WASHINGTON — With the vast majority of news articles about Islam being about violence and terrorism, the religion gets viewed through a “distorted lens” that makes it easy to persuade the American public to support government actions against Muslims and Muslim lands.
That was one of the major points that a Georgetown University professor of Islamic studies and international affairs made Thursday during a talk about a phenomenon known as “Islamophobia.”
“It’s Islamic exceptionalism,” said John Esposito, who is also founding director of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown and director of The Bridge Initiative, a multi-year research project that seeks to bring academic study of Islamophobia to the public discourse.
“Islam is treated in a way that you could never talk about Jews, Catholics, Christians, etcetera, in terms of making statements that brush stroke an entire population.”
Consequently, Esposito said, Islam gets viewed through a distorted lens that impacts foreign policy.
“It makes it a heck of a lot easier to invade another country, a heck of a lot easier to engage in drone attacks that kill more civilians than enemies, and then wonder why people don’t like us,” Esposito said.
A new Georgetown report, titled “When Islamophobia Turns Violent: The 2016 U.S. Presidential Elections,” states that nine out of 10 stories by news media outlets in the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany portray Islam and Muslims in the context of violence.
