Islam replaced communism as the West’s fear narrative after 1979

Evidence

Scholars such as Edward Said long ago documented a consistent anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bias in the media. In the Canadian context, Karim Karim examined the media for the period 1980 to 2000, and showed how Islam became ‘the new red scare.’ The Muslim Other replaced the cold war script in the Canadian media, starting primarily with the overthrow of the Shah of Iran in 1979. Muslim political violence was nearly always described as terrorism, Karim shows, and the media prepared the public to think of all Muslims and Arabs as irrational, terrorist fanatics. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 90

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to cold-war-studies and media framing scholarship; the ‘red scare to green scare’ frame appears in post-9/11 security studies and connects to the reader’s work on communication technology shaping culture. — connects to: The Cold War’s end positioned Islam as communism’s replacement global threat — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 240; Neocons replaced the Soviet enemy with an Islamic civilizational threat; The Islamic-terror enemy replaced the Soviet Union as an archnemesis. (+2 more)