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Notes
I use the terms “West” and “Western Self” to denote a location and identity formed around a set of ideals, ideas, and tropes that define a homogeneous “imagined geography” in the cultural mindframe (Said Citation1997). As the analysis within this article suggests, the concept of “the West” is allied to that of the “Self” within Orientalist discourse, and as such, is defined in opposition to the “East,” or “Orient” as the location of the “Other” within the cultural imagination.
It is possible to compare the rhetoric of the Roosevelt administration's capture of Cuba and the Philippines, which evoked the concept of “barbaric hordes” and the “civilized world” (Sharrett Citation2004, 126) with Bush's similarly binarized rhetoric: “As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment and violence ready for export … The advance of freedom is the calling of our time; it is the calling of our country” (Bush Citation2003).
An example posed by Cohen is that of Iraqi human rights campaigner Kanan Makiya, who worked to expose the atrocities of Saddam Hussein's regime, only to be later shunned by former comrades for his apparent alliance with the U.S./U.K. invasion. More broadly, Cohen claims that Third World feminists, democrats, and liberals have been let down by Western liberals who fail to take a stand alongside them, lest they be charged with cultural insensitivity and a belief in the ideological superiority of “Western” values.
In the run-up to the invasion of Afghanistan, George W. Bush justified the War on Terror by locating the source of that “terror” in Afghanistan, stating: “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed this act and those who harbor them” (Bush Citation2001a). In this sense, the United States effectively designated the whole of the Afghan nation a “terrorist state”—a move that, as Spivak recognizes, “withhold[s] state status from it, hence dehumanising the central role of citizens in the body politic and replacing its inhabitants with terrorists in the spatial imaginary (Spivak Citation2004, 91).
Following then-Leader of the Commons Jack Straw's controversial statement that Muslim women should not wear the niqab, seven incidents of Muslim women's veils being ripped from their faces and other forms of racial abuse were reported in the space of only two days (Bennetto Citation2006). An academic survey conducted in Leicester, which has one of the largest Muslim populations in the United Kingdom, also reported a rise in Islamophobia post-9/11 (Casciani Citation2002).
It is worth noting here that in the limited representations of Afghanistan in circulation, the only one in existence in the Hollywood mainstream was in Rambo 3— a pertinent reminder of the machismo militaristic dynamics that undercut the invasion of Afghanistan itself. See Makhmalbaf Citation2001 for further discussion of this.
Examples include the London Palestinian Film Festival 2007; Manchester Festival of Palestinian Literature 2007; New Cinemas of the Arab World, Manchester 2007; “Word Into Art: Contemporary Art of the Islamic World,” British Museum 2006 and the opening of the “Islamic Middle East Room” in the Victoria and Albert Museum, 2006.