Justification of war & discrimination with the weapon of Islamophobia: Some views

Pars Today- The United States of America, after the disintegration of the Eastern bloc, has looked for an alien to confront with and sought to redefine an international role for itself. Thus, Islamophobia desired by American politicians, has been highlighted via the products of Hollywood.

Islamophobia, offspring of colonialists' thought

Ehsan Azarkamand, Manager of Art, Communications and Cyberspace Section of the IRIB Islamic Research Department, says, "Islamophobia is the offspring of the colonialists' thought in the Western countries." According to this media researcher, fear of Islam began in the recent century with tarnishing of political Islam. It means that when modernist and intellectual movements were shaped in the elite community of world Muslims and different countries, the West pursued this wave of Islamophobia. In fact, some people thought that if Muslims succeed to restore their identity with the current trend, criteria and indexes, it will cause a very great danger for the Western countries.

The US leadership in Islamophobia

Bashir Esmaili, a university scientific board member, says on the vital need of politicians to the existence of an enemy, "With the disintegration of the bipolar system, the arena of international relations and the US foreign policy thereof, as the sole remaining superpower, was faced with the crisis of meaning and identity."

At this time, some American thinkers made a lot of efforts to present an alternative for communism in a bid to direct foreign policy, but none of these cases was as effective as the 9, 11, 2001 incident to clarify and conceptualize it in the field of foreign policy.

The American statesmen, exploiting this incident in the aftermath of disintegration of communism and the era of perplexity in foreign policy, presented a new strategy and enforced it widely in the world. Suspicious terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 to the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon changed the Americans' view on themselves and the world forever. These attacks set the ground for the formation of a system of values in the US domestic and foreign policy, a ground to justify Islamophobia.

Axes of introducing Islam in Hollywood

Ali Darabi, a university professor and media expert, has mentioned the following points as axes of Islamophobia focused by Hollywood and considered as media diplomacy stronghold for the US:

1.     Introducing of Islam as a fixed, monolithic and irreparable structure

2.    Islam is introduced as a separate and alien entity which has no common value with other cultures.

3.    It is insinuated that Islam enjoys an inferior status in comparison to the Western culture.

4.    Islam is defined as a political ideology which is used only for political and military purposes.

    The Islamophobic view maintains that, due to these reasons, discriminatory actions are justified against Muslims and it also believes that Islam, by nature, threatens the West and its values.

Methods used by Hollywood in psychological war against Islam

Seyyed Hossein Sharafoddin, member of Imam Khomeini University's scientific board, explains the methods used by Hollywood in the field of Islamophobia as follows, "Among their destructive stratagems are: resorting to calumny, insult, humiliation, and implicit and explicit ridicule. Obviously, these insinuations, owing to the variety of formats, plurality of issues, diversity of processions, repeatability of appendices and usage of appendices, will gradually penetrate into the subconscious of the audience and create a kind of mental conditionality and reminiscence of concepts in his perception system."

Hatred towards Muslims

Arezoo Marali, explaining the pattern of "Dominant Hatred" in the field of inter-cultural relations by Tehran University lecturer, Dr. Saeed Reza Ameli, says, "Dominant narratives in the Western society promote hatred. As for Muslims, this climate of hatred is being created by Hollywood, rules, policymaking, education and media in the West. As in the entertainment industry, Muslims are introduced as sub-human individuals with weird religious beliefs who chant, "Allahu Akbar" (God is the Greatest). And also the introducing of Iranians, Pakistanis, etc. has been there, with hackneyed ways, nearly since the emergence of film industry."

She continues, "What has taken place so far, is that they have passed the depiction [of Muslims] as "subhuman", and they have shown instead that somebody dies in the end of the film and everybody is happy with his death. Now, they are promoting the culture of violence against a special stratum. Perhaps, when the film "American Sniper" was screened, no one would say that the aim of the filmmakers was to encourage the Canadian people to kill Muslims, but now, we see that after the presentation of the film, at least in the US and Canada, cases have been reported in which people in the streets shoot at Muslims and exactly execute Muslims like a sniper. It was not the American Sniper who initiated these actions, but it was rather setting the ground and introducing of Muslims as non-human that triggered this project.

RM/UR