American Sniper Rhetorical Analysis

U.S. Navy SEAL ,Chris Kyle was just the average die hard Texan. He aspired to become a cowboy, but it wasn’t working out in his favor. After seeing the horrors of terrorism on 9/11 he was ready to fight for his country and enlisted into the military. He goes on to fight in four tours and becomes the deadliest sniper in American history. After each tour, he felt that he had to go back. He had two goals that he couldn’t give up on; protecting his team and taking out the deadliest enemy sniper, Mustafa. Chris would not stop until he achieved his goals, when he finally did, he faced a new battle. He struggled with normal daily life, but even then he persevered and found a new passion to aid him. Throughout this film, Clint Eastwood portrays the theme of perseverance through the use of setting, camera angles, and the main character Chris Kyle.

Guns are vital in today’s society, dividing the country, especially families with debates over the use of guns. Sarah Vowell is a citizen who disagrees with the use of guns, talking about her experience with a gun and her family in her essay “Shooting Dad”. Using many rhetorical techniques in her essay, she sends a message within her story, telling the audience reading her story that guns are not worth it. Vowell’s use of many different techniques helps the story come to life, explaining her life with guns around and how someone gets weak when someone has a gun around.

While reading, Shooting Dad, I have notice that Vowell uses multiple hyperboles to develop a humorous tone. She included a hyperbole like,'' shooting crows is a national pastime, like baseball and apple pie,'' because it demonstrates a sense of exaggeration stating , in a playful tone, that many people shot crows just to waste time. Vowell also exaggerates about her home being compared to a Civil War by explain that, by looking at her home, you can already see "the Democratic campaign poster in the upstairs window and the Republican one in the downstairs window." This expresses the text in a humorous yet ironic tone which capture readers attention to continue forward and have a sense of completion.

Islamic stereotypes are not new to Western culture. Problems can be traced back to the time of the Crusades, when Christians and Muslims were vying for control of Jerusalem. At

When discussing 9/11, the author writes about Post-9/11 America seemed determined: “Never Again.” Despite important differences, genocide and terrorism share one important feature, which is that both parget civilian populations. This led the author to ask, “To what extend is the mind-set of the perpetrators revealed by the way they frame their victims culturally (Mamdani, 11)?” The debate on this question turns around the relationship between cultural and political identity and in the context of 9/11, between religious fundamentalism and political terrorism. The ideas the author raised in the Good Muslim, Bad Muslim section, stuck out to me the most. Mamdani explained that President Bush moved to distinguish between “good Muslims” and “bad Muslims.” From the “bad Muslims” point of view, they were obviously responsible for terrorism and at the same time, Bush seemed to assure Americans that “good Muslims” were anxious to clear their names and consciences of this horrible crime and would undoubtable support “us” in a war against “them.” This doesn’t hide the central message of the discourse that unless proved to be “good,” every Muslim was presumed to be “bad.” All Muslims were now obligated to prove their credentials by joining in a war against “bad Muslims (Mamdani, 15).” This part of the reading really got me thinking about

“The American Sniper” by Chris Kyle is an account of the deadliest American sniper ever, called “the devil” by the enemies he hunted and “the legend” by his Navy SEAL brothers. From 1999 to 2009, U.S. Navy SEAL Chris Kyle recorded the most career sniper kills in United States military history. The Pentagon has officially confirmed more than 150 of Kyle's kills (the previous American record was 109). Iraqi insurgents feared Kyle so much they named him al-Shaitan (“the devil”) and placed a bounty on his head. Kyle earned legendary status among his fellow SEALs, Marines, and U.S. Army soldiers, whom he protected with deadly accuracy from rooftops and stealth positions. Kyle presents the gripping and unforgettable accounts of

Foreign and domestic policies are not linear, rather the policies are connected in a circle, with each policy reinforcing the values of another. Domestic American terrorism in the prison and detention systems and governmental reforms are influenced by the mobilization and ethnocentrism abroad. The militarization internationally is justified by the domestic handling of the same cultural issues within the United State borders. The United States has strangely used a near Catch-22 to handle dilemmas. The United States has allowed perspective to become reality, whether with oneself or regarding issues abroad, specifically in the Middle East. Terrorism is the use or threat of fear for political or economical gain. An internal characteristic of terrorism is how dependent it is of perspective, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. To understand “terrorism,” a focus must be applied to the history, what drove an organization to commit such acts. Respectively, the Middle East has been a hotbed for the key word “terrorism,” especially because of 9/11. Subsequently, Muslims have been stigmatized by the United States as terrorists. The consequences spawned because of 9/11 require a look to the past to understand the present.

In this tedtalk, Melissa Boigon, who studies Islam and its relationship to the Arab-Israeli conflict, talks about how Islamophobia has become more of a fear of Arabs over the last 10 years. She thinks that has to do with the connotation to terrorists groups such as Al-Qaeda, and the way middle east conflict is portrayed in The United States today. She also discusses how American Entertainment portrays Arabs, saying that it's propaganda in the form of entertainment.

Vonnegut is very keen to express his choice of words throughout the novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. The phrase that is mentioned the most is “so it goes”. This phrase is mentioned over a hundred times at full length of the novel. At every time someone dies in the novel or a tragedy happens Vonnegut ends the passage with “so it goes”. Because the main focus of the novel is on the bombing of Dresden, Vonnegut is making a point that the war is awful but inevitable. He uses repetition to promote how common and cruel war and death is, in the big scheme of things. An observation done by Allen says “The plain old death will be there anyways. It leads us to the idea that, given that we all must die anyway, often cruelly or prematurely. The commonness

Today one does not even have to wait for a movie to be released. Simply click the “ON” button on a remote and suddenly, thousands of news and television shows are available for one to enjoy. Muslims are also the target of prejudice in these news broadcasts and programs. One such television program released was a drama titled “24.” Issues and Controversies reports: “The show, which deals with a counterterrorism unit based in Los Angeles, featured a group of Muslim terrorist characters who were plotting to detonate nuclear weapons in the U.S. At the end of one episode, the terrorists successfully detonated a small bomb in a Los Angeles suburb, killing about 12,000 people” (“Race and Ethnicity in Entertainment”). This fictional show wrongly spreads the stereotypical image of Muslims and their clichéd image of the fundamentalists on 9/11. By adding the title and image of “Muslim” to the phrase “terrorist” the program wrongly advertised that potentially every Muslim could be a terrorist. This stereotypical image is similarly expressed in news broadcasts through the use of terrorism news. By increasingly using terrorism and Muslims in top

The topic of this essay was one that seemed the most relevant at this given moment in time. Post 9/11, Western media became very critical of Islam and the portrayal of Muslims and the negative associations made with them has dramatically increased.

According to the author and professor of religion at San Diego State University, Khaleel Mohammed, and many Muslims around the United States, Islam is progressively increasing worldwide and is soon to be the world’s largest religion. After 9/11, Americans seem to look at Muslim people a whole lot differently, and think of the Muslim religion as something completely different than what it really is. According to the author Edward Said, Muslims were mostly viewed as “oil suppliers” and nothing more, dating back about twenty years before the tragedies of September 11. In the 1997 article published by Edward Said titled, Covering Islam, he states how the Muslims were the last acceptable form of foreign culture in the west. On top of these discriminatory

September 11th holds many hard and upset feelings around the world today. The harsh actions of Muslim extremists unfortunately completely changed the way Muslims are treated, especially in the United States. These events, exacerbated islamophobia. Unfortunately, “the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, connect Muslims and Islam to terrorism within the geographical borders of the United States.” (Byng) Although it has been over a decade since the attack, many still feel racist and discriminatory attitudes towards Muslims. Muslims are the targeted minority in the United States, “the 9/11 terrorist attacks shifted the social and political context for Muslims in the United States. Terrorism within the geographical borders of the United States carried out by Muslims places an identity at the center of national and global politics.” (Byng) The blame of the horrible terrorist attacks, rather than be placed on terrorists or religious extremist, has been placed on Islam in America. After September 11th, hate crimes towards Muslims skyrocketed, “the most dramatic change noted by the report was a more than 1,600 percent increase in reported hate crimes against Muslims -- a jump from 28 hate incidents in 2000 to 481 last year.”

Since Islam is a religion that promotes peace and kindness, one could ask where the stereotype that all Muslims are terrorists originated. Following the tragedies of September 11, 2001, Arabs and Muslims have been presented as potential terrorists. This idea stemmed from the theory that, “media bias increases when a specific ethnic, religious, or racial group is seen as a threat to national security.” (Stiffler, 2013). Since the attacks on September 11, 2001 Muslims and Arabs have been “hyper-visible” in the media as potential terrorists. Due to the negative media attention and failure of most media platforms to

Ever since September 11, 2001 Americans along with the majority of the world’s population have been skeptical of Muslims. It’s a sad reality but it’s hard for people to think of a Muslim without linking them directly to terrorism. But these assumptions aren’t totally out of the blue—the Muslim’s religion, Islam, teaches a low tolerance for other religions and the Islamic government has no separation of church and state, so it’s only normal to assume that their government shall have a low tolerance as well—some however, immediately translate this into terrorism. Through the Islamic government and religion, relations with foreign countries, and separation amongst themselves it can be concluded that Islamic Fundamentalism is clearly a threat