Media spectacle turns native informers into embodied fantasies of Islam

Evidence

These developments have coincided with the phenomenon Guy Debord diagnosed in 1967 as The Society of the Spectacle (La Societe du spectacle), in which a widespread commodity fetishism has moved into the age of globalized mass media and endemic alienation has metastasized into the absolute visuality of everyday life. The native informers demonstrate the factual dementia of reality, the overcoming of facts by visual fantasy upon a spectacular stage where the self-loathing Muslim partakes in and mutates into the image of Islam that has taken root in the globally alienated mind. The more outrageously the native informers can posit this dangerous Islam as the enemy of the humanity at large, the better they will have inhabited the collective psyche of the global hatred they at once invite and welcome. Through this mental metempsychosis, the native informers become the collective consciousness of the race and the faith they at once personify and loath. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 459

Categorization

• DEFINE: Applies Debord’s society of the spectacle concept to explain the peculiar theatrical role of self-loathing native informers as visible embodiments of a globalized fear of Islam.
• DEEPTHINKING: The mechanism by which self-loathing individuals become the ‘collective consciousness’ of the thing they hate — metempsychosis of a deracinated identity into a spectacular stereotype — is dense enough to sit with.
• XREF: connects to: Neocons recruit Muslim ‘native informers’ to delegitimize Muslim criticism of US policy — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 676; Media channels reward native-informant Muslims who reproduce imperial Islamophobia

Related

• Native informers thrive on the spectacle as visual fantasy displaces factual reality (similarity 0.93)
• Media channels reward native-informant Muslims who reproduce imperial Islamophobia (similarity 0.88)
• Visual spectacle now overrides factual reality in global politics (similarity 0.84)
• Brown-skinned native informers authenticate the demonization of Islam while silence follows Israel’s crimes (similarity 0.80)