Common root of Islamophobia

INLSA

Muhammad Kazi

A 25-year-old man, Muhammad Kazi, walks to a restaurant in Magaliesburg. He is taunted because he has a beard, and is called a terrorist. He takes issue with being called a terrorist. He is beaten and later dies, apparently as a result of his injuries.

On the other side of the world in Wisconsin in the US, six people are gunned down because they have beards and wear turbans. Because they look Muslim. They are not even Muslims. But they are killed for looking like Muslims, for looking like terrorists.

Everyone has condemned these acts as senseless killings, but why and how has it come to this? In the land of Empire and in the Cradle of Humankind, do these expressions of Islamophobic barbarism have a common root?

The human being is a seeker of peace, love and justice and is averse to conflict, war and hatred. No one is born with a belief to hate another, fight with another or go to war.

If the human mind is naturally averse to conflict, how does it come to be that we have millions who are massacred and maimed? How do people come to accept genocide, wars, slaughters and holocausts?

Before embarking on a campaign of mass pillage, plunder and slaughter, the aggressor constructs the enemy as the other “primitive, uncivilised, smelly, stupid, degenerate and dangerous” – to create, in the public mind, the fear and hatred of the “other” enemy.

Anser Mehmood (right, centre) was assaulted together with his friend, Muhammad Kazi. Kazi died after the men were attacked in Magaliesburg by people who called him Osama Bin Laden because of his beard. In the front on the right are Kazis brothers, Mohammed Farhan Kazi (right) and Mohmed Nuaman Kazi, at the Krugersdorp Magistrates Court where the accused killers appeared.

INLSA

The aggressor extricates every element of humaness from the “other”; makes the “other” appear inhuman and subhuman. The “other” is portrayed as another race from another place. Another planet. Alien. To be feared. To be hated. To be eliminated.

The “founding fathers” of white America did this to the Native Americans. Then they went on the slaughter and practically annihilated the native population.

Nazi Germany presented Jewish people as racially inferior, poison, vermin and subhuman. They were sent to concentration camps and gas chambers where millions died atrocious deaths.

Colonialism did this to the colonised black people in Africa and Asia. The “native” was constructed as stupid, lazy, evil, heathen, sexually depraved, morally repugnant, animal-like, apelike and inhuman. Millions were enslaved, brutally oppressed and mercilessly massacred.

South Africans are all too familiar with the history of colonialism and apartheid, swart gevaar and rooi gevaar.

For the past three decades, political elites from imperial and capitalist nation states and their embedded media industry have consistently been churning and chanting the mantra of the “Muslim terrorist”.

This compulsive and obsessive tendency of synonymously equating terrorism with Islam has had devastating effects, with the image of the Muslim terrorist deeply entrenched in the public mind. To the extent that when you think terrorist, you think Muslim and only Muslim.

“I used to watch Highway Patrol whittlin’ with my knife, but the thought never struck me I’d be black and white for life.” In this song, Mideast Vacation, the lyrics of Neil Young allude to the power of establishment media. Television “black and white”, influencing and producing public opinion, constructing and perpetuating stereotypes of the “enemy”, the “other”.

In this specific context, the other is the “Mideaster”, the Arab and the Muslim.

Today, with precision-guided technology, the stereotypical image of the Arab and Muslim terrorist enters through television sets, invading dining rooms and bedrooms of people the world over.

We are presented with the stereotype of the born-hating, bomb-strapping, blood-seeking, school-bombing, sword-wielding, bead-chanting, dim-witted, cowardly and harem-living Arab.

Since its inception, Hollywood has negatively stereotyped Arabs and Muslim in productions such as The Sheik (1921), The Mummy (1932), Cairo (1942), Steel Lady (1953), Exodus (1960) and Black Stallion (1979).

It was, however, in the 1980s and after politically significant global events such as the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Islamic Revolution in Iran, which ousted the US client Reza Pahlavi’s regime, that Hollywood went into overkill with the productions that featured the subject of the “Muslim terrorist”.

Arabs and Muslims, apart from the usual verbal vulgarisms of “terrorist” and “extremist”, have been denigrated in establishment media productions. What effect does this have on the public mind?

When F16s and drones make their way into Muslim lands, when bombs are dropped on the poorest of the poor in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine, among other parts of the Arab and Muslim world, does it not play on the conscious and subconscious dimensions of the public mind that these are the “other”, lesser humans, and in the process justify the killings?

The sanctions, invasion and occupation of Iraq resulted in the loss of more than 1.5 million lives.

Imperialists and capitalists, no matter how many millions they kill, will never in mainstream discourse be referred to as terrorists.

When the US went on the rampage, slaughtering hundreds of thousands of civilians in Vietnam, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Grenada, Libya, Panama, Sudan, Somalia and Afghanistan, there was never a whisper of imperialist terrorism or free-market terrorism.

Terrorism is linguistically loaded with a power character. It is used by those who have power to refer to the powerless. In the 1970s and early 1980s, it was used predominantly to describe leftist and national liberation movements.

Today and for the past three decades, the word terrorist is used by the establishment to describe Arabs and Muslims.

You were a communist terrorist because you were left-handed, now you are a Muslim terrorist because you are bearded.

* Suleman is a Durban-based human rights lawyer.