Tarek Fahmy: Cultural Critic

“…the abuse of prisoners, innocent or not, is not only repugnant in its own right. It also squanders a crucial strategic advantage in the fight against terrorism, namely the moral superiority of liberal democracy to the nihilism and extremism that oppose it.

The Road to Guantanamo (2006)

I continued to research anything and everything that connected to profiling and Islamaphobia. I found this movie that deals with such topics. It’s not a documentary and the majority of the scenes are a reenactment “…which is based on the testimony of three British Muslims captured in Afghanistan in 2001 and held at Guantánamo for more than two years…”

These three men were on their way to a wedding in Pakistan and ended up in Afghanistan on a whim. They wanted to witness what was going on there first hand and to akso participate in humanitarian work.

They were then captured by the Northern Alliance soldiers and accused of being Al Qaeda fighters. They were sent to Guantánamo bay.

Early on in the class, we had to select a broad topic of interest to do research on.
My selected topic was ‘Racial profiling‘.

:::::::::I found this definition online:::::::::

racial profiling: the inclusion of racial or ethnic characteristics in determining if a person is considered likely to commit a crime

Examples of racial profiling in USA:
• Native Americans: mistakenly profiled as Hispanics or middle easterners.
• Mexicans: Illegal immigration
• Arabs, muslims, middle easterners, and south Asians: terrorists
• Blacks and Puerto Ricans: Crime

I started to free associate with the term racial profiling and came up with a number of other interesting words.

• xenophobia: is a fear or contempt of that which is foreign or unknown, especially of strangers or foreigners. The term is typically used to describe a fear or dislike of foreigners or of people significantly different from oneself.

• racism: by its simplest definition, is discrimination based on a racial group.

• Islamophobia: is a term that refers to prejudice against Islam or Muslims.

Since I am an Egyptian-American I want to focus on the Arabic issue in the West and i would like to understand how Arabs are stereotyped and objectified in that culture. I also want to change that stereotyping by raising awareness to it.

“I think that whenever we see a group of people being demonizeed on a regular basis we have to speak up.”