Article Review : ' Paris Attacks Drive Home Harsh Realities Of Extremism For Us Police And Civilians Alike '

In the airports, Muslim people became “the usual suspects”, were thoroughly searched and often interrogated. In her article, O’Connor claims that the lives of American Muslims changed forever, and the statement is hard to disagree with (“How 9/11 Changed These Muslim Americans’ Lives Forever.”) Those who had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks, their children and grandchildren were sentenced to face racism, hate and violence.

1.) Asa Don Brown, the author of “Desensitization of Terrorism,” focuses on how the influence of the media and social media have desensitized us when it comes to terrorist attacks. Brown directs the article toward an audience who questions why they are no longer as surprised by terrorist attacks when they occur as they used to be. This seems like an extremely odd feeling to have when several people are killed and hundreds are hurt, however, it is the strange reality these days. Terrorist attacks have been happening for years and years now and while we would love to just stop them from occurring, this is blatantly impossible to achieve. He emphasizes in the article, the idea that when terrorist attacks and the terrorists themselves are

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.

Tuesday, September eleventh 2001, four planes were on a track for total destruction. Three planes reached their destination, two flew into the twin towers, one into the Pentagon, and the final one crashed in a field in Pennsylvania.This attack killed 2,996 people and injured more than six thousand others. These attacks were orchestrated by the terrorist group known as Al-Qaeda (Staff, 1). Paris, France, Friday, November thirteenth 2015, seven terrorist attacks were masterminded by Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a member of the Islamic State. These strikes came in a series that started with a bombing at the “Stade de France”, and ending with an eighty-nine person killing spree in the “Bataclan Concert Hall”. A recount of the event stated that over one hundred and thirty people died and over six-hundred people were injured (Steafel, 1). These events rocked the world, and gave unprecedented prejudice against people of the Islamic faith. Many people around the world believe that one of these groups contain the most dangerous person in the world. However, this person is closer than many would like to believe. This person has the capability to kill billions, he can make a whole government stop in the matter of days; and he is in charge of the most powerful military in the world (Kinzer 1). President Barack Obama is the most dangerous person in the world.

This article by Isabelle Duyvesteyn starts off by summarising the objectives that challenge the perspective of terrorism since the last decade of the twentieth century is fundamentally new. In this article certain questions have been debated regarding new aspects of terrorism and they are: “transnational nature of the perpetrators and their organizations, their religious inspiration, fanaticism, use of weapons of mass destruction and their indiscriminate targeting.” ("How New Is the New Terrorism?", 2017)In order to understand the depth of aspects of new terrorism the article talks about “national and territorial focus of the new terrorists, their political motivations, use of conventional weaponry and the symbolic targeting that is aimed in order to achieve a surprising effect.” ("How New Is the New Terrorism?", 2017)

On the evening of Friday, 13 November 2015, a massacre including of public mass shootings and suicide bombings occurred in the capital of France, Paris. The attackers killed 130 people and wounded 368 serious injuries. Just 10 months previous, on January 7, 2015 two terrorists attacked Charlie Hebdo, an office of a Parisian satirical magazine. They killed eleven and wounded eleven people. During the attacks in Paris, no one victim was armed. They didn’t have any chance to defense for themselves. When police arrived, it was too late to save the innocents. The world today is full of dangerous with terrorism, criminals, mass shootings, and so forth. We 're not safe from anything.

Since 9/11 terrorist attacks have become more and more common around the world. There has been hundreds of attacks by extremist groups since September 11. 9/11 and the continued growth of terrorist attacks have changed people's views of each other and impacted world relations. Since 9/11, North Americans have expressed a sceptical interest in Islam and all things Muslim. There was a divide created between some non-muslims and muslims as xenophobic ideas towards all things islam because prevalent in the lives of some non-muslims. Those fears have dramatically increased since the arrival and rise of ISIS, where decentralized and unpredictable terror attacks have now reached global levels. Overall, 9/11 created a divide between people as their ideas about foreign relations changed. As a continued number of terrorist attacks have occured, they begin to seem like nothing since they happen so often. Imagine what the world will become in the following years if we don’t do something to stop these terrorist attacks that have been on the rise since September 11,

That attack, the November Paris attacks, dominated the news for weeks, and prompted incredible shows of solidarity from countries around the world. The countries that do suffer the most damage from terrorism are predominantly Muslim, and those attacks mostly slip under the radar of the western media. This means that while we in the west stoke our fears of “radical Islamic terrorists,” it is Muslims who bear the brunt of terrorist attacks.“The four predominantly Muslim countries that endured the most fatal terrorist attack were Iraq, Pakistan, Nigeria and Afghanistan” (Institute for Economics & Peace

However, these sentiments are not limited to these countries. As Europe is connected by mostly open borders in the Schengen Area and shared media, “Islamophobia works without Muslims” (Marks et al.; SETA 7). Countries with relatively low Muslim populations still blame increases in crime as well as other negative social development impacts on Muslims (SETA).

With the recent crisis or terrorism in Paris the world has been left reeling in shock and anguish. Many people, myself included, are horrified and angry by the acts of extremists groups that call themselves “Muslims.” Opinions have been circulating freely in response to what we should do. Some say that we should stop helping all immigrants trying to run away from terrorist groups, such as ISIS, while others state that these people that are genuinely Muslim have been hurt just as deeply, if not more so than Parisians have. As people talk and speculate I picked up Stolen Continent by Ronald Write and began reading. My anger grew as I read of accounts of men that called themselves “Christians” going to foreign lands and slaughtering thousands, if not millions of people in the name of God. Was there really a difference between what happened then, and what is happening now?

Millions of people globally supported the ‘war on terror’ at one time, largely because the discourse around it was successful in divisively framing the identities involved and attributing a ‘truthful’ nature to that framing. Governments, with the Bush administration seemingly as the lead, created ‘the other’ to be ‘the terrorist’, and those ‘terrorists’ were probably Muslim or Arab. The fear was then created by the comparison of this ‘other’ to the self; or ‘them vs. us’.

Syed Soharwardy asserts that “Media always tried to portray Islam as a religion of terror and all the Muslims as terrorists. The way the talk-show programs and news are produced and presented, it seems that the media has already decided the guilty verdict, regardless what would be the outcome of an investigation” (Soharwardy). So too do members of the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee recognize the media’s predisposition toward bias, as is pointed out in this statement, found on their website: “Key industries of American mass culture, Holllywood and television, for decades have been bastions of anti-Arab stereotyping, and have consistently resisted positive or realistic representations of Arabs and Arab Americans. (Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee).”

The history of terrorism can be traced back as far as the French revolution. Some of these acts of terrorism only seem as distant reminders of our past, but at the same time, are not a far cry from today’s brutal acts; and although these acts seem distant, it doesn’t also mean they are no longer in the thoughts of individuals in today’s time.

"The US media has been clubbing together terrorism and Islam, influencing the American public to think that all Arab Muslims are "crazy and violent terrorists"… The American media has been a primary agent responsible for creating racist stereotypes, images and

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).