The "Islamic Peril" Deconstructed

Edward S. Herman

SAIS Review, Volume 21, Number 2, Summer-Fall 2001, pp. 211-215 (Review)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/sais.2001.0042

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/30554

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 SAIS Review vol. XXI, no. 2 (Summer-Fall 2001)

The “Islamic Peril”

Deconstructed
Edward S. Herman

Islamic Peril: Media and Global Violence. By Karim H. Karim.

Montreal: Black Rose Press, 2000. 272 pp. $24.99.

I n Islamic Peril: Media and Global Violence, Karim H. Karim argues that
the “Islamic peril” has become the main substitute for the “Soviet
threat” as the West’s convenient “other.” The media readily mobilize
Islam’s menacing “jihads” and “Islamic fundamentalists” as demonic
forces opposed to Western policy. Karim contends that the Western
mainstream media are servants of Western interests, who dominate
the global economy and political world and need intellectual
rationales to justify their hegemonic policies. A member of the faculty
of the School of Journalism at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada,
Karim focuses on the Canadian media’s treatment of Islam, although
he also cites examples from the United States and other Western
countries, and notes that much Canadian news and opinion on Islam
is drawn from U.S. media and wire services. Karim makes a compelling
case that the media has displayed remarkable ignorance, superficiality,
and bias in using the Islamic peril to try to give context and meaning
to global violence.
Using many illustrations, Karim shows that Canadian (as well
as U.S. and other Western) media references to the Islamic peril are
very commonly misleading stereotypes, used with considerable
opportunism to provide the needed “fright” context. The media are
fond of terms such as “jihad” and “Islamic fundamentalism,” which
have gradually been charged with negative connotations by the use

Edward S. Herman is Professor Emeritus at the Wharton School of the Univer-

sity of Pennsylvania. He is author of The Real Terror Network: Terrorism in Fact
and Propaganda (1982), The Terrorism Industry: The Experts and Institutions that Shape
Our View of Terror (1990) with Gerry O’Sullivan, and Manufacturing Consent: The
Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988) with Noam Chomsky.
211
212 SAIS Review SUMMER-FALL 2001

of photos and selective information (and disinformation) associating

them with “terrorism.” Karim demonstrates that the meaning of
“jihad” as violent action has been in dispute in Islamic circles for many
years, and that as a justification for violence, jihad has its Western
counterpart in the notion of a holy war or just war (perhaps also,
humanitarian war). Attempting to make the recourse to violence
peculiar to Muslims is the product of an arbitrary and selective use
of history. Referring to comments by historian Elie Kedourie on the
alleged long historic roots—the “in-built messianism”—of Islam,
which Kedourie demonstrates by citing a series of isolated events over
many centuries, Karim refutes this assertion saying:

While it may be considered logical and coherent for Kedourie

to weave various persons drawn from the history of Muslims
into a fabric of ‘Islamic terrorism,’ a similar tracing of
assassinations from Julius Caesar to John F. Kennedy to
demonstrate violent tendencies in the ways that the North treats
its leaders would be considered laughable.

The media tend to gravitate to experts like Kedourie, who follow what
has amounted to a party line on the Islamic peril, and who display all
the biases described by Edward Said as “Orientalism.”1 These biases
include claims of ethnic and religious solidarity and uniformity,
excessive religiosity, irrationality, and hostility to modernization and
the West. There is also a simultaneous tendency to downplay or ignore
any just and material grievance the group labeled “Islamic” may have
against the West and to present the West as the victim. Karim’s analysis
of the writings of Kedourie, Bernard Lewis, William Pfaff, and others
shows the great importance of Orientalism and related stereotypes,
and a serious misuse of Islamic history, in the work of these preferred
experts who not coincidentally make the case for Islam as a
threatening “other.”
In addition to the East-West prejudice of media against Islam,
Karim emphasizes a stereotyping along religious lines as well. He
points out that while the media tend to stress the religious link to
Arab or other Islam-related violence, they fail to do this for Christians
and Jews, even when the link between their actions and their religious
beliefs may be equally or more plausible. Among other cases, he notes
that when an Italian sect called the “Apostles for Christ” engaged in
hostage taking and bank robberies, and a Colombian group called
“Christians for Peace and National Salvation” took forty-two
hostages, neither was referred to by the Canadian papers as “Christian
REVIEW ESSAY THE ISLAMIC PERIL DECONSTRUCTED 213

terrorists.” Similarly, Israeli expropriations of Palestinian land on the

West Bank are surely linked to Israel’s view of Palestine as a Jewish
land and sectors occupied by non-Jews as land to be “redeemed,” but
the terms “Jewish violence” or “Jewish terrorism” are not employed
in this case.
This selectivity and opportunism runs deep and is revealing.
Karim points out that the media did not mention Saddam Hussein’s
“Islamic” connections during the 1980s, when he was a “modernizing”
leader serving Western interests and receiving Western aid in his war
with Iran. In fact, during that period, Iran’s “Shiite fundamentalism”
and its expansionist tendencies were stressed. But after Saddam
invaded Kuwait in 1990 and became “another Hitler,” suddenly “the
religious posturing by Saddam Hussein
was given considerable coverage and
cameras seemed to seek out his
supporters who were in ‘Islamic’ The media never
garments.” At the same time, Iran’s
“Shiite fundamentalism” threat was
mention “Chris-
put on a back burner, and the Shiites tian terrorists” or
in southern Iraq suddenly became
worthy victims, supported by U.S. “Jewish violence.”
President George Bush and therefore
treated sympathetically by the media.
Karim notes that Western propagandists “were careful to indicate that
these Shiites, despite having ties to those in Iran, were seeking a greater
role in the Iraqi government and not a separate ‘Islamic’ state.” This
shifted dramaturgical role for the Iraqi Shiites was short-lived. After
a sharp drop in U.S. interest following Bush’s 1992 election loss, these
victims disappeared once again from media view.
Karim contends that the “jihad model,” which stresses the
religious underpinning of violence, “is most likely to be used where
the interests that a Muslim group is challenging are Northern and/
or Christian, and where the former appears to be acting in the role of
the villain and the latter that of the victim.” This was the media
construction during the Azeri-Armenian war in the Caucasus region
of the Russian federation from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s. He
notes how often the media referred to “Christian” Armenians and
“Muslim” Azerbaijanis, without any evidence that religious factors
had any real explanatory value in the conflict, while ignoring or
downplaying the role of Turkey and Turkish influence, as well as other
economic and political factors. He also shows that “when the facts of
an Armenian massacre of Azeri villagers became irrefutable,
214 SAIS Review SUMMER-FALL 2001

indications of religious identity completely disappeared as did

photographs of the bodies and mourners.”
In another interesting dichotomy, Karim points out that when
Israel took large numbers of hostages in Lebanon in the mid-1980s,
with the intent of using them to bargain, the media did not use the
word “hostages” to describe them—they used the less invidious word
“prisoners.” However, when Arabs have taken hostages, usually small
numbers, they are always hostages, not prisoners. Similarly, “When
lists of those kidnapped in Beirut were published in the print media
they did not even make a passing reference to any Lebanese, reserving
the term ‘hostage’ for foreigners—mostly from the West.”
The media have had to cope with the problem that, while they
generalize freely about Islam’s alleged violent roots and messianic
tendencies, the West has had close relations and has given massive
arms aid to states with Muslim majorities like Indonesia, Egypt,
Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, and it underwrote the Afghan takeover
by the violently fundamentalist Taliban. The fact that it has been
willing to support these states, and even stoke Islamic violence where
serviceable to Western interests, suggests that the West does not mind,
or really believe in, the threat of Islamic fundamentalism and the
Islamic peril. Karim points out that the media deals with this
seemingly contradictory behavior and their own double standard in
language and treatment by simply refusing to address the matter.
Karim argues cogently that these evasions and the attempt to portray
the violence arising in some of these states as rooted in Islam are useful
to the West and divert attention from the real economic and political
factors that produce violent responses to something allegedly
endemic, ethnic-tribal, and irrational.
This has always been the case in the West’s handling of
“terrorism” more broadly. Thus, Western support of terrorism in
Angola or Nicaragua was made into support of “freedom fighters,”
whereas those designated “terrorists” were either “irrational” or agents
of Soviet imperialism, but never allowed to have just grievances based
on structural violence or state terrorism. So also in the case of the
Islamic peril and Islamic terrorism, local reactions to Western
intrusion, sometimes linked to religious groups, have been
transformed from struggles over land and other material or political
interests into atavistic, anti-modernizing, and irrational actions by
the use of this refurbished gambit. (Karim gives many illustrations
of cases where the fact of Christian Arab participation in struggles is
ignored in Western media accounts to preserve the integrity of the
stereotype and jihad model.)
REVIEW ESSAY THE ISLAMIC PERIL DECONSTRUCTED 215

Islamic Peril has its weaknesses. It is a bit repetitive and its

presentation of historical background is too drawn out; the author’s
listing of Thomas Friedman of the New York Times as among the
reporters who avoid formulaic representations of Muslims is
surprising and questionable. Furthermore, his attempt to explain
Western and Serbian behavior in Bosnia in terms of anti-Muslim bias
falls flat. Karim wrongly asserts that this bias “legitimize[d]...the
Serbian slaughter of Bosnian Muslims,” a slaughter that was actually
a mutual affair, and a case where Serbian behavior in Bosnia was used
by the West to build support for the NATO war against the Serbs.
Nevertheless, this is a valuable book that effectively uses media
analysis, knowledge of the history of Islam, and empirical evidence
of (mainly Canadian) media practice to develop a compelling critique
of the Western treatment of Islam and its alleged threat. Islamic Peril
should take its place among the serious works that enlightens on
how the media operate, how they succumb to national ideology in
dealing with foreign policy issues, and how a media system not subject
to government control can serve as an agent of national propaganda.

Notes:
1
See Said’s books, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978) and Covering Islam (New
York: Pantheon, 1981).