Muslims are so dehumanized they are treated as bare life

Evidence

The horrors of Abu Ghraib, which continue in some form at GTMO in the forced feedings and other governmental policies still underway, are acts that reveal that Muslims are not considered human. This is, I believe, what makes the existence of imaginary Muslim monsters in Europe and the United States such a serious problem. Something led the architects of the War on Terror to think that the indefinite detention, torture, rape, and murder of Muslims—no matter how “bad” these Muslims are—would be acceptable. Muslims are so dehumanized in public discourse that treating them as just bodies, Agamben’s “bare life,” has become, in fact, acceptable. Muslims are not just represented as monsters—they are monsters. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 757

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The closing chiasmus — ‘not just represented as monsters—they are monsters’ — collapses the representation/reality boundary that the rest of the book has carefully maintained, forcing a re-read of the entire projection thesis.
• DEFINE: Brings in Agamben’s ‘bare life’ as the analytic tool naming what the monster-image lets authorities do to bodies.
• XREF: Connects to your Frankfurt School reading on indifference-to-victimization enabling fascism, and to Adorno’s ‘the manipulative type’ — dehumanization precedes the act.
• BMF: The reduction of detained humans to disposable ‘bare life’ bodies evokes the penal-isolation logic in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, where numbers of the State are revocably expendable, and Octavia Butler’s society treating unvalued humans as livestock in Parable of the Sower.