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100 4 Regulating Sympathy for the Muslim Man We learned a good lesson on September 11: that there is evil in this world. And it is my duty as the president of the United States to use the resources of this great nation, a freedom-loving nation, a compassionate nation, a nation that understands values of life and rout terrorism out where it exists. . . . The evil ones have sparked an interesting change in America, I think. A compassion in our country that is overflowing. I know their intended act was to destroy us and make us cowards and make us not want to respond. But quite the opposite has happened. Our nation is united. We are strong. We’re compassionate. —President George W. Bush, The President’s Remarks on the War on Terrorism If we really want to stop terrorism, we have to get Muslim men laid. . . . We should hire women to infiltrate Al Qaeda cells and fuck them. Things would change quickly because young Muslim men don’t really hate America. They’re jealous of America. We have rap videos and the Hilton sisters and magazines with titles like Barely Legal. You know what’s “barely legal” in Afghanistan? Everything! . . . But the connection between no sex and anger is real. It’s why prizefighters stay celibate when they’re in training, so that on fight night, they’re pissed off and ready to kill. It’s why football players don’t have sex after Wednesday. And conversely, it’s why Bill Clinton never started a war. . . . Forget the Peace Corps. We need a “Piece of Ass Corps”! Girls, there’s a cure to terrorism, and you’re sitting on it! —Bill Maher, Real Time with Bill Maher After 9/11 there were many attempts by government officials, journalists, scholars , bloggers, and citizens to explain why the terrorist attacks happened. The explanations ranged from the one offered by President Bush that there is evil in the world that must be fought by the good and compassionate United States to the one offered by TV show host Bill Maher that Muslim men simply need to “get laid.” Bush’s explanation relies on the notion that terrorism is an epic struggle between good and evil and that the terrorists hate us for our freedom. Maher’s explanation for terrorism is a variation on that theme. As opposed to being jealous of our freedom of religion and the right to speak freely, vote, and assemble (as President Bush explained in other speeches), his explanation assumes that Muslim men (as a whole) are sex-deprived and therefore susceptible to anger, which begets terrorism. Although intended for comic effect, Maher’s comment has a surprising resonance because he was not the only one to express such an idea. A professor of history wrote in the Washington Post 101 Regulating Sympathy for the Muslim Man shortly after 9/11 that “a kind of religion motivates the Taliban, but the religion in question, I’d say, is not Islam [but] insecure masculinity. These men are terrified of women.”1 In other words, terrorism is not a political problem but a sexual one. Thus one possible solution to terrorism is war and murder; another solution is to encourage sexual liberation in Muslim countries. These popular explanations, not surprisingly, bypass the far more complex possibility of a root cause (or causes) for terrorism and the far more demanding possibility that the rest of the world could address the cause(s) by instituting economic, social, or foreign policy measures. Such simplifications are not limited to describing actual people but extend to framing their actions. During the War on Terror, the government and media have used the term terrorism as a catchall for the endlessly complex realm of political violence; such terminology has in turn shaped the public discourse in at least three key ways. First, it tends to conflate all violence perpetrated by Arabs and Muslims as “terrorism” regardless of historical context or political grievance; such explanations are often depoliticized, dehistoricized, and decontextualized . The term terrorism has been used to describe an array of politically motivated violent acts, from anticolonial rebellion to Arab nationalists, from Palestinians’ suicide bombings opposing Israeli occupation to the peaceful opposition of political Islamists to U.S. involvement in the Middle East.2 The Bush administration, alongside Ariel Sharon’s administration in Israel, has described Yasir Arafat and Osama bin Laden as terrorists without distinguishing between the actions and context of each. Such a conflation demonstrates...

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