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Zaid Simirioti

Professor Hoffpauir

ENGWR 300

December 12, 2019

Bias Against Muslims and Arabs

I have always been interested in how our world changes with time. People aim to fix

problems. But sadly, new problems always seem to come up. Discrimination first started

targeting colored people and many years of fighting and protests happened. And just as black

people were being targeted, Arabs and Muslims started getting targeted by many when on

September 11, 2001, a tragic and horrifying event happened. With Bin Laden being the terrorist

that had caused this catastrophe, people started stereotyping Arabs and Muslims accordingly-

being terrorists too. Thus my topic talks about the Arabs and Muslims and how they were

affected both physically and mentally. I decided to write about this topic because I have had my

time with Muslim Arabs and it was nothing but positive. So coming here to hear about the

negativity and how Muslims/Arabs are being blamed, abused, or shamed when they are just like

any other person seems very wrong I have come up with questions hoping to find answers that

will show how Arabs and Muslims are affected now and how this will change in the future like:

 How does bias against Muslims and Arabs affect Muslim/Arab families in their future?

 How do the disadvantages for Muslims/Arabs affect them in getting jobs?

 How has the media been a part of making Muslims become targets after 9/11?

 What are the cases and what happens in hate crimes on Muslims?
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Throughout my search in the library database, I have found some topics that specifically talk

about the Muslims and Arabs after 9/11 and how they are being portrayed and how polls show

how people are seeing Muslims and Arabs. My main aim for this topic is to try to show more

awareness of how we should give these problems more attention for the audience who know

little or no background information on what is happening. And my aim would also to have the

issue of bias against Muslims and Arabs be one of the problems to be fixed like discrimination

against Black People or immigration problems for Latinx.

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Alsultany, Evelyn. “Arabs and Muslims in the Media after 9/11: Representational Strategies for

a ‘Postrace’ Era.” American Quarterly, vol. 65, no. 1, Mar. 2013, pp. 161–

169. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1353/aq.2013.0008.

This source talks about how Muslims and Arabs were affected after 9/11 by the media.

Evelyn Alsultany, an author and leading expert on the representations on Muslims and Arabs,

talks about how movies might include a “positive representation” of an Arab or Muslim yet they

would represent an Arab as a terrorist. “Hate crimes, workplace discrimination, bias incidents,

and airline discrimination targeting Arab and Muslim Americans increased exponentially.” And

then the US government passed laws that mainly targeted Arabs and Muslims both inside and

outside the US. She mentions “Positive representations of Arabs and Muslims have helped form

a new kind of racism, one that projects antiracism and multiculturalism on the surface but

simultaneously produces the logics and affects necessary to legitimize racist policies and

practices.”

The passage talks about how the media might show positive representations of Arabs and

Muslims, but people still stereotype Muslims and Arabs as bad people or terrorists. Many things

made targeting Arab and Muslims increase exponentially. The fact that the event happened in

September of 2001 and that hate crimes increased 1600% makes the number bigger than it

already is since the increase would have happened in merely 3 months. This shows how Arabs

and Muslims are being targeted ever since 9/11.

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Cainkar, Louise. "Arab Americans." Encyclopedia of Race and Racism, edited by Patrick L.

Mason, 2nd ed., vol. 1, Macmillan Reference USA, 2013, pp. 161-166. Gale

eBooks,https://link-gale-com.ezproxy.losrios.edu/apps/doc/CX4190600052/GVRL?

u=sacr22807&sid=GVRL&xid=c27271c7. Accessed 6 Dec. 2019.

Encyclopedia of Race and Racism by Louise Cainkar, a sociologist and Associate

Professor of Social Welfare and Justice at Marquette University in Milwaukee, talks about types

of racism and everything there is to know about it. Specifically in the book, Cainkar talks about

Arabs in America in a chapter. She speaks about the sudden rise of peoples’ suspicion on Arabs,

specifically 96,000 tips from people reporting Arabs one week after 9/11 happened. She explains

how Arabs faced revengeful attacks from the government and the citizens in the forms of

“assaults, harassments, mass arrests and deportations, denials of civil and political rights, media

vilification, employment discrimination, and invasions of privacy.” By the late 1970s, polls

suggested that Americans’ attitudes towards Arabs were “close to racist.”

The book shows how changes happened before and after 9/11 to Arabs. Arabs come in

with good education levels and good intentions only to be mistreated and abused by Americans

just because they stereotype them as “dangerous immigrants.” And even though Muslim Arabs

outnumbered Christian Arabs, it didn’t change how people saw them. They saw every Christian

and Muslim Arab as just an “Arab-Middle Eastern” thus being physically attacked, experiencing

job discrimination, or hearing anti-Arab comments regardless of religion. This book shows how

badly Arabs are being mistreated and abused.

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Donnelly, Matt. “Overview of Hate Crimes.” Salem Press Encyclopedia, 2019. EBSCOhost,

search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ers&AN=89185617&site=eds-

live&scope=site.

This source talks about hate crimes and then specifies how hate crimes act on Muslims

after September 11. In the beginning, the author Matt Donelly introduces hate crimes and

explains how are people targeted. The author later transitions to discussing the hate crimes

targetting Muslims after 9/11. He said that because of the 9/11 attack, 2.35 million Muslims and

as well as college students became under a spotlight and targets. 400 cases of anti-Islamic hate

crimes that just occurred weeks after 9/11. A survey by the Pew Research Center found that "[a]

quarter of Muslim Americans say they have been the victim of discrimination in the United

States." Matt later states that concerns with hate crimes on Muslims might increase due to

problems with ISIS and attacks in countries like France and Belgium.

This source truly shows how Arabs and Muslims are being physically abused in the

country by providing facts and reports to support the claims and topic. Being abused for religion

and ethnicity is something only Arabs are being targetted by. People nowadays don’t care if an

Arab is a Muslim or a Christian so in their views, they see every Muslim or Christian Arab as

“Arab”, making them a target by ethnicity and religion.

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Guy Raz. “After A Horrible Hate Crime, How Do You Not Hate Back?” TED Radio Hour

(NPR), Dec. 2016. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?

direct=true&db=n5h&AN=6XN201612161603&site=eds-live&scope=site.

Guy Raz, a journalist and radio host in National Public Radio (NPR), invites Suzanne

Barakat, a Syrian Family Medicine Resident at San Francisco General Hospital, to talk about her

stories dealing with islamophobia. She talks about how, as a doctor, she would be mistreated by

her patients in many ways. And then she recites a story that she had previously said in a TED

Talk about how her brother, her brother’s wife, and the wife’s sister were all killed in a single

home because of their religion by their neighbor. Suzanne says “The man who murdered my

brother turned himself into the police shortly after the murders, saying he killed three kids

execution-style over a parking dispute.”

This source was used to show a real-life example of how Muslims are, even 10 years

after 9/11, still abused and discriminated against. A doctor lives to help patients, but in the case

of Suzanne being a Muslim and wears a headscarf, she is being referenced as the cause of

terrorism in the country by patients. Suzanne’s brother and relatives were nothing but nice to the

neighbor even when the neighbor would harass them, threaten them, and sometimes display his

gun to them. What happened was not announced at the local news until a friend of Suzanne

helped her send the news to show awareness of what is actually going on and that what happened

to her family should never be put aside.

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Al-Arian, Abdullah. “Fueling Our Fears: Stereotyping, Media Coverage, and Public Opinion of

Muslim Americans, by Brigitte L. Nacos and Oscar Torres-Reyna.” Political

Communication, vol. 24, no. 4, Oct. 2007, pp. 468–469. EBSCOhost,

doi:10.1080/10584600701641847.

Abdullah Al-Arain, a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Georgetown

University, had published a review of Fueling Our Fears by Brigitte Nacos and Oscar Torres-

Reyna. In his review, Abdullah talks about how the “portrayal of American Muslims by the

mainstream media has been overwhelmingly negative, with major implications for the formation

of public opinion and government policy.” And then he asserts how news coverage was

ambivalent towards the American Muslim Community and that it, at worst, had “reinforced

dominant stereotypes and projected an image of a dangerous fifth column capable of

undermining the nation’s democratic institutions.” And so Abdullah says that it has become clear

that media’s coverage would directly affect public opinions on the American Muslim

Community.

Abdullah had shown a clear path on how the media directly makes a difference in how

the public build up their opinions and reactions towards the Muslim Community. News

coverages gained improvement in the period after the incident of 9/11. Abdullah asserts “The

New York Times, for instance, published 10 times as many articles featuring American Muslims

in the 6 months following 9/11 as in the same time period a year earlier.”
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Selod, Saher. American Journal of Sociology, vol. 117, no. 4, 2012, pp. 1266–1268. JSTOR,

www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/663085.

Saher Selod, an associate professor from Simmons College, reviews Behind the

Backlash: Muslim Americans after 9/11 written by Lori Peek. In Saher’s research, she talks

about the USA PATRIOT Act which is a law that subsequently meant targetting Muslims. She

also says how other laws and policies resulted in the social and political exclusion of Arabs and

Arab Muslims. Peek provided misrepresentations of Muslims and Islam in the media which

showed that prior to 9/11, Muslims lived in an environment that made it easy to target Muslims

after 9/11. Selod also asserts “how religious symbols, such as the hijab, as well as the ethnicity of

Muslim Americans, incited physical threats, verbal abuse, and stares in public spaces, schools,

and at work.” And so second-generation Muslim women showed the pressure done by their

parents to not wear a hijab because the parents fear for the safety of their children.

This source shows how Muslims are being excluded and it also answers my questions on

how the children are affected because of the incidents. Muslims being threatened because of their

religious symbols shows how people have implicit bias and prejudice against people who show

their religious identities as Muslims.