Of course, I knew Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism (really, those two concepts are inseparable and feed each other) were very prevalent in American society going back a long time, with it really ratcheting up after 9/11. But ever since the Zionist entity’s terrorist pager attack last month, the sheer depth, pervasiveness, and how it’s just out there in the open and considered perfectly acceptable has genuinely surprised me. It seems to have started with that attack and subsequent events have only reinforced it.
White Americans just seem to delight whenever they think the Arab/Islamic “terrorists” are attacked. They do not care about who the “terrorists” actually are or how many people suffer. It’s not worth interrogating what the “terrorists” are fighting for or who was harmed because to the white folks, the Muslim/Arab people don’t matter. They’ve been dehumanized to the point where their lives are considered worthless.
To give an example, there is a person in my life who I’m about to cut out (should have a long time ago) who texted me something to the effect of “that pager thing was crazy, but looks like they got a lot of terrorists”. I tried to keep my cool and explain how normal people like doctors and ambulance drivers were hurt and killed too, because lots of people use those pagers. Dude literally just used a shrug emoji in response, because I guess those people aren’t worth giving a care about.
Everything I’ve seen especially in recent weeks really shows how bad it is. Brown people in Western Asia don’t matter because they have a different religion and they are “prone to violence” and they aren’t as “developed” as us. I feel like this is really where the support for Israel comes from. Not from ideas of Israel fulfilling apocalyptic prophesy, but just because white Americans can turn on the TV and see people in Israel who look like them, who have a religion that is semi-compatible with theirs, and who live in a society that seems to be very “Western” fighting off the “savage Islamists”. It plays into their already primed-for-racism-and-chauvinism” brains.
While I don’t think American media is the source of racism and Islamophobia, I do think the last 20+ years of movies, shows, and games has really fueled the fire. I think (hope?) in the future people will look back on this period of “corn-fed white bearded operators killing all the Muslim terrorists” media in the way we look at minstrel shows now.
It comes and goes, really, along with other forms of hate.
Things get nakedly bad, which galvanizes people to organize and rise up and push back, the libs and cons get together to say "Whoah those people over there sure are hateful, let's put a new holiday on the calendar and pass a law that says "hey you're not allowed to officially discriminate against this group (wink)", the capitalists pop champaign and celebrate their inclusiveness, things seem slightly less bad for a few weeks, then the extremists get pissed off about the tolerance of those groups, the elites use their anger as an excuse to neuter the (already basically meaningless) protections, the chuds celebrate this as a win and use that as a rallying cry to organize and recruit, and saying anything about it means you are either ignorant or an extremist because "there's already laws protecting those people! There's no laws protecting my way of life! (all of the other laws)". Things get worse again, but now chuds are emboldened because they knew all along they were going to get their way like a child screaming for oreos at the grocery store.
Sometimes after a few hundred years things get marginally better! (on the surface)