What Are Muslim Stereotypes?

On September 11th, 2001, a militant, Islamic extremist group al-Qaeda, hijacked four airliners on a mission to commit the most massive terrorist attack on United States soil. Two of the planes hit the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, the third plane crashed into the
Pentagon just outside Washington, D.C. and the fourth plane crashed in a field in Pennsylvania.
These attacks prompted the start of the Global War on Terrorism as the destruction caused the deaths of over three thousand people including more than four hundred police officers and firefighters. As a result of the 9/11 attacks, Islamophobia gained in frequency and notoriety.
Violent hatred towards members of the Islamic community rose substantially.
The authors suggest that the media plays a big role in providing distorted views of Muslims which causes
Americans to see Muslims as extremists and jihadists. The authors argue that Muslims seldom appear in the media other than to perpetrate them as violent through the name of Islam. The term
Islam and Muslim have come to inherently evoke suspicion and fear in the hearts of many and that is the stereotype portrayed in Gottschalk’s and Greenberg’s book. As estimated by them, one in five people identify themselves as Muslim but the majority of these Muslims do not participate in political violence and few wish to establish an Islamic state in their own country let alone force their beliefs upon others. Anti-Muslim sentiment as grown so large in the Western world that in many places, people are harassed if they are not dressed as “Americans,”
He provides insight into how America portrays Islam thus allowing everyone to believe that Muslims are not human beings but barbaric terrorists. Similarly, Todd Green in his book, The Fear of Islam: An
Introduction to Islamophobia in the West traces the negative portrayal of Muslims in the media.
He talks about how talks of religious discourse only portray Islam in a negative light allowing those who have never had a personal experience of Muslims as human beings to be intolerant and discriminative. Ernst and Green show that the War on Terror is not just in the east but also has roots domestically. Debates ranging from building new mosques, the Muslim place of worship, to burning the Qur’an, the holy scripture of Islam, has led people to view Islam as a violent religion rather than one of peace. The Ground Zero Mosque debate is the most popular because many
Americans felt it was outrageous to build a mosque on the grounds where Muslim terrorists killed thousands of people. However, the mosque was being built near not on ground zero but the media was quick to elicit emotional appeal from citizens by saying remember 9/11. These