The Making of the Arab Menace

Anti-Arabism and Islamophobia are so much a part of the political and cultural discourse on Arabs and Muslims in American society today that most do not even recognize it as racism. The fear mongering of the Bush administration and the right wing media pundits who make a living from demonizing Arabs and Muslims have inundated people with images of the violent Arabs bent on death and destruction. For media outlets like Fox Television, it is a way to sell their sensationalist news programs and for the current administration, a way to sell its wars.
The green menace has replaced the red menace, and the “evil empire” of the cold war has become the less eloquent, but just as deadly, “evil doers” of the Arab and Muslim world. People like Daniel Pipes and Bernard Lewis, who have a long history of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab sentiments, have been elevated from their illegitimate positions of “Middle East experts” to foreign policy advisors. 

Remarking on Muslim immigrants, Pipes said, “all immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most.” On the Arab-Israeli conflict he said, the “Israelis must be encouraged to defeat the Palestinians” because the only way to peace is for Israel to militarily crush the will of the Palestinians to fight. Apparently these remarks seemed to be in line with the administration’s policies because last year President Bush nominated Pipes to the board of the United States Institute of Peace, a government-sponsored think tank dedicated to “peaceful resolution of international conflicts.”

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El-Amine echoes the Islamists line. If ANYONE knows about demonizing, it is they, the Islamists. They are experts at demonizing and dehumanizing the rest of us using techniques that are centuries old. Taking their justification from the Koran, Islamists take the demonization of non-Muslims to the extreme and other more "benign" Muslims, benign only because they don't rabidly denunciate or commit acts of violence. But they do hold non-Muslims in disdain, taking to heart the maxim, "hate them for their unbelief."

Extremism is on the rise, bolstered by the tacit approval or at least non-cooperation by more pacific Muslims with the authorities that are trying to stamp out this more virulent strain. Secretly in their heart of hearts, the majority of Muslims want an Islamic world that would only be the result of a capitulation of non-Muslims through war, mass "reversion," or annihilation. This doesn't seem very friendly -- no “live and let live,” no toleration of the other, or no "there is no compulsion in religion."

Muslims demonize non-Muslims in their hearts as they "hate them for their disbelief" and refuse to assimilate in infidel societies in their countries into which they remove themselves from Muslim lands. Some are passive/aggressive, others quietly work to bring about the Islamic takeover through demographics, and others, impatient to affect the change, scream their denunciations over the airwaves and carry out suicide bombings and threaten even worse.

Is it the West demonizes and has a double standard? Such hypocrisy!!!!