American college students respond to ‘Muslim’ with automatic terrorist imagery

Evidence

One of the few recent critical assessments of the damage caused by clichés about Islam in the media, policy journals, and academia is by Zachary Karabell (World Policy Journal, Summer 1995), who starts from the premise that there has been undue attention paid to “fundamentalist” Islam since the end of the Cold War. The public media, he says quite rightly, has been filled with negative images of Islam. “Ask American college students, in the elite universities or elsewhere, what they think of when the word ‘Muslim’ is mentioned. The response is inevitably the same: gun-toting, bearded, fanatic terrorists hellbent on destroying the great enemy, the United States.” — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 30

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Said’s Orientalism and the broader thesis of Covering Islam about media representation shaping perception.

Related

• American rhetoric repeatedly fused Muslim identity with fanaticism (similarity 0.78)
• American media reduces the Muslim world to a faceless, static, violent bloc. (similarity 0.78)