Page 224 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

Islam and the Med a | 0

practices of conceiving and creating ideas about Islam, argues that this image
of Islam has little to do with reality and the ways in which Islam is practiced
around the world, and more to do with the justifications that were needed by
various empires to continue their domination of the region. Islam and the West
were counter posed as two separate and distinct entities. In this rhetoric, the
West is associated with freedom, democracy, women’s rights, liberty, civiliza-
tion, and Christianity. The world of Islam, its polar opposite, is seen as evil, bar-
baric, uncivilized, unscientific, and home to a people who hate freedom and
are irrational. Thus, it was argued that the superior West should colonize and
civilize the backward peoples of the world of Islam.
Said also argued that the common caricature of Islam created a sense of
regional identity for Europe and the West, via a process known as othering,
whereby an individual or group takes all the qualities that they do not wish to
be associated with them and attaches these to another individual or group, al-
lowing a seeming contrast to be constructed that flatters the individual or group
doing the othering. This false binary was particularly convenient for colonizing
forces in drawing attention away from their own systematized acts of barbarism
and of suppressing and denying personal freedoms that regularly accompanied
the process of colonization and control.

ThE 1970s: ThE oiL Crisis anD ThE iranian rEvoLuTion

The Orientalist view of the Middle East was one among many within the
academy and the media. However, since the 1970s it has become the dominant
perspective. And since the events of September 11, 2001 it has received a further
boost. In the 1970s, two events set the stage for how the Middle East would be
understood in the United States. The first was the oil crisis of 1973–74 and the
second was the Iranian revolution of 1979. Before the oil embargo instituted by
the Oil Producing and Exporting Countries (OPEC), the term Islam barely ex-
isted in the culture and in the media. When, all of a sudden, oil prices rose pre-
cipitously it was a sharp reminder that oil and energy resources were not “ours”
for the taking but rather, according to the rhetoric of the time, were controlled
by irrational Muslim men in white robes. Various films, such as Network, drew
on this theme of rich and powerful sheiks out to control the United States and
the world.
Following this event, coverage of the Middle East focused on various cri-
ses in the region. The world of Islam, which had largely been marginal to the
media, became news worthy in the context of political crises. These included
the civil war in Lebanon, the war between Ethiopia and Somalia, the Soviet
invasion of Afghanistan, and perhaps most importantly the Arab-Israeli con-
flict. With the United States squarely in Israel’s camp, the Palestinian struggle
for national liberation came to be viewed through the rubric of terrorism. The
news and entertainment media would largely reflect the view held by political
elites.
The most dramatic event, however, that thrust Islam into the spotlight was the
1979 Iranian revolution, which brought the Muslim cleric Ayatollah Khomeini
to power. The media presented the revolution as a religiously driven movement