Evelyn Alsultany Takes A Different Approach To The Oppression

Evelyn Alsultany takes a different approach to the oppression of Muslim women that the U.S. portrayed in the media to fuel the War on Terror and analyses that the U.S. portrayed Islam as backwards and an uncivilized culture. Alsultany analyzes published stories and news shows on CNN, NBC, CBS, and Fox after the 9/11 attacks and concludes that these news stations used women’s oppression and linked it with terrorist attacks because they conveyed that Muslim men hated the West’s cultural ideals of women being free and wanted to impose Islam on the West. The media portrays women’s veiled oppression, female genital mutilation, honour killings, and women being beaten as they did not dress properly as the nature of Islam’s backwardness and†¦show more content†¦Also, Oprah’s comment that U.S. women being the luckiest in the world is a stereotype because it portrays that the West is the best and is more civilized and educated than the Middle East. T he response from the Oprah Winfrey episode on Amina Lawal was that 1.2 million people emailed the Nigerian government and many of the people called the Islamic culture barbaric whereas they thought of the United States as a moral country of superiority. However, the oppressiveness of women is mainly held by Islamic fundamentalist groups and when the media many times portrays these fundamentalist groups as backwards, uncivilized, and barbaric they are many times associated with all of Islam. When all of Islam is associated with fundamentalist groups it stereotypes Muslims as inferior to the West and it justifies that the U.S. in superior to the Middle East and is why they should intervene and help promote women’s rights. The tactics that the Bush administration used by using media influence to portray women in the middle East as oppressed, which was to justify the War on Terror was successful because Evelyn Alsultany found that when viewers in the media saw Muslim women being oppressed they were outraged at the religions injustice and formed prejudicial views against Islam. However, in 2008 a Gallup poll of fifty thousand Muslim women from 35 countries showed that the majority of Muslim women do not see Islam as