Page - 191 - in Media – Migration – Integration - European and North American Perspectives

Kenneth Starck | Perpetuating Prejudice 191 rich pool of resources for anyone wishing to carry out a more extensive review of the literature. Let us begin with a few general observations. In his seminal work exploring the relationship between culture and imperialism, the late Edward W. Said (1993) noted that media mold and manipulate perceptions and political attitudes. Since 1967 (year of the Six-Day War, also known as the 1967 Arab-Israeli War), he wrote that the Western press representation of the Arab world was “crude, reductionist, coarsely racialist”, all of which, he noted, had been well documented earlier (p. 36). Despite this earlier documentation, film and television continued to portray Arabs as “sleazy, ‘camel-jockeys,’ terrorists, and offensively wealthy ‘sheikhs’” (p. 36). Not much changed up to or during the first Gulf War. Media rallied behind the first President George Bush and devoted little attention to dealing with the political, social, and cultural developments in the Arab world. The same thing appears to have occurred with the second President George W. Bush’s incursion into Iraq. Said, who died in 2003 and is still recognized as one of the most profound scholars of East-West thought, was a severe and early critic of the media. Though focusing primarily on Islam, his ideas concerning Western attitudes toward the Middle East resonate in any discussion of Arab communities in general. In an introduction to a later edition of what has become at least a minor classic, Covering Islam, Said accused journalists of “making extravagant statements, which are instantly picked up and further dramatized by the media” (1981, p. xvi). Further, he argued journalists were only part of an inter- related apparatus that included the academy and government, all of which were driven mainly by politics rather than by truth or accuracy. That media and government reciprocate in depicting the Middle East is perhaps nowhere more evident than in several addresses delivered by President Bush immediately following the events of September 11, 2001. Merskin found that the speeches turned popular cultural depictions of people of Arab and Middle East descent into a rhetoric that then drew upon the “collective consciousness to revivify, reinforce, and ratify the Arab as terrorist stereotype” (2004, p. 172). In constructing the enemy’s image, President Bush used such terms as “them”, “evil”, “those people”, “demons”, and “wanted: dead or alive” in references to people of Arab and Middle Eastern descent. Merskin found stereotypical characterizations of Arabs and Middle Easterners in a wide array of media, from news to magazine stories, from cartoons to movies. While President Bush appeared to be speaking mainly about non-U.S. citizens, as Merskin notes, the remarks could not help but register with the millions of Arab Americans. What is the danger of ethnic stereotyping? Shaheen, whose work on Arab American portrayals in films, put it well in one of his early works: “Ethnic