Islamophobias In The Iba

On September 11th of 2001, more than 3,000 people died during the terrorist attacks. The event changed the lives of not just the people whose loved ones died on that day, but also of those who belonged to the Islamic world. The experience of Muslims who lived in America in 2001 and those who were yet to come here would never be the same again. After 9/11, the number of hate crimes against Muslims in the United States increased and their everyday lives changed forever due to the rise of islamophobia and the vicious influence of the American media.

Since the incident of 9/11 occurred, many people have debated over the Muslim faith and its practices. Muslim extremist groups such as Al-Qaeda and ISIS have affected the name of Islam causing majority of Muslims to be blamed. Recently, a tragic event that occurred in Paris killing over a hundred people left the people of France shaken with fear and anger. These events have lead to an increasing amount of hate and tension towards Muslims all over the world from protests at mosques, where Muslims go to pray, and anti-Muslim rally’s. Islamophobia is a massive issue that has steered European counties like France to enforce laws that ban religious garments that Muslims wear such as the niqab and burqa. Some people perceive these garments to be

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.

The abuse, stereotyping and scapegoating of Australian Muslims is on the rise in 2016 and the media isn’t helping.

Islamophobia within the United States is an ongoing social issue that negatively impacts the Muslim-American community. Muslim-Americans are forty-eight percent more likely to have experienced discrimination and harassment in the past year compared to Protestants, Catholics, and Jews (“Islamophobia,” n.d.), thus confirming the fact that many non-Muslims within America view followers of Islam as worthy of being labeled as scapegoats and foreigners more than the followers of any other religion deemed harmless to American society. With regards to this social problem rooted in discriminatory profiling, this paper examines how the social conflict, structural functionalist, and symbolic interactionist theories can be used to examine the issue of Islamophobia in America.

The mission of the Federal Bureau of Investigations or the FBI for short is to protect the citizens of the United States and to uphold the Constitution in which the United States was founded upon. The FBI ensures the protection of civil liberties of citizens, fights transnational as well as national criminal organizations and enterprises, and combats significant white-collar and violent crimes. America has been fighting terrorism since the early 1920’s when the Islamic brotherhood was formed, so it is no surprise that there is a relatively lengthy number of wanted terrorists listed on the FBI’s most wanted page. One of those terrorists being Abdul Rahman Yasin, who is suspected in participation of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

After the bombing everything changed. FBI Shifted its priorities,reasoning large numbers of agents ro work domestic terrorism cases and hiring many new agents.Its significantly expanded the number of joint terrorism Task forces across the country and went to congress with

Although anti-government extremists are a large part of the domestic terrorism group. There are several other groups that spread their beliefs of hate such as the Aryan Brotherhood, the KKK, the Black Panthers and outlaw motorcycle groups. Several of these groups plot to kill judges, police officers and other public officials and attack targets ranging from churches to abortion clinics, and even build chemical arms. The FBI is the lead agency assigned to investigate domestic terrorism in the United States. Their vast array of investigative

Islam is a monotheistic religion, centered around the teachings of the Qu’ran and serving Allah (meaning God in Arabic). However, this Abrahamic religion has been harshly discriminated against in the United States for years. Most prominently throughout the last twelve years, post September 11th, 2001. Unfortunately, issues such as socialization through the media, power distribution, religious ignorance, stereotyping and visible differences have contributed to the ill attitudes towards Muslims. This paper will examine how Americans have been socialized in islamophobia within the United States.

The award winning American television show, Homeland, is a political and psychological thriller produced by Fox 21 Television Studio in 2011 and based on the Israeli television drama Hatufim (Kamin, 2013). Through a Cultural analysis, it is clear that the Islamophobic portrayal of Muslims in the show Homeland reinforces the ideology that Muslims around the world are violent individuals who commit unjustified crime in the name of Islam. It also stereotypes Muslims as people from Arab descent with an agenda to destroy America. Lastly, through the process of Othering it constantly compares the supposed values of White Americans in comparison to Arab Muslims and concludes that there is something inherently wrong with Islamic values. The racist and Islamophobic sentiments seen in the show Homeland perpetuate a false image of Muslims around the world.

Amir is scared to be a Muslim in that country. This is one of the reasons why he abandons his faith. It has started to scare him. He thinks that the Quran states and encourages things like wife beating and the treatment of women is not appropriate. Emily tells Amir that the words do get twisted in any manner as the person pleases but it cannot make it true. His nephew Abe/Hussein has also changed his name for a similar reason. It is because people judge on the basis of which race and ethnicity you belong to. Amir was judged by a waiter, who he did not even know only because of his religion. People are scared of Islam but Islam is not the enemy. A religion is a personal choice and someone’s faith only.

In Oxford English Dictionary, Islamophobia is defined as “intense dislike or fear of Islam, especially as a political force, hostility or prejudice towards Muslims.” This term was first used in 20th century and had its’ own definition at 1970s. Particularly, after the 11 September events -which a radical Islamic group claimed its responsibility- in U.S.A. most of the non-Muslims in the world knew the Muslims with violence. The Berkeley Institute on Racism Studies says that Islam is often seen as a religion of violence which supports terrorism and has a violent political ideology. This perception of Islam is enlarging globally more and more because of some reasons such as terrorist attacks in non-Muslim countries, effect of media on the people, misunderstanding of Islam, and lack of the true representative

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).

Hurricane Katrina pounded the Gulf Coast with tremendous force at daybreak, August 29, 2005, severely punishing regions that included the city of New Orleans and its neighboring state Mississippi. Resulting in a total of just over 1700 people killed, and hundreds of thousands missing. When we think of Hurricane Katrina stories, we think of stories that were published by the media such as, “Packing 145-mile-an-hour winds as it made landfall, the category 3 storm left more than a million people in three states without power and submerged highways even hundreds of miles from its center. The hurricane's storm surge a 29-foot wall of water pushed ashore when the hurricane struck the Gulf Coast was the highest ever measured in the United States.