By asking many rhetorical questions, such as “what should have been done?”(Said, W. Edward, Covering Islam, p.28) and “But was Iran- is Iran- rational?”(Ibid) Edward W. Said is giving us answers related to Islam and Islamophobia.
Said’s opinion is that Islam is a special case, as he says “I mean that like so much of the postcolonial world, Islam belongs neither to Europe nor, like Japan, to the advanced industrial group of nations.” However, later on, again as his opinion Said emphasizes that he does not strongly believe in nation of “Islam” (p.26). Despite this, it somehow seems that he is still emotional about the topic when he says that the western world sees Islam as “barbarism” (p.22) and only wants its oil reserves.
In order to show how the islamophobia started, he uses facts about the “hostage return” that happened on January 20, 1981 (Ibid, p.27).
Said is still were kin about defending Islam and showing a real picture, and in order to achieve it he uses loaded language, for example “Most newspapers and national weeklies ran supplements on the return from learned analyses of how the final agreement between Iran and the United States was arrived at, and what involved, the celebrations of American heroism and Iranian barbarism.”(Ibid, p.27)
If you try to find some tabloidese on the same topic, on the internet, you will get the title “Hook’s ‘Bomb Big Ben Book”(www.goliath.ecnext.com), which is how one London tabloid called the book written by Abu Hamza al-Masri, the hook-handed former imam of the notorious Finsbury Park mosque.
Moreover, I think that Said is actually generalizing all the time, by saying West, East, Europe, US, and looking at people that live there in general.
We can see how the techniques which writers are using, possibly on purpose, can influence the creation of our opinion, while we are reading some text, and we do not necessarily notice that, despite when we have it as a taskJ.
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