Mediated images of the Middle East recruited economically trapped men into foreign wars

Evidence

John was trapped, with just one way out. He decided the military seemed a “good option.” He was clearly a good man, someone who wanted to make a better future for his young daughters, and who, out of fidelity to his country, was motivated to exact revenge on the terrorists who crashed two planes into the World Trade Center. So John shipped out to a place he had never visited before enlisting in the armed forces, a place he had only seen in the Hollywood films and corporate news coverage that “make the Middle East” and that pushed him to fight for the country he loved so much. The war would turn him into a shell of the man his family had known before he enlisted to fight in a foreign war. To fight for a nation that did not love him back. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 187