In the post Cold War, voices in the West, from politicians to journalists, identified a new enemy: a resurgent political Islam. Symbolizing this image is the Arab/ Muslim terrorist, fanatical militant fundamentalist, and revolutionary Iran armed with nuclear weapons and funding global terrorism. Articles in prestigious journals and the elite press by prominent political commentators, academics and journalists announce the threat of an aggressive, resurgent Islamic fundamentalism as the new enemy after communism.
Television viewers, not only in Europe and the US, but globally, see Israeli bodies blown up by Muslim suicide bombers, and Chechen fighters, fighting Russian troops shouting "Allahu Akbar" (God is Great). They read headline news in the press about an "Islamic" nuclear bomb allegedly being constructed by Iran and Iraq, terrorists camps in Sudan and Islamic terrorists in Algeria murdering Westerners. All these images and reports fuel alarmists concerns and dislike for everything Arab and Islamic. Existing biases, stereotypes and negative images against Arabs and Muslims for being violent, irrational, backward and confrontational are intensified through media coverage.
Trumpeting the Islamic threat is the cultural and intellectual institutions of influence and power. In the US Congressional hearings, politicians, intelligence reports and authoritative policy institutions, journals, visual and print media, have held symposia, published articles and released studies proclaiming the threat. Particularly influential in expressing the political, civilizational and demographic threat of resurgent Islam and the Muslim world were two articles: Samuel Huntington’s "Clash of Civilizations" and Bernard Lewis’s "The Roots of Muslim rage." Both have been original in defining the parameters of the debate that has gripped diplomats, policy makers, journalists and academic analysts.
It was Samuel Huntington, internationally respected professor of the Science of Government at Harvard University, more than Bernard Lewis, who provided the intellectual framework highlighting the fear of confrontation between Islam and the West. He argued, in a widely read article published in the authoritative journal, Foreign Affairs, Summer, 1993, about a coming "clash of civilizations," stating that nation states are no longer the unit of international relations. Competition and conflict will not disappear, but will be between larger units of cultures and civilizations, each composed and consisting of groups of countries. Eight major civilizations are cited, ranging from Hindu to Slav, but in Huntington’s analysis there are in fact only three reasonably clear contenders in the international arena. The first is the West, the Euro-American culture. The second is the Confucian, the ideas and culture developed along the Chinese region, and the third is Islam, which is regarded by many analysts as the only ideological competitor of the West. Huntington, furthermore, identifies a Confucian/Islamic connection "that has emerged to challenge western interests and power."
He sees civilizational conflict taking place, where "violent conflicts between groups in different civilizations are the most likely and most dangerous source of escalation that could lead to global wars." A central focus of conflict for the immediate future is between the West and several Islamic/Confucian states. Highlighting the age-old conflict between western and Islamic civilization in a post Cold War world, Huntington sees the centuries old military interaction between the West and Islam as unlikely to decline, but becoming more violent. Clearly Huntington is very provocative and influential in articulating the position of an impending conflict between the West and Islamic civilization. In his analysis, western policy makers and geostrategists, find an intellectual paradigm for their post-Cold War policies toward China, an emerging superpower, and an assertive Islam, which challenges their domination of international society and vital interests in the Middle East.
Bernard Lewis’s article "The Roots of Muslim Rage" in the Atlantic Monthly is equally provocative and sensational. It persuades the reader to view Islamic revivalism and Muslims, in its relationship with the West, in terms of rage, aggression, hate, and irrationality. Throughout the article the discussion and analysis of the contemporary Muslim world are portrayed as an angry, raging world, bent on confronting the West, because of its cultural differences, and national and international interests and priorities. About the resurgence of political Islam and its relation with the West, he says:
It should by now be clear that we are facing a mood and movement far transcending the level of issues and policies, and the governments that pursue them. This is no less that a clash of civilizations - the perhaps irrational, but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both. It is crucially important that we on our side should not be provoked into an equally historic, but also irrational reaction against that rival.
Lewis’s discussion is there to provoke, sensationalize and distort. It lacks depth and analysis, since he makes no mention of the reasons for, and diversity of, the Islamic reassertion. The diversity and difference of Muslims and their reaction to specific historical and environmental conditions are not mentioned. The 1,2 billion Muslims in the world, are lumped together, acting as if they are monolithic, regardless of ethnic, ideological and nationalistic differences. Because of Lewis’s international status as a scholar and commentator of the Middle East, the article received widespread national and international coverage, and had significant influence on how Muslims and Islam were viewed in the minds of intellectuals and the masses in the West.
Other scholars, on the other hand, do not identify political Islam as clashing with other civilizations, but more of a disruptive force in the international arena. Discussing the world after the collapse of communism, Lewis Gaddis, the Cold War historian subtly invokes the Muslim bogeyman, when he postulates that a contest in the post Cold War is between the forces of integration and fragmentation in the contemporary international environment. For him the forces of fragmentation show up in the arena of religion:
The resurgence of Islam might be seen by some as an intergrationist force in the Middle East. But it is surely fragmentation to the extent that it seeks to that particular region off from the rest of the world . One can look at Beirut as it has been for the past decade and a half and get a good sense of what the world would look if the forces of fragmentation should ultimately have their way.
The forces of fragmentation here is political Islam which he sees as a menace and disruptive to international society.
The threat extends further, especially in the context of European concerns of the complex problem of migration and immigrant Muslim communities in Europe. Writing in The National Review, Daniel Pipes hypes the Islamic threat when he focuses on Muslim immigration to the West. Drumming up fears of a demographic Muslim threat subverting western civilization from within, he sees this "demographic imbalance" as the single greatest challenge. The historical and contemporary notion of Muslim aggressiveness and confrontation is now viewed as a domestic threat with the growth of Muslim communities in the West. The World Trade Center bombing in New York, in March 1993, brought home to the American public the fears of Islamic terrorism that had reached the shores of America.
Many pundits, furthermore, hyping the threat, identify political Islam as the new communism; an international movement controlled and funded by a revolutionary Comintern in Iran. Thus the Islamic threat is further manifested in the form of the Islamic Republic of Iran who is seen as the center of Islamic terrorism and fundamentalism.
The Mass Media And Foreign Policy
The power of the media, visual and print, in conveying the notion of an Islamic threat to the American, European and a global audience must not be underestimated. The link between the media and the political elite in the US is a very complex one. Political officials in the State Department in Washington, have more access to news than the average citizen. Having the power to convert their policies into public policies, politicians and government bureaucrats compete with other elites to get their policies to the public. News professionals and organizations argues Gay Tuchman, instead of being a watchdog, if not an outright adversary of the government, serve to "legitimate the status quo, complementing one another’s reinforcement of contemporary social arrangements. Media, is a conscious industry whose main business is to sell the existing social hierarchy." The Persian Gulf War as Mowlana claims, accentuates these trends which characterizes the relationship between the communication media and international relations since the First World War:
First, the media tend to follow the norms of the state, particularly for the superpowers, and thus help to defend the status quo. Second, an emerging philosophy of wars has shifted the manipulation of public support from the domestic to the global level as total propaganda becomes a prerequisite for conducting international warfare. Third, traditional democratic institutions have declined, and two discrete sources of power and influence - the media and the government have emerged into one. Public communication channels ceased being watchdogs, abandoning their adversary relationship with officials. Given these trends, the media did not fail in reporting the Gulf War but rather succeeded in supporting the international status quo. This status quo means selling the foreign policy of the political elite, and the different administrations in the White House.
Studies by Dorman and Farhang, and Artz and Pollock demonstrate the media’s support and framing of news which supported and legitimized various United States administrations foreign policy objectives. The former show that the American media do not constitute a fourth estate, but play a role of deference. This relationship between the political elite does not mean that the former makes foreign policy, but in some important ways set the boundaries within which policy can be made. Dorman and Farhang’s study about the American media coverage of Iran demonstrate how the media followed information from State Department’s foreign policy makers, rather than exercising independent judgment in reporting the social, economic and political situation under the Shah.
When reporting about non-western cultures, and events which bears on US foreign policy, many journals and newspapers may have a bias towards non-western cultures, and can be easily susceptible to ethnocentrism, which serves the goals of policy-makers in Washington well. Writing about the Arab/Israeli conflict, Robert Thrice points out that the Arab governments and Palestinians were never able to elicit sympathy from American newspapers. Editorial, opinions, on most foreign policy issues he says, "are a function of the persuasiveness of the arguments presented by the US government, the cultural, religious and belief systems of the editorial staff, and the perceptions of the opinions of significant individuals and groups in the domestic and political environments." He further observes that the majority, if not all the editorial staff of the prestigious press come from a Judeo-Christian tradition, and journalists and editors are thus easily susceptible to ethnocentrism when covering the Third World. Reports of events in these regions are inevitably tainted with stereotypes, bias, and half truths, and in the case of the Muslim world and Islam, reporting is prejudiced by the State Department’s policy which views Islam as a danger to American interests. In many cases, journalists are also ill informed about the history, culture, socio-economic and political issues and religious beliefs of Third World nations.
As the main purveyors of information in society, the American media (print and visual) are the source where the understanding of events in Muslim world is mediated to the American public. However, as indicated above, the media sell and influence the foreign policy of the political elites, and have a bias toward non-western cultures. They can either, as Thrice observes, "be critics of the government, informers, interpreters or advocates of policy, and on occasion active participants in the policy making process itself." Therefore, instead of covering events related to Islam, the Middle East and Islamic groups objectively, and within its sociopolitical, economic and cultural context, media reports are tainted and laced with stereotypes, sensationalism, half truths and exaggeration. "Journalists," says Hadar, "have now become the transmission belt reporting about the Islamic menace and terrorism so reminiscent of Cold War propaganda campaigns."
Where editorials, articles and op-ed pieces in the media about, events in the Muslim world and Islam, reach a diverse audience, niche publications such as The Atlantic Monthly, Foreign Affairs, Commentary, National Review and the Economist reach target audiences such as students academics, policy makers, and a general well-educated reader. Hence, the word Islamic is identified with terrorism and violence, pervading all strata of society, where in most cases the western reader is uninformed or ignorant about the social, political and cultural realities of the Muslim world and tenets of Islam. Articles in prestigious publications and editorials continue to intellectualize, analyze and report the notion of an Islamic danger, a clash of civilizations (between Islam and the West), demographic explosion in Muslim countries, the threat of immigrant Muslims in Europe, Islamic terrorism and the authoritarian nature of Islamists movements.
In setting the political agenda by describing the Islamic threat, the media coined a new jargon of catch phrases, labels and cliques. Islam is described as a "cancer, authoritarian, backward, medieval, retrogressive, anti-democratic, a force meaner than communism and fascism, and the green (the color of Islam) menace." Terms such as "Islamic Bomb" give the impression of a united, irrational Muslim world bent on global dominance, threatening world peace. There are never references of a Jewish, Hindu or Confucian bomb when referring about the nuclear capabilities of Israel, India or China.
Islamic/Muslim fundamentalism is one of the most common labels describing political activity and opposition by Muslim groups against imperialism, injustice and authoritarian regimes which deny them the right to contest their political views. By now, the media equates Islam with terror and fundamentalism, so that no matter where a bomb goes off in the world, the first suspects are always Muslims or Arabs. For example, the latter and Iran were immediately accused (without any proof) of the TWA 800 plane crash off New York in June 1996, the Oklahoma bombing and the bombing at the Atlanta Olympics. Accordingly, this term conjures up images of violence, fanaticism religious extremism, rabid crowds and the subjugation of women. Social movements motivated by religion in Poland and Latin America are never described as Catholic fundamentalism, and Serbs motivated by religion and nationalism, committing genocide against Bosnian Muslims, were never called fundamentalists Christians fanatics. All these catch phrases and labels identified with Islam, Muslims and Arabs are meant to convey certain messages and images to the news audience; the grand strategy being that Muslims and Arabs are "fundamentally delinquent, irrational and violent."
Portraying the diverse events and communities in the Muslim world, which consists of 1,2 billion adherents, through this narrow lens tainted by myths, stereotypes and bias, obviously influences the Western media audience. Reporting violence associated with the Muslim world, the media consistently addresses these issues simplistically and out of context. The way in which words like extremism, fundamentalism, terrorist and militant are used interchangeably conveys the impression that there is an inherent connection between the fundamentals of Islam and violence. In a study by the University of Rochester in New York, about the portrayal of religion in the American media, statistics indicate that Islam is a high profile religion in the print media which is consistently associated with extremist militant acts, predominately "negative and misrepresentative." The study further finds that few articles address Islam as a religion that is diverse in practice and values. Objective information, and the perpetuation of myths about Islam and the Muslim world for the majority of Americans, therefore, come from a bias source: the media; and once myths become ingrained, they gain force of their own and are difficult to undo.