Stereotyping of Arabs and Muslims in the Western Mass Media: An Obstacle to the Movement of al-Imam al-Mahdi that Must be Confronted-2

The major difference in the coverage between the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News was how Finley showed his colors in several editorials. Rather than seeing the conflict for what it was, a highly controversial event affecting many locals, Finley used his pen to make a series of highly alarmist and extreme articles in support of Israel. Editors in most American newspapers do not generally sign their names to such articles out of fear of losing credibility—but not Finley. He was single-handedly responsible for virulently pro-Israel material while also presenting stereotypical views of Arabs and Muslims.
Finley didn\'t develop his aggressiveness as a result of the Israel-Hizbullah conflict—he was already far to the right even before the conflict began. In a June 25 Detroit News editorial, titled, "Use nukes to keep the bad boys in line," Finley grossly simplified America\'s relations with "rogue states." He did not give any room for those states to note their grievances with the U.S. and reduced nations of millions to a few bogeymen that needed to be wiped out. Finley did not mention what the fallout from the use of such nuclear weapons could do to civilian populations and seemed to think that such ideas are a sign of weakness. He wrote:
Witness the fact that we\'re wringing our hands while Iran\'s insane
mullah posse, all hopped up on jihad, push defiantly ahead with a
nuclear program they boast will \'wipe Israel off the map\'. … Or that
our soldiers -- our sons and daughters -- are dying everyday in Iraq
at the hands of an enemy that fights in sandals and makes bombs
in the back of somebody\'s garage. Am I the only one who wonders:
Why don\'t we just nuke \'em? What good is all that shock and awe
hardware if we aren\'t willing to use it to spare our own children from
murderous butchers like the ones who mutilated two American soldiers
in Iraq last week? Why do we waste our breath bargaining with nut
balls like Kim Jong Il when in a blink of an eye we could make him
disappear? The answer: Because we know as well as our enemies do
that we\'ll never push the button. And so our amazingly potent
hardware does us no good in deterring threats from rogue regimes.
America will never launch the Big One, unless someone drops a big
one on us first.

Finley\'s article is delusional on a number of levels, not least because the U.S. is the only country that has used nuclear weapons, not only once, but twice against Japan during WWII. This use of "shock and awe hardware" was started by the U.S.—America never was responding to a nuclear attack when it used its weapons of mass destruction on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Finley goes on to state that the solution to deterring "regimes like Iran and North Korea" is the design and use of "smaller nukes" on those countries.
With such an openly aggressive pro-Israel stance, it should have been no surprise that Finley would have supported Israel\'s assault on Lebanon. In an article titled, "Israel\'s Right to Defense," Finley wrote, "The cries that Israel is wreaking a humanitarian disaster in Lebanon, wantonly killing innocents and destroying homes and infrastructure, are reaching a hysterical pitch." In a superb example of double-talk, Finley said that Israel had to be allowed to destroy Hizbullah, otherwise the "Lebanese people [would be] as vulnerable as they were before the fighting began." Finely added:
When the smoke clears, Israel must have a wide buffer between
itself and Hezbollah\'s Iranian supplied rockets. If Lebanon can\'t
guarantee that safe space, then Israel must be free to do it itself.
… Compounding the hazard is Israel\'s tiny size. It\'s less than
one-sixth the area of Michigan, with roughly the same amount of
people. The enemy is always within shooting distance. If nothing
else, we have relearned during the past two weeks that as long as
there are Jews in the Middle East, someone will try to kill them.
Since when does a country being small mean that it is vulnerable? The American-backed Israel has the strongest military force in the Middle East. It is capable of easily crushing its neighbors whenever it sees fit. It would seem that Finley\'s notion of Israelis being beleaguered in relation to their neighbors is so lacking in evidence that he has to argue on the basis of the size of their country, an utterly clichéd and irrelevant point of debate.
Although there still were many letters to the Detroit News supporting Israel unconditionally, after Finley\'s "Support for Israel\'s defense" article, letters in opposition were seen more often. The Detroit News, to its credit, ran a number of letters criticizing Finley\'s position and also allowed guest editorials by Sheikh Mohammad Ali Elahi, the imam of Dearborn Heights\' Islamic House of Wisdom, and Imad Hamad, director of the Michigan Chapter of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. Both Elahi and Hamad were highly critical of Israel\'s actions against Lebanon. Hamad was even able to say, "The disturbing fact is that people who are justifiably critical of Israel immediately become targets of harassment." However, this did not undo what Finley had said and he never apologized for his comments.

Conclusion
Most editors who are part of the mainstream western media are much more subtle if they support Israel because readers do not like to feel they are perusing propaganda. Regarding reporters, they are sometimes biased but often times may be ignorant. The same may be said about film producers. However, in all cases, the negative portrayal of Arabs and Muslims can be seen as a direct attack on the interests of al-Imam al-Mahdi\'s movement, which must be addressed.
One may take hope in Warikoo. He visited Lebanon on behalf of the Detroit Free Press after the conflict and his reporting since the trip was of markedly better—in this case meaning more balanced—regarding incidents involving Arabs and Muslims. He wrote several stories that showed far more empathy for Arabs and Muslims, including a piece titled "Stares, whispers take toll on metro Muslims – They tire of defending religion, ethnicity."
Perhaps part of the solution to cutting through ignorance regarding the Arab and Muslim world is that the Shi\'a facilitate meetings and visits by dignitaries. Israel is far ahead of us in this regard and savvy when it comes to winning the hearts and minds of undecided policy makers. The Israelis have invested time and money into speaking English and French fluently which are the lingua franca of intellectualism today just as Arabic and Persian were in the past. To speak Persian and Arabic is good and to be commended, but there is a time and place for everything and we must be flexible to address the rapidly evolving world we live in today.
Without our having a strong, principled media that operates with efficient and logical systems, it is difficult for nonbiased but ignorant reporters to maintain balance and hear our grievances. Reporters can be influenced by the same propaganda that many in the pro-Israeli lobby have skillfully produced and even very experienced and good hearted writers, although careful not to offend sensibilities ordinarily, may write the same kind of clichéd journalism that fuels stereotyping in the public. The world must know the truth about what we are, what we believe in and what we want to see.
American support of Israel may generally seem extreme and incomprehensible to outsiders, but it is the product of years of gradually ratcheting up paranoia in the American public about Arabs and Muslims. Such paranoia does not make our cause any easier. In the days after 9/11, there was widespread support of the idea that Islam needed to be better understood and that by allowing terrorism to create splits in the public, the attackers/ terrorists would have achieved their goal of sowing chaos. There was sensitivity to the idea that perhaps Muslims and Islam would have to be addressed in more sophisticated terms than in the past. Sales of the Qur\'an and books about Islam were all the rage. However, today the bestsellers\' lists are filled with anti-Islam and anti-Arab books, many relying upon the same old clichéd stereotypes of the past. Rather than address the important topics and address the rights and wrongs of both sides of the clash between the West and Islam, it is discouraging to see that for the most part, popular literature and media on the issue of Arabs and Islam are tremendously emotional, lacking in depth and perpetuating the notion that Arabs and Muslims are predisposed to violence.
The war on Iraq might not have taken place if emotional arguments based on conjecture rather than evidence had been screened out by the media. What the American media did was to amplify whatever anti-Arab and anti-Islam biases existed in the population, reducing very the complex issues to a bogeyman—Saddam was a vicious dictator to be sure but hardly an ally of Al Qaeda—who was to be seen as the source of terrorism in America. With the fall of Saddam, the Iraqi people were to receive the Americans with open arms, throwing flowers and rose water. This did not happen. In fact, the opposite occurred.
Outside America there was almost universal opposition to the war, based on most of the concerns that Bush and his ilk ignored or ridiculed but now are known to be valid. For example, the French voiced the concern that the war in Iraq was doomed to failure with no plan for a civil war or the struggle spreading to other countries. Instead of taking the idea seriously, it popularly became a sign of patriotism to refer to criticism of the war effort as being "French-inspired," a stance that the American media did not oppose. But because the French were sophisticated in making their stance known, they have greater leverage today on the issues that matter. So to for that matter does Qatar because of Al Jazeera\'s active involvement, however biased that also maybe. The same cannot be said for the followers of al-Imam al-Mehdi. Many Americans, even at the highest levels of the government cannot tell the difference between a Shi\'i or a Sunni. We may laugh, but our lack of placing representatives across the western world, trained in the ways of the media, is part of the problem.
As followers of al-Imam al-Mahdi, our community must make a more concerted effort to reach out to the ordinary people of the western world and in their languages if we are to assist our Imam in creating a platform for action there. By merely perpetuating misinformation and emotional appeals rather than a plan for action in doing this ultimately everyone involved loses out—and that is not only the followers of al-Imam al-Mahdi but the people who might come to our side inside American and Israeli borders.