Scholarly discourse about Islam can facilitate media dehumanization of Muslims

Evidence

In reviewing such events, one must suppress one’s feelings about Ibn Warraq’s writings, and about all the other native informers in part responsible for having dehumanized Arabs and Muslims so successfully that Americans do not think twice before deleting the word “Palestinians” from the number of their dead. I must now patiently dissect Ibn Warraq’s words in order to see through the mechanism that links them to the carnage. Back to Ibn Warraq: that is my intifada. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 511

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that academic ‘native informer’ writings are causally linked to mass-media dehumanization and even wartime carnage is a dense, unsettling thesis worth sitting with.
• XREF: Connects to Said’s Orientalism and the native-informant concept in debates about intellectual complicity. — connects to: Think tanks, academia, and media institutions jointly produce Islamophobia; Selective media focus on Muslim sexism constructs Western enlightenment as its opposite

Related

• Insular academic language on Islam enables public charlatans (similarity 0.83)
• Islamic studies’ marginality lets media spread racist caricatures unchecked (similarity 0.82)
• Native informers’ writings help dehumanize populations that are then killed with impunity (similarity 0.82)
• Western discourse reduces all Muslim societies to a single malevolent essence (similarity 0.81)
• Native informers can undercut their own thesis by citing evidence against it. (similarity 0.80)
• Muslims have long practiced self-criticism within their own languages under their own names (similarity 0.80)
• Islamic intellectual history already contains every claim native informers recycle as new (similarity 0.79)
• Islamophobic claims serve to positively define their speakers rather than describe Muslims (similarity 0.79)
• Native informers embody self-hatred by personifying what they denounce (similarity 0.79)
• Muslim intellectual critique long predates and exceeds Islamophobic polemic. (similarity 0.78)
• Media Islam images derive from geopolitical experts, not academic scholarship (similarity 0.78)
• Muslim-born public intellectuals denounce Muslim crimes but stay silent on Israeli ones (similarity 0.78)
• Popular conflation of Arabs, Muslims, and terrorism enabled the Iraq war. (similarity 0.78)