And slapped it onto the cover of an Arab publication, you would have the equivalent of “American Rage.”
That’s what Youseff Munayyer, Palestinian-American writer and ED of the Jerusalem Fund, told Politico today.
The latest Newsweek cover, which sensationalizes the ripple of protests currently erupting across the Middle East, is getting flack on the internet for re-hashing Islamophobic stereotypes popular during the Bush-era and for oversimplifying the post 9/11 cultural clash between Islamic and American civilizations.
This morning, Joe Scarborough added salt to the wound when he created a false dichotomy between the Middle East and the U.S, arguing that they just “hate us because they hate us.”
But this talk of so-called ‘Muslim Rage,’ as many journalists have already pointed out, is offensively cheap and polarizing to the majority of Islamic people who do not all unanimously exercise let alone possess Anti-American sentiments. (Libya, as it turns out, has a 54% US approval rating.)
Even Gawker, after putting a lighthearted, sardonic spin on the presumptive claim that Muslims are raging, accused Newsweek of misrepresenting Arab Muslims everywhere: they “have no lives, no feelings or thoughts external to constant, violent rage, directed at old white people living in the Midwest (due to their freedoms).”
“We need to be clear-eyed with our grief,” Hilary Clinton forewarned last week in the wake of the attacks in Libya and Egypt – and so must we be with our overgeneralized, culturally othering, and falsely accusatory rage.
