Media coverage humanizes Muslims as perpetrators but erases them as victims

Evidence

The War on Terror, beyond the tanks and the drones, is an epistemological crusade. One that, ironically, only humanizes Muslims and makes them the familiar subject of news headlines when they are doing what Islamophobia warns us about: carrying out terrorism. But when Muslims die, it buries their bodies under the news coverage, deep in the abyss of forgetting, in the black hole that millions of Muslim victims gunned down by unjust wars or white supremacist terrorists are thrown into. … If there is one truth that the War on Terror has unearthed and incessantly reaffirms, it is that Muslims are newsworthy only when villains, and seldom when victims. … While none—absolutely zero—of the nearly 13 million Muslims killed in the years before, and especially after, the War on Terror commenced claim even a small part of our memory. The only Muslims we tend to remember are the culprits of violence, the craven dictators, the warmongers, and the terrorists. Most lastingly, the terrorists. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 973

Categorization

• XREF: Extends the ‘epistemological crusade’ frame beyond sovereign nation-states examined elsewhere in the book — the erasure operates at the level of media knowledge-production, linking to Iftikhar’s global-synthesis treatment.