British media explicitly shield Muslims from collective guilt while American media do not
Evidence
As the BBC was reporting the horrors of Mumbai in detail, its producers and reporters went out of their way to find young male British citizens of South Asian origin—the same age and ethnicity as the rampaging criminals—who were either lying wounded in Indian hospitals or landing at London’s Heathrow airport to recount the horrors in accents familiar to the British audience; thus the criminal acts of a band of militant adventurers were kept from being generalized, politicized, and cited as an excuse for racists in Europe to use against immigrant communities. A similar scenario unfolded after the terrorist attacks of July 7, 2005, in London, when Mayor Ken Livingstone and other authorities and news organizations explicitly exonerated British Muslims and South Asian communities from any shred of complicity. In my more than 30 years in the United States, not once have I seen anything similar from an American news outlet. On the contrary. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani seemed to implicate Islam itself in the criminal events of September 11, 2001, thereby potentially putting millions of American Muslims at risk. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 43
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s America-vs-outsider theme and the broader post-9/11 Muslim experience. — connects to: Anglo-American press frames Muslim criminals by religion rather than nationality — Peter Gottschalk and Gabriel Greenberg, Common Heritage, Uncommon Fear:…, 14
- SEED: Could seed an essay contrasting how post-terror coverage either contains or amplifies collective guilt across liberal democracies.