The War on Terror through Arab-American Eyes: The Arab-American Press as a Rhetorical Counterpublic

Abstract

This article employs theories of counterpublics to investigate the Arab-American press before and after 9/11 as a counterpublic to the American war on terror. We use Squires's categorization of counterpublics as (1) assimilative enclaves, (2) satellites seeking separation, or (3) resistant counterpublics, actively dissenting. Using a corpus of 113 articles from Arab American News, we argue that the Arab-American press circulated stories consistent with (1) and (2) but not (3). We conclude that a strategy of active resistance required greater standing of the Arab-American point of view in mainstream American thought than Arab-Americans enjoyed.

Notes

¹The authors thank RR reviewers Shawn Parry-Giles and Andrew King and Editor Theresa Enos for their comments on previous drafts.

²To fill out our corpus, we included five articles from a second newspaper, The Arab View, a smaller Chicago-based Arab-American newspaper founded by the Christian Arab Ray Haninia. This paper started in 1999 and folded in 2002 under pressure following 9/11. Seeding the corpus this way yielded a small contrast between the powerful Dearborn paper and a smaller Chicago upstart.

³The controversy stirred by Bitzer's definition arose precisely because rhetorical situations carrying the external/objective pull of flashbulb moments culturally are the exception rather than the rule. Bitzer's prime example of a rhetorical situation is the last flashbulb event before 9/11—the Kennedy Assassination. See also Vatz, Consigny, and Grant-Davie.

⁴ http://www.whitehouse.gov/inaugural/index.html.

⁵ Arab American News, Jan 25, 2002.

⁶ Arab American News, April 12, 2002.

⁷“Terrorists Failed, Abboud Declares.” The Arab American View. Orland Park, IL: Feb 15, 2002. Vol. III, Issue 2: 1.

⁸“U.S. Muslims Call for 9/11 ‘Day of Unity and Prayer’: All Faiths Urged to Open Houses of Worship for Interfaith Activities.” The Arab American News. Dearborn, MI: Aug 2, 2002. Vol. XIX, Issue 859: 11.

⁹This article is available at http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/1216-01.htm.

¹⁰Ned Parker. “Intifada Spotlights Ethics of the Suicide Bomb.” The Arab American News. Dearborn, MI: June 8, 2001. Vol. XVII, Issue 798: 7.

¹¹Zogby, James J. The Arab American News. Dearborn, MI: Sep 11, 1998. Vol. XIV, Issue 668/669: 5.

¹²A story appearing on December 19, 1997 reports on a summit that condemned the use of terrorism in the name of religion. A headline appearing October 14, 2001 proclaimed that Islam is “A Home of Tolerance, not Fanaticism.”

¹³See Howell and Shryock.