Reimagined Communities

McAlister’s account of the Iranian hostage crisis of the late 1970s brought to light striking similarities between the way in which politics and religion intertwine in both the United States and the Middle East. For instance, McAlister notes how critics at the time blamed terrorists for using human beings and their emotions simply as a means to an end, free air time and mass-advertising (224). In this sense, American politicians and Middle Eastern terrorists do not seem very different. These political actors managed to underplay the historic relationship between U.S. politics and the Christian faith by pointing their fingers at the Middle East, accusing their Islamic governments of too personally connecting religion and state. And in this effort, American state officials managed to promulgate their own political-driven agendas to the successfully distracted and scared American populace. So, to that extent, the U.S. government and the work of radical Islamic terrorists seem more alike than not.
Ironically, politicians in the late 1970s more intimately aligned American patriotism with Christianity.

Never denying how religion shaped the United States, government officials instead made the correlation between Islam and Middle-Eastern nations loud and clear. Just as McAlister writes, the “…fusion of state and religion was presented as in the ‘nature’ of Islam, but not of course of Judaism or Christianity,” (219). Yet during the Iranian hostage crisis, Americans seemingly placed the television on the same level as the Bible, looking to both for some hope and sense of reassurance in eventual salvation. In other words, this crisis drew Americans even closer to the nation’s Christian roots while simultaneously triggering an obsession with the media as a source of divine truth and accuracy to illuminate contemporary events and eventually bring good news.

With increased faith and national adherence to television, Americans more readily digested whatever message the media dismissed, completely ignoring the political undertones and agendas implied. For instance, six weeks after the beginning of the hostage crisis, co-workers and family members of the hostages gathered in Washington, D.C. to rally for their release (212). After the demonstrators sang “God Bless America” (emphasis added), a white marine ascended to a podium and sang “Go Down, Moses”. No one, according to McAlister’s account, reacted warily.

As seen in Delta Force, Hollywood filmmakers use “television images to establish a relationship of authenticity between the film and the historical events it recounts and revises,” (228). The film Not without My Daughter also tries to sculpt American’s perception of the Middle-East. Emphasizing Iran’s attack upon America’s private sphere, this film apparently draws upon Iranian women’s domestic failures as a sign of the culture’s inferiority (230). Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark also emphasis the hostage crisis through their story lines (224). Filmmakers and politicians alike used the media to indirectly advertise the message that Americans were under attack and needed to defend themselves against this insult.

This is admittedly very far-stretched, but the United States consequently appeared to indulge in terrorism of a more intellectual and less dramatic fashion. According to a conference held in Jerusalem in 1979, terrorism is “the deliberate and systematic murder, maiming, and menacing of the innocent to inspire fear for political ends,” (217). Clearly politicians did not murder or maim American citizens, but their use of the media certainly menaced some naïve U.S. citizens into full-heartedly believing a particular point – that the Iranian hostage crisis was a direct intrusion upon American private life and merited immediate military redress on an international level.

Since I am the only one to post for this week, I thought I’d write about a few different themes I found interesting so everyone can address whatever makes sense to them.

In the concluding chapter of ‘Epic Encounters,’ McAlister ties together several threads that we have traced throughout the semester. Some of the themes that I want to discuss are gender, the media, and the nation.

In terms of gender, McAlister pointed to examples of masculinity and femininity in the last two chapters that reinforced traditional gender roles. When discussing the firefighters of 9/11, particularly in the famous flag raising photo, as white, lower-middle-class “working men” whose idealized “let’s do it” pragmatism was the embodiment of national strength. (274) This image, along with the image of the U.S. soldier is juxtaposed against McAlister’s understanding of the neoconservative view of Arab men who were unable to understand time and “at once sex-obsessed and sexually repressed, both due to perverse childrearing practices.” (291) The implication being that Arabs were incapable of addressing the problems in the Middle East and that the U.S. had ‘just cause’ to take over. The photo analysis of the Abu Ghraib incident further contributes to this view.
Arab women also served to reinforce paternalism with the image of the Burqa and the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. McCalister compares the paternalism of American women toward these oppressed Afghan women to the rescue narratives in U.S. history and argues that the Bush administration used women’s liberation as a means of justifying the war. (282) McAlister also includes a discussion of the heroism of the American women in the story of Jessica Lynch. She argues, “Both Lynch’s rescue and the destruction of Hussein’s statue, which happened within a week of each other, were presented by most U.S. media sources as heralds of a rapid U.S. victory in Iraq and moral legitimacy of the war.” (297)

The media also figured prominently in McAlister’s final chapters. We already discussed the role of television and the news in shaping public opinion but in the final chapters McAlister focuses much of her attention to photography and the iconic image. Whether discussing the image of firefighters erecting a flag over the 9/11 rubble or the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue, McAlister continues her argument that images shape politics. I thought her discussion of the events leading up to the individual photographs was interesting, especially the Hussein statue photo and the military’s role in creating the atmosphere needed to portray celebration. The news coverage of the war was also influenced by military agenda according to McAlister. In her earlier discussion of the first Gulf War, McAlister writes,

“The televisuality of the war also has seemed, to some, to mark its “postmodern” nature: its apparent immediacy in terms of news coverage and yet its strange unreality, despite its nightly presence in Amerian homes. In this, the coverage of Desert Storm was less a transformation than a consolidation of earlier trends. Engaging that nexus of television, representations of the military, U.S. nationalism, and the Middle East that had been forged in the coverage of Israeli actions and then in the Iran hostage crisis and its aftermath, it was perhaps the inevitable end result of more than two decades in which the Middle East functioned as a signifier for the post—Vietnam decline of the American empire. Yet the story being told about the Gulf War, by both policymakers and journalists, was that it was the beginning of something quite new.” (237)

An interesting discussing to follow this argument would be to determine to what extent this holds true for today’s U.S. presence in the Middle East.

Finally, the ‘nation’ recurs throughout McAlister’s final chapters. She discusses Anderson, Fukuyama, and Huntington throughout to make her case for U.S. nationalism in the context of the Middle East but I found two points that really came full circle from the beginning of the book. The first was the notion of “multiculturalism” and the “other.” McAlister writes, “…the production of “multiculturalism” as a militarized national construct imagined a multicultural family that offered an appropriately hierarchical and yet affective tie among peoples and groups. The militarized nation needed an “outside” to mark its boundaries; that outside was the Middle East.” (259) In this argument McAlister is arguing that just as race was constructed in the United States to form boundaries within its borders, nationalism and multiculturalism are used to form a border around the nation, in opposition to other outside boundaries, namely the Middle East.
She concludes this argument by positing that the new enemy ,‘terrorism’, makes this boundary formation difficult. The moral geographies formed by juxtaposing America and the Middle East become less clear. She writes, “Terrorists destroyed the sacred private space of individualism by insisting that no space was free of politics. After 9/11 the problem was understood differently; terrorists might be speaking in political terms, but those terms were literally invisible, and so their acts became evidence of private pathology. In both cases, however, the hallmark of terrorist in these debates was that it blurred boundaries between public and private. (279)

The greatest tension I see in the final chapter is whether or not McAlister oversimplifies the conditions of the U.S. involvement in the Middle East and the degree to which Americans are as monolithic in their views of the region as McAlister’s analysis would seem to convey. In her concluding paragraph she emphasizes her goal to understand identity and foreign policy through culture. It would seem that McAlister would argue that culture is inextricably linked to policy but I wonder if it is possible to overemphasize the relationship.