preview

The Only Thing We Have For Fear Is Fear By President Franklin D. Roosevelt Essay

Good Essays

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address (1933)
When the terrorist threat and fear politics are analyzed, there are many approaches that different school of thoughts has taken. Some of them are unbalanced and primarily critical towards what is normative in their respective societies, rather than offering a comprehensive reading of the myriad interconnected issues that relates to the nature of terrorism and political securitization. This essay, through discussing the conceptual framework of Said (1978), Kumar (2012) and Masco (2014) in investigating how fear is constructed, harnessed and used to serve the American imperial interests, will argue that the role of religion is immensely significant in the construction of terrorism/death industry, and why it is vital to include it in analyzing the war on terror.

To publicly talk about the connection between an ideology, in this case Islam, and the believer’s violence and bigotry has been stigmatized by notions of racism and intolerance towards multiculturalism. Many leftist academicians, such as Kumar (2012), are involved in a growing industry of producing an apologetic and uncritical literature that seems to shield Muslims from facing the sorts of realities that their faith creates, thus Islamic extremism is never what it seems. By making the discussion lopsided and focused predominantly on the securitization industry as in Masco (2014), the jihadists cannot

Get Access