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đŸȘ” The Threshold

Brown-skinned native informers authenticate the demonization of Islam while silence follows Israel's crimes

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tagsja-picks, bmf, causal_relationships, trade, singleton, xref, category/causal-relationships
aliases@dabashi_brown_2011, loc. 555

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Brown-skinned native informers authenticate the demonization of Islam while silence follows Israel’s crimes

Evidence

Why is it, then, that the term “Islamic terrorism” is a common staple of Western European and North American journalistic, policymaking, and even scholarly parlance, but not “Jewish terrorism” (or even “Christian terrorism”)? That is the issue I have sought to address in this book, in part via the instrumental category of native informers, people with brown skins and white masks and falsified consciousnesses, who I believe are significantly responsible for authenticating and corroborating this demonization of Islam and dehumanization of Muslims. 
 Israel, an entire state apparatus with a massive military machinery, massacres Palestinians by the hundreds and maims them by the thousands in Gaza, the whole world is crying out in protest—and yet Rushdie and his friends are nowhere to be seen. 
 Look closely at the tired, frightened, angry faces of the millions of people protesting the Israeli war crimes in Western Europe and North America! Not a single one of them can you imagine reading Reading Lolita in Tehran. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 555

Categorization

  • BMF: The native informer with a brown skin and white mask, whose falsified consciousness authenticates the oppressor’s narrative, resonates obliquely with Changez in The Reluctant Fundamentalist — both are educated colonial subjects whose self-fashioning gets punished with inferiority when rejected.
  • XREF: connects to: Neocons recruit Muslim ‘native informers’ to delegitimize Muslim criticism of US policy — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of
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