Reflection 3

Yesterday, along with Jared and Bryce we went to a talk on the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and what they were actually like. The previous week, in class, we watched a documentary on Orientalism and a clip from the Colbert Report. These 3 individual things tie into the same core theme: how are middle easterners perceived? Not only in the United States but also in the West in general.

It was amazing for me to hear just how different society is and how the Muslim Brotherhood is compared to what it is portrayed by the Western media. I always knew that many stereotypes were formed about Middle Easterner even before the rise of extremism and terrorism simply because of the vast history of conflict and hatred between the Middle East and West since the early Middle Ages even prior to the Crusades. Naturally you would want to dehumanize your "enemy" and desensitize your population to what you may inflict upon that enemy so naturally Middle Easterner would be portrayed in a negative light as devils or at least uncivilized people that need to be stopped. For example, few know that Afghanistan used to have one of the greatest civilizations of the known world prior to Western involvement and later the rise of the Taliban. Most people like to focus on what they are given as information rather than try to learn for themselves the truth. From visiting a Middle Eastern country to actually speaking from people from those countries, it does not take much to dispel the inaccurate information given off by Orientalism.

It was especially disappointing to me that this happens in the United States, a country that has always prided itself on being a melting pot of world cultures. It is amazing that so many people can be blinded by hatred or by the actions of a few to discriminate or disregard a select group. It is unfortunate that the contributions of American Arabs and more generally American Muslims goes unrecognized but I believe that things are starting to change more and eventually the more people will interact with American Arabs and Muslims and the more the collective memories of the Terrorist attacks start to fade, tolerance and acceptance will come back into the mainstream instead of being pushed back to the Middle Eastern Wars and the War on Terror.