Djelloul Marbrook: How the Press Masks its Xenophobia

The press dolls up its xenophobia in pseudo-objective claptrap, but when you explore its use of Arabic words like jihad and caliph and mullah a persistent pattern of demonization emerges. The press freights these words with sinister intent.

It’s not unlike the mockery of French or German or even British accents that used to be stock fare in movies, but in the case of Arabic it’s more like the B-movie use of Gothic script to convey the evil of Nazism. The press popularized the word mogul in the same way, implying that there was something deserving of ridicule about the word mughal, from which the word derives, when in fact the Mughal Empire was one of the world’s great civilizations.

We see this adolescent arrogance in the current use of the term all you need to know, as if anyone could possibly know what you or I need to know.

Jihad in Arabic means the selfless purpose of destroying corrupt centers of power. It means rooting out this corruption in oneself as well as in the world.  But the Western press, hijacking Saudia Arabia’s deadly export, Islam For Dummies, attaches bloodthirstiness to the word. The press degrades the word in the same way that fanatics calling themselves Muslims degrade it. In both cases, the underlying purpose is scaremongering.

From a visual standpoint the press uses screenshots and other imagery of Arabic script, one of the most beautiful scripts in the world, to suggest sinister purpose. The press by so doing assumes in its readers and viewers a high degree of ignorance and prejudice and invites them to wallow in a sty of intellectual disgrace.

Not all Muslims speak Arabic, the language of the Prophet Mohammed, but Islam cannot be lived and practiced without understanding its Arab roots. It is suffused with Arabic words. So is English and many other languages. Half the stars bear Arabic names. Common words such as moon, algebra and algorithm are essentially imported Arabic words. Arabic itself,  like English, is a balletic and accommodating language that exuberantly imports such words as gasoline and rifle as gaz and rifel. This is how languages stay alive and prosper, by respecting other languages, the very thing the press mocks.

Before we examine further the use and misuse of the word jihad we should ask ourselves why the Crusades should be construed in ways other than sustained jihad. And, if it was not jihad the Europeans waged against the indigenous peoples of the Americas, what was it? From a Muslim perspective we are waging jihad in the Middle East, but only in the lowest and meanest sense of the word. In its highest sense jihad is a purification of one’s own spiritual vessel.

Mohammed was a warrior prophet. The Qur’an, Islam’s holy book, is said to have been dictated to him by the archangel Gabriel. This explains its frequent command, Write! Some seventy military campaigns were launched by Mohammed and his followers in his lfe time, many of them led by the prophet himself. His generals, particularly Khaled ibn al Walid and Amr ibn al ‘As, conquered the Sassanid and Egyptian empires respectfully. The razzia, raid, was a feature of Bedouin life, and Islam’s early conquests were extended tribal razzias. It wasn’t really until the Abbasid period that caliphal armies were detribalized, a move that led to the employment of mercenaries and the consequent decline of Arab rule.

The Prophet found the pagan Arabs worshipping many idols in their sacred Kaaba in Mecca, and he famously smashed them, setting the precedent for Islam’s iconoclasm. The statuary in Christian churches were regarded as idols. Christians themselves, once Emperor Constantine had made them reputable, defaced and destroyed thousands of classical statues and mosaics. It was, in fact Christians who razed the fabled Alexandria library, although historians blamed it on the Arabs. The library was burned before Amr’s armies conquered Egypt.

Today’s Salafists and Wahhabis in their zeal to restore Islam to what they distortedly regard as its pure state are not unlike Christian literalists who take the Old Testament at its primary word rather than figuratively. If poetry were read that way it would lose its grandeur, its majesty. It would become mere pickings for nitpickers. The Salafists and Wahhabis look to accounts of the destruction of idols and the early military campaigns for guidance, for instruction, not to the great exploratory and tolerant civilizations that Islam would breed across the world.

They look to the destruction of Umayyad Cordoba by ignorant Muslim fanatics for instruction, not to the glory that was Cordoba when it was the crown jewel of the medieval period, a city with street lighting, sewers, running water, hospitals and libraries when Christian Europe was sunk in darkness. They look back not for instruction but for validation of their murderous intent. They use Islam, just as many Christians use the Christian message, to justify their bigotry.

They share with Christian fundamentalists an intolerance for the complexities of contemporary society and look back instead to times they regard as simpler and easier to grasp.  They could be said to be intellectually challenged, disguising the impediment in simplistic rhetoric and a belligerent insistence on being right at everyone else’s expense.

Far from daunting us they are daunted by us, but instead of recognizing this fright the 21st Century the press chooses to scare us by hitching all of Islam to frightened thugs. The Muslim fanatics see in the various degrees of women’s liberation in the West a threat to their insistence on women as chattel. They see women as a threat to their manhood, which they distinguish somehow from personhood. They dominate women because they fear them.

That was the significance of the airstrike led by Maj. Maryam al Mansouri of the United Arab Emirates against  the Islamic State’s ground forces. But the American press went off in several typically wrongheaded directions, sometimes pointing out UAE’s poor human rights record, sometimes simply telling her story without even raising the possibility that terrorism is rooted in  fear of women and therefore Major Al Mansouri’s role was historically as significant to the West as it was to the Muslim world.

The American press in its role as dimwit orchestrator pretends to be authoritative when it is in fact a purveyor of bottled fog. The problem is not only its Wall Street masters and their insistence that the press lay down a smokescreen to disguise their rape of labor, the problem is a tradition of insisting on being right, a tradition of manifest destiny and bearing the white man’s burden because the rest of the world is so demonstrably inferior. When the press demonizes Arabic words it seeks to demonstrate the Arabs’ inferiority as a people.

There is hardly a difference between American and British imperialism except that America lies more but not as convincingly as the British. The British managed to sound right—they still do—even when they were horribly wrong. Americans have never mastered this sense of authority. It’s perhaps in the British nature to sound authoritative while it’s in the American nature to sound like Jubilation T. Cornpone at his comic worst. That is because our press has not studied at the feet of our poets and storytellers, as it should have, but rather has developed a full-of-it bafflegab of its own that sounds very much like the bullshit the press is wont to mock.

In its adolescent sulk the press envisions every development as a kind of war game. Who wins? Who loses? This is especially ironic in view of the press’ utter failure to tell us who profits from the development it so breathlessly reports. The press uses war and sports verbiage, arguing that its audience is too illiterate to appreciate a higher level of literacy, and thereby keeping Americans perpetuating the problem.

While disdaining psychology as voodoo, the press couches developments in geopolitical and strategic parlance, religiously failing to tell us who profits by these developments. To read and hear about Afghanistan you’d think the United States has waged a thirteen-year war, the longest in its history, to assure Afghanistan’s freedom from the dreadful Taliban. Nothing about Afghanistan’s vast mineral resources and who profits from them. Nothing about the opium trade. Nothing about turning a tragic nation and its people into a freewheeling arms market. Nothing but the bullshit with which the press regularly provides Wall Street with cover.

When has the press troubled to make Afghanistan’s mineral wealth part of the context of each new story, as it makes the Taliban or the latest killing of American soldier’s by their Afghan allies? When has the press troubled to tell us of Afghanistan’s historic role in the history of mystery cults and metaphysics?

News without context is misdirection. The press is not interested in coveting knowledge or shedding light. The press is fully committed to keeping Americans in a high state of anxiety and ignorance so that Wall Street can pick the people’s pockets.

The demonization of Arabic words, like the mockery of French or German words, is nothing but schoolyard taunt and name-calling. It’s the hallmark of a press that has failed to grow up, a press that has failed the 21st Century because it requires more maturity than Wall Street deems good for crooks.

Consider this. The United States has yet to articulate its resolute opposition to the use of torture. But the Muslim Sharia, so demonized by the Western press as a kind of satanic doctrine, specifically condemns torture. Sharia law is evolving, in the same way Christian doctrine evolves. Islam is seven centuries newer than Christianity, and it may be fairly argued that its thinking has evolved at a faster pace than Christianity’s. Yet none of the considerations, which might provide context, find their way into the press.

When it comes to Islam the press is not so much Gabriel as it is Lucifer.

— by Djelloul Marbrook writing for Vox Populi