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Is the Occident racially superior to the Orient?

According to Edward Said, Orientalism is a collection of myths, stereotypes, and skewed

images that appears to be both a result of the power relationship between the Occident, i.e.
the West and the Other, and a means for reestablishing that relationship. The Orient
essentially refers to the east and the Occident refers to the west. There has been a long-
standing thought that the Occident, including Europeans, are superior and more developed
than the Orient and required the former's assistance to even behave human as they are viewed
as inherently animalistic. The Occident on the other hand was viewed as educated, rational
and developed beings. (Gutowska-Kozielska)

Orientalism and Neo-Orientalism have been heavily researched topics. Neo-orientalism is a

phrase coined by Dag Tuastad to describe the American neo-colonial and neoliberal agenda
in the Middle East and the supremacy of American values. The cultural and political
hegemony of notable Western leaders who define their countries and cultures in reference to
the East and its culture is plainly visible in the inauguration of a new Orientalism academia or
Neo-Orientalism. An example of the above would be former Italian Prime Minister Silvio
Berlusconi stating "We should be conscious of the superiority of our civilization." (Altwaiji)
This is representative of the views of many Europeans and Americans towards the orient.
However, The United States has rarely been silent in its claimed hospitality; it has cheerfully
imagined itself as the speaking statue, beckoning the poor, the tired, and the huddled masses
to build a new life in a new world on numerous occasions, often without admitting economic
need or self-interest. It despises what it invites. Perhaps it invites it in order to have
something to despise. It wants scapegoats, a steady supply of labour, and the ability to
sacrifice it when the time comes. (Simpson)

The movie, The Visitor, is a 2007 movie directed by Tom McCarthy. The movie shows us the
treatment of the orient by the occident while also showing us the unconventional relationship
between Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins), a white American and Tarek Khalil (Haaz Sleiman),
a Syrian immigrant. The movie touches on the unorthodox friendship between the two and
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how the former sympathises with the latter and does everything he can in order to help his
friend who is at risk of being deported. The movie is placed in a post 9/11 America and
therefore depicts the more stringent policies against immigrants. (McCarthy)

After considering the above, in this paper, I seek to argue that there has been increased racism
against the orient since the occurrence of 9/11 through the movie The Visitor.

Walter Vale in the movie, is an economics professor who is trying to learn to play the piano
in remembrance of his late wife who was a concert pianist. When he goes to his old
Manhattan flat, he finds Tarek and Zainab to be living in the flat. Tarek is a Syrian djembe
player and Zainab is a Senegalese ethnic jewelry designer. David Simpson in his article After
9/11: The Fate of Strangers claims that The Visitor suggests that 'world music' plays a more
traditional role as a bridge-builder and cosmopolitan community builder, as an agent of cross-
cultural sympathy and shared delight. Tarek has already crossed a cultural divide by playing
an African drum instead of a Middle Eastern instrument. (Simpson) This division is further
blurred by the friendship that develops between Tarek and Walter, along with Tarek teaching
Walter to play the djembe.
Tarek is later falsely accused of jumping a subway turnstile and taken to a detention centre as
an illegal immigrant. "No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention, or exile," says
Article 9 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In 2007, however, there were
283,000 persons jailed in the United States, with 85% of them not having access to a lawyer
(Simpson). The incident at the subway station directly contradicts the above as Tarek who
had diligently swiped his subway card was wrongfully arrested for no apparent reason.
Walter and Tarek’s mother Mouna (Hiam Abbass) then go meet with an immigration lawyer
that is employed by Walter to discuss Tarek’s case. The lawyer questions Mouna about their
trial and appeal for asylum and asks her if they had received a ‘Bag and Baggage letter’ to
which Mouna says no. The lawyer then states that the tracking down immigrants pre-911 was
not much of a priority. This to me shows that after the occurance of 9/11 the orient and all
immigrants in general have been more villianised and that the immigration policies have been
more stringent.

In the last ten years, the United States' immigration laws and policies have been increasingly
focused on national security. Individuals of Muslim, Arab, and South Asian (MASA)
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ancestry have been scrutinised in particular, and the term of "terrorist activity" has been
broadened to encompass an incredible range of behaviour. In dealing with arriving asylum
seekers, the federal government has chosen a more flexible criterion. Arriving aliens who
lack proper documentation are subject to mandatory detention under the Illegal Immigration
Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996. Including asylum seekers who frequently
lack paperwork or identifying documents due to fear of persecution in their home countries.
Specific non-citizens could be granted parole or temporary admittance under the 1996 act if
they applied for it and met certain criteria. There have been concerns that the parole standards
and criteria were applied unevenly. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) responded
by announcing flexible parole processes for newly arrived asylum claimants. An arriving
immigrant who can confirm their identity, does not constitute a flight risk or a threat to the
community, has a credible fear of persecution or torture, and has no unfavourable
considerations was automatically evaluated for parole under these new rules. There were also
laws that targeted males over the age of 16, who weren’t immigrants such as students,
visitors, green card holders and asylum or refuge seekers were required to register with
immigration authorities. This, however only applied to those for 25 specific countries,
Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Egypt, Eritrea, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq , Jordan,
Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, North Korea, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia,
Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, UAE and Yemen (Iyer, and Rathod). These countries are all
oriental and are primarily Muslim majority countries. This clearly depicts the discrimination
against the orient as well as islamophobia to an extent. Tarek from the movie The Visitor is a
Syrian, which makes him more of a target for scrutiny.

Orientalism cannot be discussed independently of islamophobia. As stated in the previous

paragraph, the United States and most of the occident is rife with anti-Arab and anti-Muslim
sentiment. Edward Said in his widely known piece Orientalism states that in its treatment of
the Orient following World War II, the United States represented the Occident more clearly
than the other Western nations. He contends that European intellectuals, academics, scholars,
and savants have branded Muslims as foreign, primitive, uncivilised, and wayward and that
Islamic countries will struggle to assimilate into global communities without Western
supremacy (Said). "Islam represents a resurgent atavism, which suggests not only the threat
of a return to the Middle Ages but the destruction of what is regularly referred to as the
democratic order in the western world," Edward Said argued in Covering Islam: How the
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Media and Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World. If this was the Western
opinion of Islam before the 9/11 attacks, it has now deteriorated. (Said)
According to Dag Tuastad, American new imperialism in the Middle East is linked to a neo-
Orientalist narrative that emphasises Arab violence. He refers to contemporary American
depictions of Arab violence as "new barbarism." The concept of new barbarism is central to
neo-Orientalist discourse, which portrays the Middle East's violence as a menace to the entire
world. This type of violence is ingrained in the local culture. The barbarism of the Arabs is
intertwined with post-9/11 neo-Orientalist imaginaries to permit new imperialist methods
aimed at conquering new regions like Iraq and legitimising the Gulf's continued political and
economic hegemony: "For a long time, the desire of oil has been the most compelling
motivation for US military activity in the Persian Gulf region." In the post-9/11 American
political discourse, representations of Arab brutality resound loudly (Altwaiji)

Islamophobia is a less historically loaded term that gained prominence after 9/11, particularly
in the United Kingdom, where it has become widespread. If this definition is deemed too
positivistic, we can define Islamophobia as the systematic marginalisation of Muslim
individuals or communities by non-Muslims based on Islamic practises, Muslim identities, or
ethnic features deemed synonymous with religious observance. Hate crimes, profiling (at
airports and elsewhere), and institutionalised prejudice could all be considered components of
Islamophobia. Orientalism has proven incredibly beneficial as a descriptive critique of
phenomena ranging from misconceptions about Arabs to imprudent foreign policy, and its
use among Arab Americans in the post-9/11 United States has increased. However, the term
carries a lot of theoretical and historical baggage, making it ambiguous or ambiguous in some
intellectual circles. We can perceive in its use the possibility for slippage or rhetorical
imprecision borne of correspondingly equivocal or oblique authorial/oratorical purpose, given
its multiple meanings and debates about its denotation. On the other hand, Islamophobia is
riddled with ambiguities that make it difficult to understand. While the word's suffix implies
that fear of Muslims causes hatred of them in some circumstances, we must consider much
more historical context in order to adequately outline a context for the hatred. While
Islamophobia is a valuable descriptor for specific occurrences like dispensationalist
demonization of Islam as a faith, it is inherently a transnational expression that limits, albeit
unintentionally, a localised examination of individual interethnic encounters. (Salaita)
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It's a mistake to think of anti-Arab or anti-orient prejudice as a result of Events of 9/11.

Although it is clear that 9/11 stratified pre-existing attitudes about Arabs (both positive and
negative), thereby transforming Arab Americans into dialectical themes invoked to justify
various political agendas, a more responsible conceptualization will locate anti-Arab racism
within a heterogeneous and multitemporal complex of historical factors. 9/11 provided an
opportunity for leftist liberals and multi-culturalists to use violence against Arabs (and those
mistakenly identified as Arab) to argue for inclusion and tolerance, and later to argue for the
less admirable cause of electing Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, who is
himself an anti-Arab racist. On the other hand, conservatives, particularly neoconservatives,
cited 9/11 as proof of Arab treachery and, later, as evidence of the need to keep George W.
Bush in office to protect "us" from "them" - in this context, "them" is a chilling pronoun
spoken inevitably without nuance or modification, acting as the epistemological Other used
to define the White, Christian "us." This type of xenophobic frenzy signifying a purportedly
defeated racism would be stupid to interpret as newfangled. The 9/11 attacks gave a
seemingly empirical justification to legitimise anti-Arab racism, but 9/11 did not create anti-
Arab racism; rather, it confirmed it. (Salaita)

From all the above paragraphs we can see that in the movie, The Visitor, Tarek was falsely
arrested purely on the basis of his race regardless of the fact that he was an illegal immigrant.
The arresting officers could not have known at that moment that he was residing in the
country illegally. This along with the statement made by the lawyer about the lenient attitude
of immigration services towards tracking down immigrants for deportation shows clearly that
the racism towards the orient especially the Arabs has increased exponentially after the
occurrence of 9/11.

We also see that islamophobia along with the anti-orient sentiments in most of the occident
especially the United States has existed from long before the occurrence of the 9/11 incident.
America invites everyone into their country and advertises itself as the “Land of Dreams” but
clearly not everyone has the right to dream, only if you are white and fit into the stereotype of
the occident will you ever be treated as an equal. The categorization of the white Christian as
the normal and anyone else as the Other has long existed and has only become more widely
known and prevalent after the occurrence of 9/11.
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Works Cited

Altwaiji, Mubarak. "Neo-Orientalism And The Neo-Imperialism Thesis: Post-9/11

US And Arab World Relationship". Arab Studies Quarterly, vol 36, no. 4, 2014, pp.

313-323. Pluto Journals, https://doi.org/10.13169/arabstudquar.36.4.0313.

Gutowska-Kozielska, Ewelina. "Commodifying The Oriental Other. Liberal American Media

And Reproduction Of Racism". Media Biznes Kultura, no. 1 (8), 2020, pp. 141-151.

Uniwersytet Jagiellonski - Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellonskiego,

https://doi.org/10.4467/25442554.mbk.20.010.12420.

Iyer, Deepa, and Jayesh M Rathod. "9/11 AND IMMIGRATION LAW AND POLICY".

Gpsolo, vol 29, no. 1, 2012, pp. 62-23., Accessed 30 Apr 2022.

McCarthy, Tom. The Visitor. Participant, 2007.

Said, Edward W. Covering Islam. Pantheon, 1981.

Salaita, Steven George. "Beyond Orientalism And Islamophobia: 9/11, Anti-Arab Racism,

And The Mythos Of National Pride". CR: The New Centennial Review, vol 6, no. 2,

2006, pp. 245-266. Project Muse, https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2007.0011.

Simpson, David. "After 9/11: The Fate Of Strangers". Amerikastudien / American Studies,

vol 57, no. 2, 2022, pp. 193-206., Accessed 1 May 2022.