Analysis Of ' Allah Hu Akbar '

After a horrible terroristic attack that shocked the whole world on September 11th in the center of New York City, Muslims in the Western world have been constantly fighting against prejudice. After September 11, media interest in Islam increased, where Islam was usually portrayed in a negative way. Before 9/11, many Muslims lived the normal, everyday life. However, the attack has changed lives of many people that belonged to the Muslim community, where they were the victims of guilt. Unfortunately, many Americans were introduced to Islam, after the 9/11 attack, thus even till today, Islam is associated with terrorism. For the past ten years, Muslims felt excluded from the American society by being rifled, attacked, discriminated, checked

These shortsighted views contribute to the major issues that affect Muslims, which involve prejudice and discrimination. Prejudice is a preconceived judgment, that is usually based on insufficient information (Tatum 102). Discrimination is the actions taken toward members of a group because of their group membership (Feldman 444). Specifically, these issues include harassment at airports, accusations of aligning their beliefs with ISIS, and alienation from U.S. communities. In particular, Muslim Americans can experience discrimination at airports for expressing stereotypical attributes of Muslims, such as Khairuldeen Makhzoomi, a

One of the most widely discussed issues in the U.S. Muslim community is the negative image of Islam in the American media, an issue that was cause for concern even before 9/11. While appeals to the media for accuracy and fairness continue, newspaper headlines regularly print the words “Islam” and “Muslim” next to words like “fanatic,” “fundamentalist,” “militant,” “terrorist” and “violence.” Uses of the term “jihad” in television programs

Americans fear that the terrorists would some days attack their country, and kill them. This fear is vastly increased after the 2001 attack in New York City. Since then, most Muslims in America have been investigated by spying their phone talks, screening their profiles and so on . Although everybody knows that Muslim extremists are the only cause, they tend to relate it to all other innocent Muslims and discriminate them. It is not only affected Muslim adults but also their kids. They wanted to quit from schools because they were consistently called murderers. Worse than this, they received violent acts such as kicking, bullying just because they are born Muslims. The racism today is obviously shown in President Donald Trump’s traveling ban on seven Muslim countries which is later changed to six by excluding Iraq. It prevents all Muslims from these countries to travel to the US (Henderson & Graham). Even though the President wants to strengthen the security and makes Americans safe, the ban do affect thousands Muslims who do not involve in terrorism, and shows the discrimination against this

9/11 is known as one of the most tragic events in the history of the United States. Since World War II, America had proven its superiority and had become a progressive and powerful country. The occurrence of a terrorism group entering the country, breeching security and killing several thousands of Americans took a toll on almost everyone. Not only was the safety of the public questioned, the nation’s security legitimacy was as well. Since 9/11, many debates on American policy have been sparked. However, not only has this event had an impact on policy in America, it has had a severe impact on the public’s perception of Muslim American’s. It has been fourteen years since the attack in 2001 and Muslim Americans are still facing a terrible bias and being treated with disrespect. The American society has perceived Muslims into a single group that associates them all with terrorism (Bayraktaroglu). This is stereotype leads to a negative public perception.

Since 9/11, people seem to always associate Muslims with terrorists. More importantly, when people hear Muslim terrorists they never assume that they are from any other areas except from the Middle Eastern. Being young and not knowing the real reasoning behind the attacks of 9/11, I had always looked at Muslims as terrorists. To be specific, I thought they were mainly Middle Eastern Muslims. I was oblivious to the fact that there are other types of Muslims because all I have ever saw in the media were those types. It didn’t hit me that I was starting to become a victim of discrimination until I was on the bus and I saw a white male dressed up in a turban thinking that he was going to harm the passengers on the bus. I knew then that I had to alter my opinions about this because I knew that I wouldn’t like it if someone thought I was

Legendary boxer and famous figure for the Muslim community, Muhammad Ali once said: “The word 'Islam ' means 'peace. ' The word 'Muslim ' means 'one who surrenders to God. ' But the press makes us seem like haters.” As Ali points out the United States public today has criminalized the religion of Islam and this has caused discrimination on the structural level. Citizens in the United States expect that they are not subject to marginalization and be treated equally. Instead what Muslim constituents are finding is that they are being treated unfairly by law enforcement. Undermining the laws of the United States sets a dangerous precedent for the future. Thus it is absolutely crucial that the United States federal

Even before 9/11, the effects of stereotyping against Muslims has been present. For example in a Harvard University article about Muslim Americans struggling with stereotypes it states,”in the immediate wake of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, early news accounts included reports of people of “Middle Eastern heritage” fleeing the scene; many journalists, “experts,” and even former Representative Dave McCurdy linked the bombing to “fundamentalist Islamic terrorist groups.” In media such as newspapers they have printed in a way that could be misleading to the reader, “newspaper headlines regularly print the words “Islam” and “Muslim” next to words like “fanatic,”

This book chapter also introduces surveys, examples and statistics that will help support my argument and further my research. This book chapter differs from the article, “Framing Arab-American and Muslims in the U.S. Media” because it explores the way that the U.S. media attempted to aid in the destruction of the Arab and Muslims terrorist stereotype, but ultimately failed. It provides an interesting contrast from the article, presenting a more positive way that the media tried to portray Arab and Muslims after 9/11. This book chapter, although different than the article, does reinforce the same idea that Arab and Muslims were ostracized following the events of 9/11 and felt they needed to prove themselves to the rest of American citizens as “good Americans”. The information in this book chapter is reliable because it has numerous cited examples and statistics that reinforce the validity of the main idea. This book chapter helps perpetuate my research as it gives me another perspective on the influence of the U.S. Media, and encourages me to continue down this path of research, and I will now be looking for how the U.S. media have tried to correct the terrorism stereotype they perpetuated against Arabs and

Two of the planes made a course toward the World Trade Center, flying through the Twin Towers. One plane flew into the Pentagon, while the fourth plane’s passengers fought off the hijackers and crash landed in an empty field in Pennsylvania, killing everyone on board. “The carefully planned attacks killed nearly 3,000 people, making it the worst attack on the United States in history”(Pressler Par.1). Prior to this day, Muslims were treated very similarly to other minorities in America, but once the towers came crashing down, the Muslim population as a whole was treated in a completely different manner. Large amounts of “media coverage immediately after the attacks presented vast amounts of negative images related to Muslims and Arabs in general, thus leading to greater but temporary prejudices toward this group” (Khan and Ecklund Par.33). Al-Qaeda’s attack on 9/11 is how Islamophobia rose in the

This is due to the attacks of 9/1, which was caused by Al Qaeda, an Islamic extremist group. 9/11 has changed the mind of Americans on what they think of Muslims. According to Elaine C. Hagopian of Haymarket Books, “Muslims and Arab-Americans are increasingly under attack as a result of the U.S ‘war on terror’- at home as well was abroad. Since the tragic events of September 11, Arabs and Muslims have faced major assault on their civil liberties.” The 9/11 attacks have damaged the reputation of Muslims. The Muslims are not viewed as everybody else to most people, but something bad. They are being blamed on the actions of other people on a different continent! Additionally, by Christopher Ingraham, “If the incident does turn out to be motivated by anti-Islamic sentiment, it would be one of dozens of such events that happen each year, according to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports program. Prior to the 9/11 attacks, the program typically recorded between 20 and 30 anti-Muslim hate crimes per year. But in 2001 that number rose more than tenfold to nearly 500. In the years since, annual hate crimes against Muslims have consistently hovered in the 100-150 range, roughly five times higher than the pre-9/11 rate.” Since September 11, more and more people are hating on innocent Muslims because they have the same religion as the group behind 9/11. People are assuming that bad and deserve to be harshly treated. The strive of destroying the Muslim faith has become a problem caused by American grudge against Al

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

The connection between Islam and terrorism was not intensified until the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center that pushed the Islamic faith into the national and international spotlight (Smith, 2013). As Smith (2013) articulated, “Many Americans who had never given Islam a second thought before 9/11 now had to figure out how to make sense of these events and relate to the faith tradition that ostensibly inspired them” (p. 1). One way in which people made sense of these events was through the media channels that influenced their overall opinions by shaping a framework of censored ideas (Yusof, Hassan, Hassan & Osman, 2013). In a survey conducted by Pew Forum (2012), 32% of people reported that their opinions of Muslims were greatly influenced by the media’s portrayal of Islam that depicted violent pictorials and fundamentalist Muslims. Such constant negative depiction is likely to lead to the inevitable—prejudice and hate crime. For instance, in 2002 alone there were approximately 481 hate crimes that were carried out against Muslims (Smith, 2013). Ever since the 9/11 attacks Muslim people have been the target of “suspicion, harassment and discrimination” (Talal, n.d., p. 9).

This survey reveals that the problem with the Islam faith is not racial: The Muslim people are welcomed, the Islam faith is not. The violence that has been perpetrated against America, whether executed or planned, has brought to fruition religious persecution not seen since the persecution of the Jews in W.W.II. This “trust no Arab” attitude has brought shame to the Constitutional intentions of freedom of religion intended by our forefathers, and has set religious tolerance back 200 years. Looking at media representation of Muslim Americans prior to 9-11, it shows religious diversity in America, depicting Muslim America as just another religious community seeking to advance and protect their interests, not unlike other Americans. After 9-11 the media portrayed representations of threat and fear, creating boundaries between Muslims and other Americans. Such depiction transforms the identity of Muslims and American religious pluralism (Byng, M. pg. 3).