{"id":87,"date":"2018-04-14T14:22:37","date_gmt":"2018-04-14T18:22:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/rhetoric-terrorism\/?p=87"},"modified":"2018-04-14T14:22:37","modified_gmt":"2018-04-14T18:22:37","slug":"week-13-readings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/rhetoric-terrorism\/2018\/04\/14\/week-13-readings\/","title":{"rendered":"Week 13 Readings"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michael J. Lee\u2019s article, \u201cUs, them, and the war on terror: reassessing George W. Bush\u2019s rhetorical legacy,\u201d discussed the reframing and understanding of Bush\u2019s discourse after 9\/11. Typically, his presidential rhetoric has been critiqued as \u201cmelodramatic\u201d and promoting dichotomy of \u201cus versus them\u201d or \u201cgood versus evil,\u201d as seen in a number of his speeches<\/a> after the attacks.\u00a0 In this article, Lee strives to present an argument that states Bush\u2019s rhetoric did not exclusively focus on dualism; rather, a combination of dualism and universalism. One of Lee\u2019s most compelling arguments that supported his thesis was the idea of universalism as a form of imperialism. Universalism is defined in the article as seeing out a needy group, and organizing their rescue by creating a \u201clawful democracy.\u201d By this definition, the United States was promoting the idea that the world is One, and we all must support each other, following a universalistic construction. At the same time, this rhetoric classifies Arabs and Muslims as a needy Other and the United States as the savior, promoting the same dichotomy stated earlier. Another interesting point of the article was the concept of dissociation: a strategy that separates two otherwise connected concepts. Using this tactic, Bush manages to separate Arabs and Muslims from terrorism through starting to dissociate Islam from Arabs and acts of terrorism. Bush states, \u201c\u2018These acts of violence against innocents violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith\u2026 The fact of terror is not the true faith of Islam\u2026 Islam is peace.\u2019\u201d (Lee, pg. 8) In this quote, Bush manages to remove religion from acts of terrorism, thus removing Arabs from acts of terrorism as well. Personally, I have always considered Bush\u2019s rhetoric to follow the \u201cus versus them\u201d framework, so this article was very eye opening to me as it proved that he managed to use a number of different tactics to remove generalizations about the Other.<\/p>\n

El-Nawawy and Powers\u2019 article, \u201cAl-Jazeera English: A Conciliatory Medium In a Conflict-Driven Environment?\u201d argues that the news source, AJE<\/a>, models of journalism offers an inclusive alternative to mainstream news media that continues to encourage stereotypical representations of the Other. The article argues this is done through journalist giving a voice to the voiceless which has allowed viewers to become less dogmatic in their \u2018cognitive thought.\u2019 A major argument of this article was the implementation of peace journalism, a form of news that tones down the focus on violent conflict. This would mean the need for empathetic journalists to create platform for all parties and voices that focused on the negative impact of violence from conflict. The hope of this kind of journalism is to not sanitize coverage, but to talk about violence in relation to its social, economic and political effects. Personally, I disagree with this kind of journalism. While agree there is certainly something wrong with news media today and the entertainment factor of conflict has gotten out of control, I think by downplaying the emotional effect of violence we lose a bit of humanity. It would be essentially taking the dramatic and emotional effect on peoples lives out of the story, and only focusing on the nitty gritty of conflict. Personally, I think this is unrealistic because if there are people telling an emotional story, you can\u2019t just remove that emotion all together. Some stories just have entertainment aspects at face-value, and by removing that you are altering the story itself.<\/p>\n

The article, \u201cThe World as the American Frontier: Racialized Presidential War Rhetoric\u201d by Zo\u00eb Hess Carney & Mary E. Stuckey, discusses the similarities between presidential rhetoric from the Indian War<\/a> and the present War on Terror. The article argues that while the Indian Wars go unmentioned in todays presidential rhetoric, the racial underpinnings from these wars are the foundation of our understanding of war rhetoric and the historical relationship between race and war. Carney outlines this articles through corresponding elements of racialization during the Indian Wars and the War on Terror: collapsing identities, permeating boarders and wielding technology. The first argument, collapsing identities, refers to the generalization of 500 nations, cultures and languages all into one single identity. American Indians were understood to be so different from white that they were rendered indistinguishable from each other, marking them all as one group of Indian. This racialization creates a single identity that ascribes specific characteristics and actions to the group including dangerous, murderous and savages<\/a>. By the same premise, \u2018terrorist\u2019 has become a generalization for Muslim or Arab. Similar to the Indian, presidents imagine the enemy as a single identifiable subject who must be conquered, justifying the creation of hierarchies and authorizing violence. Permeating boarders refers to the\u00a0 lack of boundaries surrounding both wars. During the Indian Wars, there were no boundaries or no areas marked as safe zones. Once one tribe was conquered, colonizers would move onto the next with no regard for civilian lives or the implications of violence. Bush\u2019s rhetoric classified all citizens of Iraq as terrorist simply based on their location and appearance; thus, where ever people are falling into this identity, immediately becomes a war zone. Shifting boundaries in both wars lead to the justification of taking innocent civilian lives because since the enemy is flood and dynamic, the troops must be too in order to protect our nation. The argument wielding technology refers to the classification of the enemies weapons. Presidents often classified Indian weapons as trickery and inhumane, and valorize the U.S.\u2019 weapons as moral and humane. Their access to weapons furthered their characterization as savage aggressors, and framed the Americans as the protectors. In reality, the United States is frequently placed higher in the hierarchy based on our access to weapons and the governments ability to afford better technology. Overall, I found this article to be incredibly interesting and the connection between rhetoric surrounding the wars to be indisputable.<\/p>\n

Kumar\u2019s article, \u201cFraming Islam: The Resurgence of Orientalim During the Bush II Era,\u201d outlines the dominant framework that reinforce stereotypes<\/a> surrounding Islam and Muslims after 9\/11. This is done through the discussion of five discursive frames: 1) Islam is a monolithic religion 2) Islam is uniquely sexist religion 3) The Muslim mind is incapable of rationality and science 4) Islam is inherently violent 5) The West spreads democracy whereas Islam spawns terrorism. The article covers the history of colonization, and its use as justification for racism as an ideology. Orientalist used this justification to create a hierarchy, placing the \u201cWest\u201d on the top and framing the \u201cOrient\u201d (particularly Muslims) as barbaric and in need of intervention. This article reiterates many arguments made in the other readings for the week including the collapsing of massive groups of people into one identity (monolithic religion), the Other as a barbaric and incapable group (relating to sexism), and the framing of a single group as inherently violent. I found the most interesting part of this article to be the framework of Islam as uniquely sexist, particularly the comparison to the United States.<\/p>\n

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Michael J. Lee\u2019s article, \u201cUs, them, and the war on terror: reassessing George W. Bush\u2019s rhetorical legacy,\u201d discussed the reframing<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2676,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/rhetoric-terrorism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/rhetoric-terrorism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/rhetoric-terrorism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/rhetoric-terrorism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2676"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/rhetoric-terrorism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/rhetoric-terrorism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/rhetoric-terrorism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/rhetoric-terrorism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/rhetoric-terrorism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}