muslims still linger Posted on December 17, 2012 at 9:54 am

By Ben KreimerIn the days, weeks and months after the deadly attacks on the United States on

Sept. 11, 2001, Arabs and Muslims became fixtures in American media like never  before.Suspicion and negative stereotypes — the phrases “Muslim terrorist” and “Arab

terrorist” became commonplace—  proliferated, sparked by perceptions of fear and

misunderstanding about Islam and its followers.

 Loukia Sarroub, an associate professor at UNL, said, “One of the sad 

consequences of 9/11 was that people really suffered because of media.”  

“Sept. 11 changed the way Muslims are portrayed in the media,” said Loukia

Sarroub, an associate professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who has

done extensive research on language and literacy among Yemeni Americans in

Michigan and the Iraqi refugee community in Lincoln, Neb.“One of the sad consequences of 9/11 was that people really suffered because of 

media,” she said. Overbroad and innaccurate portrayals of Muslims don’t leave room for the nuancesinherent in the followers of Islam. Even before 9/11, news coverage of Muslimsoften associated them with acts of violence, terrorism, unrest or anti-Western

sentiment. Studies of such coverage have found that stories, even when positive,tend to see Islam as monolithic rather than viewing its followers as different fromone another.

And because of Western influence and interests in the Middle East and North

Africa, areas that also happen to be hotspots for turmoil, news from that part of the

world tends to get more attention than other regions, resulting in Arab Muslimsserving as stand-ins for all Muslims.

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Together, these elements combine to portray Muslims — and especially Arab

Muslims — negatively.

Focus of fear and misunderstanding 

In the 11 years since 9/11, Loukia Sarroub has seen an improvement in the wayMuslims are portrayed in the media. But even so, recent news coverage continuesto demonstrate the need for further change. Such change is slow, however, and

reflects the time needed to heal cultural wounds inflicted by such negativity. Negative attitudes toward Arabs and Muslims have tended to seep into the

consciousness of American culture and Americans themselves. At a 2008 town hall

meeting in Minnesota for then-presidential candidate John McCain, a womancalled Barack Obama an Arab and said she, therefore, could not trust him. Inresponse, McCain told her that Obama was not an Arab but rather was a “decent

family man.” 

Although McCain likely had good intentions in disagreeing with the woman, hisstatement revealed that, in American culture, Arab and good person could be

viewed as mutually exclusive. And while the media alone are not solelyresponsible for perpetuating such a negative characterization, the stories and

 perspectives they present can influence how Americans think about Islam,Muslims and Arabs.

Sarroub explained, in an article  published in the spring of 2002, how a November 

2001 segment of the CBS television news program “60 Minutes” had caused thecommunity of Arabs and Arab-Americans living in Dearborn, Mich., to change its

 perception of itself as it became a focus of fear and misunderstanding in post-9/11

America.

The segment ended with the FBI’s Detroit director saying that Dearborn, a suburbof Detroit and home to 300,000 Arabs and Arab-Americans, included individuals

who were concealing their support of terrorism.

One misconception that has taken root in American culture since 9/11 is the notion

that Islam condones violence and acts of terror. Like many religions, Islam isgrounded in peace. The root of the word Islam comes from the Arabic word for 

 peace: salaam. A greeting often used by Muslims, assalamu alaikum, means peace

 be upon you.

In his Farewell Sermon, delivered to Muslims in Mecca on March 9, 632 A.D., theProphet Muhammad, who Muslims believe to be the link between humans and

God, said: “Hurt no one so that no one may hurt you.”  More than 1.6 billion Muslims — compared to 2.18 billion Christians — were

estimated to be living in the world by a 2010 Pew Forum on Religion and Public

life study. Analysis of the Pew study showed that the Middle East and North Africaare home to 315 million Muslims, 20 percent of the world’s Muslim population.

Indonesia is home to world’s largest population of Muslims, with more than 205million.

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 Shams Al-Badry, a Muslim and a junior poli tical science major at UNL, said of 

the Newsweek cover: “My family is from Iraq, and they don’t dress like that.”  

Despite the diversity of Muslims, American media today still tends to tap into falsestereotypes when reporting on Muslims around the world. One stereotype regularly

seen in the media is of an Arab Muslim, often a bearded man wearing a thobe, a

traditional piece of ankle-length clothing similar to a robe. While thobes are oftenworn by Arab men, they are not worn by all Muslim men.

 Newsweek’s Sept. 24, 2012, magazine cover offered a recent glimpse into Western

media’s view of Arab Muslims. A boldface headline —“MUSLIM RAGE”— screamed from the cover. Just below the headline an equally bold page-filling

 photograph captured bearded Muslim men wearing thobes and clenching their fists,

their faces wrenched in fury. Weeks later, the vividness of the Newsweek cover and what it represented still triggers frustration in Muslims and non-Muslims.

“My family is from Iraq, and they don’t dress like that,” said Shams Al-Badry, aMuslim and a junior political science major at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

“I know [some Muslim] people look like that, but you’re playing into the notion

that all Muslims have beards and are yelling and are outraged.” The Newsweek cover story was about the anti-American protests that began in

Egypt on Sept. 11, 2012, following the release of the Arabic translation of a trailer 

for a film called “Innocence of Muslims.” Muslims in Asia, Europe, the MiddleEast, America and Australia had been protesting against the film’s message, which

critics said offered a blasphemous critique of Islam and the Prophet Muhammad.

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In Newsweek’s story, Somali-born Dutch scholar Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote that

Muslim men and women who support the punishment of blasphemers are not a

small group: “On the contrary, they represent the mainstream of contemporaryIslam,” Hirsi Ali wrote. She went on to say that many Muslims and ex-Muslims

around the world condemn the violence and protests seen surrounding the“Innocence of Muslims” trailer, yet they are “marginalized and all too often held  responsible for the very provocation.” 

Despite all this, Sarroub believes that Muslims today are more fairly portrayed inAmerican media than they were both before 9/11 and in the two years that

followed. But, like Hirsi Ali suggested in her Newsweek article, Sarroub believes

that the tendency of news outlets toward “sensationalism” in their reporting resultsin otherwise peaceful Arab and Arab-American Muslims bearing the burden of criticism resulting from negative stereotypes and news coverage.

• A Nov. 8 article  published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

carried the headline, “Good News From Iraq.” The article celebrated Iraq’scompliance with the International Atomic Agency, while also pointing out how

unusual positive news is from this region. The first sentence of the story read:“Good news from the Middle East is rare these days.” 

• A Nov. 29 story featured on the Huffington Post’s world news page bore theheadline, “Girl reportedly has throat cut after father refuses marriage proposal.” A

15-year-old Afghan girl was attacked after fetching water for her family. The

attacker was her cousin, who had proposed to her on behalf of his brother. Thegirl’s family refused the proposal, saying the girl was too young to marry.  • A story appearing on the Fox News home page on Nov. 30 carried the headline,

“New flagpoles in Iran spark rumors of  clandestine satellite jamming technology.”

The article suggests that new flagpoles appearing in major Iranian cities are part of a government effort to jam Internet access and Western-influenced broadcast

television and radio signals originating outside the country.

• In February 2011, CNN featured a story on its home page with the headline,

“Pakistani woman suspected of killing, cooking husband.” As the headlinesuggests, the story was about a woman from Karachi, Pakistan, who was suspectedof murdering her husband, chopping up his body and trying to cook the pieces. Not

until the end of the story do readers learn that she told a Pakistani media outlet that

she killed her husband because he desired sexual relations with her daughter, hisstep-daughter.

Criticism, sometimes humorous, on the rise 

Criticism —  by both Muslims and non-Muslims —toward the American media’s

negative stereotypes and subtle critiques of Islam, Arabs and Muslims isincreasing. One way in which such criticism emerges is through black humor  — 

making light of serious matters and hopeless, stressful or traumatic situations. Newsweek, with its provocative cover and its subsequent encouragement of publicdiscussion of its “Muslim Rage” story on Twitter, sparked such humor.

 Newsweek’s suggested hashtag #MuslimRage elicited a wide variety of response,

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some of it darkly humorous. Al-Badry, for example, said she and her friends joined

others who were using the hashtag in satirical ways.

“Muslims just hijacked @Newsweeks’s hashtag. Pun intended. #MuslimRage,”tweeted @Arab_Fury.

“Shawarma with no garlic sauce? #MuslimRage,” tweeted Omar of @AllWeAskFor.“That was really cool to see because that was something that was trending,” Al-

Badry said, remarking at how Newsweek’s #MuslimRage hashtag became amockery.

Twitter user @JHoffman6, a white American, summarized the nature of 

“discussion” surrounding the #MuslimRage hashtag situation with a tweet: “75%of the #MuslimRage tags are indignant remarks at @newsweek. The other 25% arehummus jokes. W2G dying old media.” 

Although Newsweek’s controversial article came out more than two months ago,

the #MuslimRage hashtag continues to be used in tweets daily.@JHoffman6’s “way to go dying old media” was a foreshadowing statement. On

Oct. 18, 2012, Newsweek, which began publishing in 1933, announced that at theend of 2012 the printed magazine would be no more. Only an online version would

 be published.But @JHoffman’s statement suggests something else as well: Mainstream media is

out of touch with Islam, and media consumers disagree with the Muslim

stereotypes portrayed by the media.Al-Badry sees room for news media to improve their coverage of Muslims. Shesaid the Newsweek article played into Western stereotypes about Muslims as

uncivilized “very angry people” who are always attacking each other and the

Western world. This leaves her and other Muslim-Americans in the position of  being expected to justify and condemn the acts of other Muslims around the world.

“Usually Muslim-Americans are being attacked for being unpatriotic,” Al-Badry

said. “We’re always having to justify ourselves. “It’s not our job to justify others,”

Al-Badry said. “I am not going to condemn other Muslims.” Al-Badry was strongly opposed when Muslim high school students in Lincolnwanted to stage a protest in September in conjunction with the other anti-American

 protests. She argued that if such protests did occur in Lincoln, the media coverage

would be negative, and would do nothing to fix the already negative portrayal of Muslims in the news.

“We’re never shown in a bright light,” she said.

„Be calm, do nothing‟ 

Mohammad Haft-Javaherian, a 25-year-old clean-shaven and self-described “super religious Muslim” believes that radical Muslims on the fringes of Islam who act

violently and protest in the name of Islam are not true Muslims. As an example, he points to the violence in Benghazi, Libya, that left four Americans dead, includingU.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens.

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On the one hand, the news media is expected to cover current events around the

world. But by covering such events — in this case, radicals protesting — the media is

also helping the radicals distribute their message to the world, making their  presence seem greater than it really is.

James Le Sueur , a UNL history professor with expertise in North Afr ica and the 

M iddle East, said the news media tends to go for more sensational stories 

because “they are, for lack of a better word, sexy.” / Photo by Ben Kreimer  

Protests in Egypt were attended by disenfranchised Islamists, primarily politicallyultraconservative Salafists who believe in a strict interpretation of the Quran and

are opposed to the type of Egyptian government born out of the Arab Spring.

On the other hand, Benghazi, Le Sueur said, was not a protest: It was a terrorist

attack.“The media makes money and profits from exploiting these radical voices,” Le

Sueur said. “The media would be better if it actually did its job and reported a

variety of interpretations.” Megan Reif, assistant professor of political science at the University of ColoradoDenver, analyzed the numbers of protesters involved in the anti-American protests,

comparing them to the pro-democracy protests of the Arab Spring. She based her 

data on the duration of the different events: December 2010-May 2012 for theArab Spring, and Sept. 10-Sept. 16, 2012, for the anti-American protests.

In Egypt, the country where the anti-American protests began on Sept. 11, 2012,Reif estimates that 2,500 people participated in the week that followed. During the

Arab Spring, her conservative estimate is that at least 250,000 Egyptians participated in protests early in the uprising. By the time Mubarak left office,millions of Egyptians had participated.

Reif noted, in a written analysis of her findings, the differences in how mediacovered the Arab Spring versus the anti-American protests. During the ArabSpring protests in Egypt, media outlets often took wide-angle photographs and

video footage of the crowds in Tahrir Square to capture the masses of people

 participating. Media coverage of the anti-American protests relied more on narrow

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angle and closely cropped images, such as Newsweek’s “Muslim Rage” cover,

which featured a photo close-up of the faces of two Muslim men.

“The recent [anti-American] crowds are pathetic by comparison, but we wouldnever know that without the same wide-angle perspective,” Reif wrote. 

To decrease the overrepresentation and exaggerated influence of radical Muslims,Le Sueur believes the media should do more to show the perspectives of other Muslims. For example, when the media covers radical Muslim protests, he said,

the perspectives of a moderate Imam or Muslims who are opposed to the protestsshould also be included. During the September protests, Le Sueur said, other 

radicalist Muslims were also protesting against the radical protesters.

“But you don’t see that [perspective] anywhere. You never see the moderates,” hesaid. “The reason for it is that the moderates aren’t sexy, they don’t sell.”  Perspective biases aside, Haft-Javaherian says he believes that media outlets

communicate stories differently based on where their audience is compared to

where the news is happening.He said he noticed this difference after he left Tehran, Iran, three years ago — 

during the tumultuous Green Movement in 2009 —to study for his master’s degreeand doctorate at UNL. The Green Movement was a backlash against the reelection

of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Many Iranians believed his landslide victorywas fraudulent, and protests broke out in Tehran, involving upwards of three

million people.

Because he was in Iran during part of the Green Movement, Haft-Javaherian had afirst-hand sense of what was occurring in Tehran. After coming to America, he feltthe American media were exaggerating the protests in Tehran. His primary news

source was CNN.

After about a month, Haft-Javaherian said, he became less skeptical of the news hesaw on CNN. He began calling his family in Tehran to warn them about the news

reports he was seeing on American television. To his surprise, Haft-Javaherian’s

family knew nothing of the reports he was seeing. His family did not feel

threatened by what Haft-Javaherian was telling them. His information didn’t lineup with what was actually happening in Tehran. Haft-Javaherian quicklyrecognized the altered reality that news broadcasts presented to audiences.

Sarroub thinks this altered reality is a result of how news is often presented today.

In the context of American media, she thinks there is too little in-depth reportingon stories that require the communication of nuances to be accurately covered.

“We don’t see news anymore,” she said. “What we call news now is a bunch of  people presenting very small clips of something and then devoting three hours to

analysis.” 

She views Muslims as victims of the media’s tendency toward shallow reportingthat does not capture all the perspectives necessary.

Haft-Javaherian has traveled back and forth between Tehran and Lincoln whilestudying at UNL. During his time back in Tehran, he said, he noticeddiscrepancies between the reality of life in America and the portrayal of life in

America by non-Western media outlets.

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“If you are going and check the news from those [non-Western] points of view,

you will laugh because that is also not what happened here [in America],” Haft-

Javaherian said.As an example, he cited the non-Western media coverage of the Occupy Wall

Street movement in America was exaggerated. In his opinion, the media coveragesuggested the movement was bigger and more chaotic than it really was.Ultimately Haft-Javaherian thinks these varying perspectives among media outlets

are beneficial because it allows consumers to get different perspectives.“When you select media, you’re agreeing to listen to the news from their glasses,”

he said. “You cannot say the media should change their point of view. This is their 

 point of view.” Haft-Javaherian feels that it’s fair for media outlets to portray Muslims as they do,even if it means grouping all Muslims together. The media has the right to choose

their perspective on the news, he believes.

“You can’t blame them for their point of view,” he said.  “You can turn it off [if you don’t like it].” 

 Narges Attaie, a 22-year-old Afghan-American Muslim and a senior broadcastingmajor at UNL, said she believes that the media have simply been doing their job,

and that they never deliberately set out to portray Muslims in a negative light. Thatsaid, she thinks consumers of the news media should not base their opinions of 

Islam or Muslims solely on news reports.

“Learn about the culture, learn about the religion and then go ahead and form your opinion,” she said.Maricia Guzman, the 21-year-old president of UNL’s Multicultural Students in

Media organization, thinks U.S. news organizations should employ more Muslim

reporters.“The Muslim perspective has to come from Muslims,” said Guzman, a junior 

studying journalism and broadcasting. “But they’re hardly even there.” 

Pi  

- See more at: http://cojmc.unl.edu/mosaic/2012/12/17/improvement-stereotyped-

 portrayals-muslims-linger/#sthash.1KNgSOEB.dpuf**************** 

If people and the media weren't so quick to confuse Arabs, Muslims and Middle Easterners as oneand the same, fewer atrocities would find their source in assumptions, argues guest writer  Jill ian C.

York . A few days after the horrific events at Fort Hood, a Marine reservist in Florida mistook a visiting Greek 

Orthodox priest for a “terrorist” and beat him with a tire iron. The reservist (who was indeed white)

made all sorts of wild claims — that the priest yelled “Allahu Akbar ,” that he made a lewd hand

gesture. . . claims that have been widely refuted.

What really happened is this: The Greek priest, Father Alexios Marakis, was visiting Florida for the

purpose of blessing another priest. He got lost while driving, and pulled over to ask for help. He

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was dressed in a robe and did not speak English very well, so the Marine, Jasen Bruce (who is

sticking to his story and refuses to apologize) got freaked out and beat the crap out of him.

Because he looked like a terrorist.

Which really means he looked Muslim.

Which really means he looked “Arab.”  

Which really means he looked different, and that scares white people.

The Inner Orientalist in Every American

I don’t know exactly what it is about white Americans. . . I can say,

from anecdotal personal experience, that Europeans and other white

 people traveling throughout the Middle East and North Africa often

make silly orientalist comments, and I’m fully aware of the idioticBritish BNP (and other European right-wing parties) that would

happily rid Europe of all Muslims. However, there seems to be a

special kind of ignorance amongst white Americans when it comes to

Muslims and Arabs. It goes something like this:

They don‟t know the difference between “Muslim” and“Arab.”Remember last year during one of  John McCain’s town hall

meetings when a middle-aged white woman objected to Obama by

saying, “ but he’s-he’s-an ARAB!”? It was obvious to many of us that

what she really meant to object to was his religion — after all, it was

 part of the zany right-wing public debate at the time — but instead

she just somehow got confused and cried “Arab.” You know, because

it doesn’t really matter right? Which brings us to McCain’s response .

. . “No, he’s not, ma’am, he’s a DECENT family man.” As if being an

“Arab” disqualifies a man from being a decent family man. Which

leads to:

They think “Muslim” and “good person” are mutually

exclusive. McCain was quite aware that the woman meant to say

“Muslim” and yet chose to defend Obama not just by saying “No,

ma’am he’s not,” but also by feeling compelled to add “he’s a decent

family man.” The implication? That one cannot be both an Arab (or 

Muslim, since that’s what we all know the woman meant) and a good

man. I often hear comments about how obesity is the last acceptable

 prejudice in this country, but I’d like to argue that Islamophobia is far 

more widespread and accepted. Can you imagine if white people

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 blatantly still said such horrible things about black people? It’s

completely unheard of in many parts of the United States for someone

to say “nigger ,” but “sandnigger ”? In many places in this country,

that’s totally okay. 

They don‟t realize that most Muslims aren‟t Arab.Going back to

the first point, the imagery of what it means to be Muslim in the

United States is so tied in with our images of  Saudi Arabia and the

Gulf (not even the Arab world on the whole!) that even on

 progressive blogs, you will often see people refer in blanket terms to

Muslim women’s dress as “the burqa.” What they don’t seem to

realize is that the countries with the largest Muslim population are all

in Asia (where, mind you, women don’t even wear the burqa), and not

Arab at all!They mistake non-Muslims and non-Arabs for Muslims andArabs. In the years since 9/11(though before as well), many groups

have become collateral damage in racist attacks againstArabs and

Muslims in the U.S. Iranians, Greeks, Sikhs, Hindus, and sometimes,

anyone with a beard seems to be a target.

They think “Middle Eastern” is a race. Except on the census. While

the region also known as the Middle East and North Africa is often

referred to as “the Arab world,” the latter is somewhat of a misnomer and more accurately refers to a shared language (kind of like the way

Latino is often used). From Morocco to Saudi Arabia, there are Arabs,

 but there are also Amazigh (Berbers), Moors, Bedouins, and plenty of 

other native groups that prefer not to be referred to as “Arab.” But

when they come to the United States, it doesn’t matter anyway, as

they’re expected to check the “White” box. . . imagine arriving

from Mauritania, on the continent of Africa, and being told you can’t

check the “African-American” box. True story. They assume that all Arabs are Muslim. I love this one. . . It never 

ceases to amaze me the blanket statements made about “that part of 

the world,” and “their practices.” Nevermind the native Coptic, 

Maronite, and Orthodox Christian populations, the converts, the Jews,

the Druze, the Zoroastrians, the Baha’i. And if on the off chance you

do meet someone who is aware of those other populations, they’re

still likely to try to convince you that they’re those populations are all

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oppressed by the Muslims, anyway. Which brings me to my last and

most important point.

They pretend it‟s not racism. So, Islam is not a race, and to many,

“Arab” isn’t either. . . It doesn’t matter: there is plenty of evidence of 

racism against all of the aforementioned groups. In fact, there’s

significant evidence to suggest that systematic racism is practiced

against Muslims and those with Muslim or Arab-sounding names

(regardless of actual faith) in a number of places. This BBC

article discusses the racist practice of not hiring Arabs and Muslims

 based on name alone (in France). Though I’m not aware of any study,

I’ve seen the same happen in the U.S. And the exclusion of North

Africans from being qualified as “African-American” on the census

and on scholarship applications (again, they’re supposed to check the“white” box) means they’re doubly discriminated against: Not really

white, but not non-white enough to benefit from certain programs.

Next Page: The Pity of Assumptions 

The Middle East and the West: Misunderstandings and

Stereotypes

Katerina Dalacoura

East and West: Prejudices and Stereotypes

The impact of 11 September on the relationship between the West and

the Middle East has for 

the most part been negative, but positive developments may also arise

from the crisis in the

long run. The present brief analysis is an attempt to explore this

relationship and shed some

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light on its implications for world affairs.

Suspicion of the unknown

11 September hardened prejudices and

encouraged stereotyping on both the Western

and Middle Eastern sides. In the Middle East

the West has typically been perceived as an

imperial and often arrogant master at the

 political, economic and the cultural levels. The

culture of conspiracy theories that permeates

Middle Eastern politics commonly describes

the West as the instigator of plots and the

invisible 'mover' of events. The history of 

colonial domination in the nineteenth century,

followed by mandate semi-colonialism in the

interwar period, left deep suspicion towards

European powers, especially Britain and

France. The Cold War confrontation between

the United States and the Soviet Union, which was played out to some

extent in the Middle

East, meant that ulterior motives were imputed to the actions and

alliances of the superpowers

in the region. US interest in the survival of Israel and in the constant

flow of oil at low prices

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also meant that the US was seen as a self-interested actor in all its

activities in the region. Since

the end of the Cold War, the emergence of pax Americana has led to

an exaggerated view of 

the degree to which the US can dominate the region and produce

desired outcomes. This is

deeply resented by local people, especially the Arabs and Persians,

and has contributed to the

explosion of Islamist politics in the region over the last twenty-oddyears.

This relationship, in turn, is also characterised by suspiciousness and

misgivings towards the

Middle East. There are those who argue that the Middle East has

always been laden with a

sense of threat for European societies, a sense that developed with theOttoman incursions into

European space and was strengthened by the centuries-long conflict

 between Christianity and

Islam. There has also been an element of the 'mysterious' and the

'unknown' in Western

conceptions of the 'Orient' that developed in the nineteenth century as

Europeans explored and

FEMA

Ground zero: the remains of the world trade centre

following the September 11 attacks. These attacks deeply

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affected East-West relations.colonised the Middle Eastern region. But

it is difficult to ascertain the extent to which such

lingering notions shape the current perspective on the Middle East in

Western societies. More

directly relevant is the impact of political events over recent decades.

The shock of the oil price

rises of the 1970s that rocked the world economy is combined, in

Western consciousness, with

images of violence and terrorism--hijackings, hostage-taking, bombings--emanating from the

region. Such violence gradually changed in form from nationalist to

religious, the latter having

a symbolic start with the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The World

Trade Centre attack in New

York in 1993, the terrorist attacks in France in 1995 and the massiveexplosions detonated

against the US embassies in Nairobi in Kenya and Dar-es-Salaam in

Tanzania in 1998 were all

attributed to Islamist extremists, with the latter specifically attributed

to Osama bin Laden.

The impact of 11 September 

11 September accentuated the negative aspects of the Western-Middle

Eastern relationship on

 both sides. Despite the insistence on the part of Western governments

that they have no quarrel

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with Islam as such, but rather with the extremist exponents of it, the

sense among Western

 publics that Islam is exceptional in its anti-Western animus increased.

The 11 September 

attacks caused the United States to spring into action, hence the

campaign in Afghanistan to

overthrow the Taliban protectors of bin Laden and uproot Al Qaeda.

This in turn hardened the

sense on the part of many Middle Easterners that the West has aspecifically anti-Muslim

agenda. This sense of victimisation grew because the post-11

September crisis coincided with

the upsurge in the violence of the second Palestinian intifada and the

Israeli response to it. The

cycle of violence led to desperation about the continuing failure of Western states to apply

 pressure on Israel to end the occupation. It will increase even more

over the next few months if 

the US attacks Iraq to overthrow the regime of Saddam Hussein.

The 11 September crisis galvanised the West and

specifically the US into a 'War against Terrorism'. But

the war is being pursued on the basis of a dangerous

simplification. This essentially consists of the inclusion

of different sorts of phenomena under the single label

'terrorism'. Terrorism can be defined as 'the

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indiscriminate targeting of civilians for a political

 purpose'. But although we rightly define terrorism by

the means it uses (terrorism is a method), we should

also take into consideration the causes behind the

 phenomenon and the aims pursued by it. Such

understanding does not excuse or justify terrorism. It

simply enhances our ability to deal with it properly.

This has not happened in the post-11 September Middle

Eastern context. The result is that different sets of 

 phenomena--Al Qaeda activities, Palestinian terrorism in the context

of the second intifada, the

activities of Hizbullah in Lebanon, and the possible development of 

weapons of mass

destruction by Iraq and Iran--have all been 'thrown together' under 

one label. What should take

the place of such a simplification?

Thinking Points

• Do you think that the

image the Middle East

and the West have had

of each other has any

 justification or basis in

reality?

7/29/2019 Despite Improvement

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/despite-improvement 18/18

• How would you modify

the respective

stereotypes?