Islam entered American awareness mainly through oil and terrorism news
Evidence
Consider therefore that Islam has entered the consciousness of most Americans — even of academic and general intellectuals who know a great deal about Europe and Latin America — principally if not exclusively because it has been connected to newsworthy issues like oil, Iran and Afghanistan, or terrorism. And all of this by the middle of 1979 had come to be called either the Islamic revolution, or “the crescent of crisis,” or “the arc of instability,” or “the return of Islam.” A particularly telling example was the Atlantic Council’s Special Working Group on the Middle East (which included Brent Scowcroft, George Ball, Richard Helms, Lyman Lemnitzer, Walter Levy, Eugene Rostow, Kermit Roosevelt, and Joseph Sisco, among others): when this group issued its report in the fall of 1979, the title given it was “Oil and Turmoil: Western Choices in the Middle East.” — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 132
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: Islamist groups were judged purely by their utility to US oil and business interests — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 410
Related
- Islamist groups were judged purely by their utility to US oil and business interests (similarity 0.82)
- The Islamic world’s salience as Western challenger is powered by rentier oil economies. (similarity 0.79)
- Western ideological camps all reduce Islam to a scapegoat (similarity 0.79)
- Westerners encounter Islam only through pre-framed political and media channels. (similarity 0.79)
- Islam emerged as a media category only after the 1974 OPEC oil crisis (similarity 0.79)
- Islamist groups arise from local conditions, not from anti-American plots (similarity 0.79)
- The American public first linked Islam with terrorism only after the Iranian Revolution. (similarity 0.78)
- Real-world events, not scholarship, propelled political Islam to academic attention (similarity 0.78)