MEDIA PORTRAIT OF MIDDLE EASTERN PEOPLES
This research discusses the way in which the peoples of the Middle East of Muslim origins are portrayed in the American and other Western mass media, the effects of this portrayal on persons of Middle Eastern descent who live in the United States and the complex psychological, political, economic reasons for such treatment.
On the whole, the Western mass media--the movies, television, radio and other publications--portray Middle Eastern peoples from predominantly Muslim countries, including those who have emigrated from the region, in a stereotyped, biased and derogatory manner. The effects of that treatment on public opinion are to predispose the American public to expect the worst from Arabs, Iranians and other non-Jewish Middle Easterners, and these expectations have generated some hate crimes and other difficulties for the Middle Eastern community in the United States, which, as a result of this biased coverage, is put in the impossible position of defending its national patriotism and loyalty to America.
These problems may also lead to that community becoming more active politically than it has been in the past. The reasons for this slanted presentation are complex and have their roots in history, widespread ignorance of the region, the political clout and general pervasiveness of pro-Israeli sentiment in the West and in the United States in particular and fears and anxieties of many Westerners, including Americans, concerning the troubled and often violent course of developments in the Middle East and their possible adverse effects on the West.
There is nothing new about anti-Muslim phobias in the West. The image of the bloodthirsty Turk or Arab is a part of the general heritage of the West, dating back to the first contacts between Occidental and Oriental civilizations. The Crusades were billed, whatever the true reasons for them, as a holy campaign to rescue Palestine f...