Media framed Padilla as incurable menace while excusing white converts

Evidence

The story of Jose Padilla—a Latino man from Chicago—begins marked for failure. News accounts of Padilla unfailingly note the grimy underbelly of his early life: he was in a gang, a petty thief, and in and out of facilities for juvenile delinquency. As with the standard reductive explanations for terrorism, here too the typical media portrayal ignores larger, more complex environmental factors: Padilla went from a life of crime to terrorism. Different from the pitiable sexual pathology of Greg Landon, Padilla became a terrorist because at his core he is a menace to society; he was incapable of living a normative American life that includes holding a job, having a relationship and a family, and, most important, being a law-abiding citizen who does not commit crimes and end up in prison. Padilla is portrayed as part of a larger trend of men of color who fill prisons, convert to Islam while in prison, are released from prison only to commit another crime, and are sent back to prison. Islam here serves as yet another gang, but the severity of the crime goes from gang banging in the neighborhood to plots that threaten national security. — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 1061

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the reader’s interest in how institutions label bodies as threats; also connects to The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s treatment of American suspicion toward the racialized other.
• SEED: An essay angle: the ‘prison-to-Islam-to-terror’ pipeline as media myth — how conversion narratives are racially coded differently for Latino men versus white converts like John Walker Lindh.