Re: SO WHAT!!! THEY ALL DO THAT ALL THE TIME!!! let me tell you about MY experiences with muslims..
Posted by Wymark on 7/10/2009, 7:17 pm, in reply to "Re: SO WHAT!!! THEY ALL DO THAT ALL THE TIME!!! let me tell you about MY experiences with muslims.."
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'Islamophobia' meanwhile, I am fine with - I see it in more positive terms though as a wholesale rejection of Cultural Relativism, which I abhor.
That really is akin to saying ''Anti-semitism' meanwhile, I am fine with'. They're both irrational prejudices based on hatred of, and suspicion towards, a certain religion and it's adherents. For no other reason than that they follow that religion. And their proponents usually try and justify them by highlighting instances of Muslims or Jews behaving badly, or flagging up the more extremist/fundamentalist groups within the religion, and then generalising from there, as though the instances are typical.
Ultimately, it leads to discrimination, violence against these minority groups, and even murder. I don't find it difficult to understand how once progressive people can come to endorse such dangerous, racist tripe, though. Not in the current climate of hysteria against Muslims, so that, according to a study by the University of Cardiff:
- Four of the five most common discourses used about Muslims in the British press associate Islam/Muslims with threats, problems or in opposition to dominant British values.
- The idea that Islam is dangerous, backward or irrational is present in 26% of stories. By contrast, only 2% of stories contained the proposition that Muslims supported dominant moral values.
- We found that the most common nouns used in relation to British Muslims were terrorist, extremist, Islamist, suicide bomber and militant, with very few positive nouns (such as ‘scholar’) used. The most common adjectives used were radical, fanatical, fundamentalist, extremist and militant. Indeed, references to radical Muslims outnumber references to moderate Muslims by 17 to one.
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- The visual representation of Muslims reflects the portrayals described in the content analysis. We found a widespread use of police mugshots used in the portrayal of Muslim men (with all the negative associations these carry), while two of the most common venues used for images of Muslim men were outside police stations and law courts.
- We also found that Muslims are often identified simply as Muslims rather than as individuals or particular groups with distinct identities. So, for example, Muslims are much less likely than non-Muslims to be identified in terms of their job or profession, and much more likely to be unnamed or unidentified (especially in groups).
- Decontextualisation, misinformation and a preferred discourse of threat, fear and danger, while not uniformly present, were strong forces in the reporting of British Muslims in the UK national press.
http://www.channel4.com/news/media/pdfs/Muslims_under_siege_LR.pdf
People are constantly bombarded with images of Muslims as backwards, sexist, violent, irrational, etc (it helps facilitate murdering in them in their hundreds of thousands as part of the 'war on terror'), even though the reality is quite different.
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