March 2012
Stranger #Orientalism by Daisy Rockwell
“We all know what shariah law does to women — women must wear burqas, women are subject to humiliation and into controlled marriages under Sharia law. We want to prevent it from ever happening in Texas.” — Texas state Rep. Leo Berman
For an empire to mobilize its people against an enemy, it must provide motivation and define that enemy as an other, possibly less human, group of people. If the enemy, or the colonized peoples, are not drawn in garish caricature, then how does one justify their subjugation? Since al-Qaeda’s attacks on the United States in 2001, there has been a consistent effort on the part of the US government and those in public life who have a particular stake in supporting our two conventional wars and the Global War on Terror (GWOT), to paint our enemy, generally construed as Muslim and Arab or South Asian, as animated by “religious extremism,” under which category are such nefarious plots as the desire to impose Sharia law in the United States and make our women wear burkas. This religious extremism is shorthand for a whole host of mysterious and mystifying practices that renders Muslims “other” and infinitely unknowable. While our “enemy” (understood to be Muslim) is motivated in his (irrational) hatred of us by religious fervor, we (the citizens of Empire) are motivated by rationality, truth and a love of “freedom.” There is no scope within this narrative for resentment of the United States’ imperial practices and increasingly bloody foreign policies in the Middle East. Resentment of policies is the province of rational beings, not of religious fanatics.
►http://www.bookslut.com/white_chick_with_a_hindi_phd/2012_03_018789.php
