In this title, Sheehi examines the rise of
anti-Muslim and anti-Arab sentiments in the West
following the end of the Cold War through GW Bush's War
on Terror to the Age of Obama. He investigates the
increased mainstreaming of Muslim-bating rhetoric and
explicitly racist legislation, police surveillance,
witch-trials and discriminatory policies towards
Muslims. The book focuses on the various genres and
modalities of Islamophobia from the works of academics
to the commentary by mainstream journalists, to
campaigns by political hacks and special interest
groups. Featured are Bernard Lewis, Fareed Zakaria,
Thomas Friedman, David Horowitz, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Irshad
Manji, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, John McCain, Hilary
Clinton and Barack Obama. Sheehi contends that their
theories and opinions operate on an assumption that
Muslims, particularly Arab Muslims, suffer from
particular cultural lacuna that prevent their cultures
from progress, democracy and human rights. While the
assertion originated in the colonial era, Sheehi
demonstrates that it was refurbished as a viable
explanation for Muslim resistance to economic and
cultural globalization during the Clinton era. Moreover,
the theory was honed into the empirical basis for an
interventionist foreign policy and propaganda campaign
during the Bush regime and continues to underlie Barack
Obama's new internationalism. If the assertions of media
pundits and such academics became the basis for White
House foreign policy, Sheehi also demonstrates how they
were translated into a sustained domestic policy of
racial profiling and Muslim-baiting by US agencies from
Homeland Security to the Department of Justice.
Furthermore, Sheehi examines the collusion between
non-governmental agencies, activist groups and lobbies
and US local, state and federal agencies to in
suppressing political speech on US campuses critical of
racial profiling, US foreign policy in the Middle East
and Israel. While much of the direct violence against
Muslims on American streets, shops and campuses has
subsided, Islamophobia runs throughout the Obama
administration. Sheehi, therefore, concludes that Muslim
and Arab-hating emanate from all corners of the American
political and cultural spectrum, serving poignant
ideological functions in the age of economic, cultural
and political globalization.
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