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Opinion

A Muslim Holocaust?

Waqar Haque
Guest columnist

Dehumanization can be defined as a "psychological process whereby opponents view each other as less than human and thus not deserving of moral consideration." 

This is usually a result of a long, extended conflict between groups, where one group is consistently demeaned in order to justify brutal actions taken against it. This dehumanization is exactly what is taking place against the world's Muslim community. 

A recent poll by The Washington Post revealed that 43 percent of Americans have an unfavorable view of Islam. A national survey done last year by Cornell University's Department of Communication concluded that 44 percent of Americans believe the U.S. government should suspend civil rights and use surveillance techniques to spy on Muslim Americans, and 27 percent of respondents were in favor of formal registration of Muslims. 

Because most Americans do not have experience in dealing with Muslims, their negative viewpoints are molded by the mainstream media and their own are molded by a cursory consideration of current events. There is a frightening "enemy image" of Islam that is being cultivated in American culture. Television specials and world news programs focus exclusively on the actions of the small percentage of extremist Muslims. Media pundits fail to put their actions in the proper context and focus primarily on religious orientation. This incessant barrage of Muslims by the media is dehumanizing and alienates Muslims from most Americans, as poll numbers indicate. 

History shows that dehumanization can have unpredictable consequences. In Nazi Germany, Jews were consistently portrayed as evil, greedy and detrimental to society. Germans grew psychologically detached from the Jews and began to view them as a truly inferior breed of people that had no right to be in Germany. In less than ten years more than 6 million Jews were slaughtered in the Holocaust, and the majority of the German people just looked the other way, or were actually accomplices to the massacres, because of the negative and hostile perceptions of Judaism they had been indoctrinated with by the mass media.

Genocide is always preceded by a process of dehumanization. In Rwanda, talk show radio hosts flooded the airwaves with anti-Tutsi sentiments, harping on Tutsi inferiority and inciting the Hutus to purge the country of Tutsis. In March 1994, the Hutus did just that as mobs slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Tutsis in a matter of days. This was encouraged by radio talk show hosts, who were not much unlike the Pat Robertsons and Michael Savages of American radio shows, who try to rile up Americans against Muslims with comments describing Islam as "not a peaceful religion that wants to co-exist, but one that wants to co-exist until they can control and dominate and then, if need be, destroy." 

The media today never fail to portray Muslims in the most negative light possible. Whenever a bomb goes off in Israel, the bomber is usually labeled an Islamic terrorist. That the Palestinian people have no homeland; Palestinian cities are routinely shot at by Israeli tanks, and more than seventy percent of Palestinians live below the poverty level is ignored. The attacker is not even called a Palestinian, but usually an Extremist Muslim. The intense focus on his religious orientation further indoctrinates viewers into linking Islam with terrorism, violence and extremism. 

It would be foolish to think these public stereotypes will not have long-term effects on the psyche of the American people and the rest of the world. The negative actions of criminals who claim to be Muslims are falsely thought to be a reflection of the fundamental nature of Islam. As educated university students we must be at the forefront of bringing attention to the rise of prejudice against Muslims and stand united against it. 

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