News juxtaposed Afghan women’s horrors against liberation images to justify war

Evidence

Images accompany these stories: a man whips a group of women and children on the street; a woman is in the hospital after being burned alive by her father-in-law for not doing the laundry properly. Other images of postliberation Afghanistan are juxtaposed to these horror stories: recurring favorites are images of wedding celebrations after the fall of the Taliban; men and women are celebrating together, and the women are not wearing burqas but high heels and makeup. Many news stories in the wake of the terrorist attacks in the aftermath of 9/11 contain references to the United States bringing “light” to the “darkness” that was Afghanistan. — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 533

Categorization

• XREF: The light/darkness and rescue-narrative framing connects to the ‘white savior’ trope and to narratives of colonization as rescue; also echoes the ADDENDUM article on sacrifice as stabilizing rhetoric. — connects to: Media coverage of Afghan women spiked eighteenfold only once it served war aims — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 288; NGOs function as imperial weapons in feminist guise in the Afghan war — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 311; Afghan women’s conditions did not improve and even worsened after invasion — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 288
• SEED: Angle: a visual-history essay on how the burqa-free wedding photo became the icon of ‘successful war’ — the single most repeated image of post-9/11 Afghanistan coverage.