Page 225 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

0 | Islam and the Med a

that unseated the pro-Western Shah. In reality, it was a popular uprising sparked
by many factors including the Shah’s rampant corruption and use of intimida-
tion and violence to silence critics. Workers, women, students, and other forces
held demonstrations and strikes to demand economic and political justice. Kho-
meini was able to finally assert control of the movement two years later, and
only because he proved most adept at maneuvering between the various forces.
Yet, in the United States this popular uprising was seen as a medieval yearning
on the part of the Iranian people to found an Islamist state. When students took
over the U.S. embassy in Tehran and held U.S. personnel hostage in response to
the United States giving sanctuary to the Shah, they were presented as violent,
dangerous, and virulently anti-American. Two images that were used frequently
by the news media were angry mobs burning U.S. flags, and the stern face of the
bearded and turbaned Ayatollah Khomeini.
Images of Islam as violent and dangerous were exacerbated by domestic
events, particularly media depictions of the Nation of Islam during their in-
volvement in civil rights protests in the United States. News reports in the late
1950s and 1960s, such as Mike Wallace’s report for CBS, The Hate That Hate
Produced, often constructed The Nation of Islam’s message as one of hate, intol-
erance, and “revenge,” and their spokespersons Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad,
and later Louis Farrakhan as dangerous and irrational radicals. Thus, even far
from the shores of the Middle East, Islam was viewed with suspicion and de-
picted as wedded to a philosophy of conflict. Furthermore, since the civil rights
era, media reports and retrospectives have often belittled the Nation of Islam’s
prominent role in the struggle for racial equality, and have marginalized their
voice in American politics.
However, not all parties of political Islam were viewed as irrational and
dangerous. This is because at various points the United States has supported
Islamist groups when they have proved as effective means to weaken left-
ist and secular groups. For instance, the United States supported the Muslim
Brotherhood in Egypt and viewed the group as a bulwark against the secular
nationalist President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Similarly, when the Soviet Union
invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the United States supported, trained, and funded
the Islamist Mujahideen fighters. The film, Rambo III, is dedicated to the Muja-
hideen “freedom fighters.”

MusliM Bad guys

The Islamic “bad guy” has become a stock character in Hollywood television and film. More
recently, it is the pervasive image of the Arab terrorist that we see, in films such as True Lies
and The Siege and in television shows such as 24. But even before the terrorist depiction,
there were films such as Midnight Express that suggested a cultural disposition and pro-
clivity toward violence, repression, and injustice by stranding the protagonists in a Turkish
prison, where torture and chaos reign. Disney’s Aladdin even begins with a song whose lyrics
note of Arabia, “They cut off your ear / If they don’t like your face. / It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s
home.” The Hollywood association between Muslims and danger has become so solidified