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Chapter 5 The Security Spotlight and the Conduct of Everyday Life T HE GOVERNMENT’S measures directed at Arab and Muslim American communities were conducted with widespread public acquiescence, if not approval, according to the opinion poll data cited in previous chapters, although in the context of organized dissent. Public consent was built to a significant degree on fears that another attack might occur, perpetrated by terrorist sleeper cells hiding within Arab and Muslim American communities. This narrative was articulated more than once by U.S. government officials, who actually knew very little about who and what they were dealing with. Popular consent for aggressive collective policies was also built on the successful leveraging of widely held public understandings that Arabs and Muslims have some kind of inherent leaning toward violence and terrorism and that those who do not actively engage in violence probably silently support it. This interpretation of reality was constructed at the convergence of awareness of the increasing number of objective acts of violence occurring outside the United States (focused on those perpetrated by a small minority of Arabs and Muslims) and the meaning that was ascribed to these acts by journalists, “experts,” policy analysts, talk-show hosts, pundits, Muslim haters, and others who by design or default portrayed these acts as irrational yet characteristic of Arab culture and the Muslim religion. Notions such as these had been graphically reinforced in the American media and popular culture through images that represented Arab and Muslim life principally through portrayals of evil men and mob scenes contextualized by themes of anger, violence, and rote behavior (Joseph 1999). Such scenes conveyed the idea that Arab and Muslim societies lack the capacity for individuality, diversity , rational thought, or choice and instead are characterized by widespread organic solidarity and collective unanimity. A complementary schemata was that Arabs and Muslims lack the very human values and feelings shared by other groups, for example, that they feel joy upon 153 death. In other words, they are not like “us.” These types of ideas were bolstered by the near-absence of images of Arabs or Muslims expressing grief over something for which “we” would be sad or happiness over something for which “we” would be happy—a birth, a wedding, or a victory in a football match. The arguments of persons such as Harold Bloom (1989, 30), who claimed in an Omni magazine article that Arab culture produces terrorists because Arabs do not hold their children or show them affection (quite the opposite of common observations)—“Could the denial of warmth lie behind Arab brutality?” Bloom asks—can only appear credible , and be publishable, under conditions of selective representation, when others hold the power to define who you are. Discursive Rivalries Using terms from Gary Fine’s (1996) model of discursive rivalry, preexisting discursive and representational framing of Arabs and Muslims empowered the post-9/11 narratives that cast suspicion on Arab and Muslim American communities at large. Public figures from Arab American, Muslim American, and other communities who tried to offer counternarratives, especially about Islam as a religious faith, were impugned by groups that had greater resources and power and that labeled them terrorist supporters who were not credible.1 The time period immediately after the attacks was one in which many respected mainstream voices were apprehensive about standing up in support of counterinterpretations because the stigma and political costs attached to such an action were high. President Bush’s (2001) September 20 statement to Congress, in which he directed his words to the world’s Muslims— “We respect your faith. It’s practiced freely by many millions of Americans, and by millions more in countries that America counts as friends. Its teachings are good and peaceful, and those who commit evil in the name of Allah blaspheme the name of Allah”—was an important act of leadership, but his expressions of such sentiments were often drowned out by his far more emotive appeals to anger and fear. Bush’s subsequent statements invoking the theme “why do they hate us?” seemed to carry much more media traction. Under these discursive conditions , the stereotype (so named because it assigns to all group members complicity in the acts of a few) was positioned well to drive social action after 9/11. Arabs and Muslims in the United States became spotlighted stereotypic subjects, and it could be claimed by those holding power that they were really a group of people whose intentions were “unknown...

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