Daily Times

No other thought ran through my mind, but that it must be an agenda-setting tool. The prolonged focus on copies of Holy Quran, prayer beads and rugs in news clips of Western mass media became frequent, bombarding news items following the 9/11, cherry-picking alleged terrorists, who incidentally happened to be Muslim.

Are they against Islam, asked a graduate students in my Media and Politics class. “Sir, why is media in the West triggering Islamophobia”, he quickly supplemented the question that suddenly deepened in all eyes present, filling the lecture hall with a mysterious hush.

No, it’s certainly not the religious antagonism at the core of hoopla focused around the ongoing Islamophobia, the thought I have been holding in one of the neurons in back of my head for the past 16 years suddenly found an outlet and liberated spontaneously. The critical and curious minds of policymakers in the West do not romanticise on belief matters, as we do here in Pakistan. However, the fact remains that in masses, Islamophobia represents a form of racism fueled with cultural intolerance.

Despite all its modernity, the world is still curbed in a large tribal theatre where the need to have an enemy is as essential in the nation-state system, as it would in a tribal conservative societies of the East. However, to have an enemy in the United States led West holds strategic objectives unlike ego massaging, self esteemed inspired and for guarding the false taboos at micro traditional tribal cultures.

The international politics is governed by the Classic Realist paradigm geared by the Realpolitik where inconsiderate national interests free of sentimental contamination are above everything, whether we like it or not.

Islamophobia might not be a crusade, as generally perceived, but a strategic compulsion for better commercial and strategic gains

Exhausted of the disasters of the world wars, it was terribly awful to attract investment into the war industry that the US needed to emerge as a superpower rivaled by the Soviet Union. Media industry in United States focused on demonising the Soviets portraying Russians as ruthless barbarian determined to bulldoze Americans – the Russians are coming, was the hot selling jargon. Fear of the Red Russia was so much inculcated in the minds of American masses that they welcomed every jingoistic idea placed before them faithfully.

The war industry started rolling and Military Bureaucratic Industrial Complexes (MBIC) became the top trillions of dollars industry producing a whole array of sophisticated warfare machines with consistently upgrading technological sophistication. And with the product comes the need for new war markets. The modernising mass media industry served the purpose well, inducing fear to trigger an aggressive consumer behaviour. The effect 24/7 news network has on political and economic environment.

Just as media theory, the CNN effect underlines that the attention of target viewers is narrowly focused for potentially prolonged periods of time, hence causing individuals and organisations to react more aggressively towards the specific subject matter in focus.

Since after the dismemberment of the Soviet Union in 1991, the US shriveled of an enemy, Americans badly needed a worthy rival in order to maintain the fear level regimented among people and succumb to any defence budget escalations. The gauntlet thrown at the Islamic world was not because of intrinsic ideological conflicts but the unending incoherent interstate rivalries within the Muslim world that attracted the attention. It has, in fact, been the blood soaked history where more Muslims were harmed and killed by Muslim brethren that no other enemy could do. It in fact, helped the war managers nominate a new enemy to help the West keep its war industry.

The coercion and profits of terrorism and subsequent flourishing of the counter-terrorism industry have even surpassed the MBICs, because the war has come down at the individual level. Islamophobia might not be a crusade, as generally perceived but a strategic compulsion for better commercial and strategic gains. Whether or not recognising Jerusalem as Israeli capital will escalate anti-Americanism is yet to be seen. However, it would continue to work for good.

However, architects of the terror jingoism ignored that this time the enemy is not far away behind the iron curtains fighting proxies elsewhere, but that it creeps within under the very skin. Over six million Muslims live in the US alone and they also constitute a significant minority in Europe. It’s the both ends of candle that are burning and the consequential damage would be collateral – that’s all a whistle blower can put forward.

The writer is a senior journalist and former Political Affairs Advisor to the US Consulate General in Karachi

Published in Daily Times, December 9^th 2017.