All Asians are bad drivers.
And all Muslims are terrorists, right? Well actually uneducated racist who wrote both that sentence and the title, wrong. In fact, “most Muslims oppose terrorist violence” (Kurzman 63). The threat of Islamic terrorism is overstated in the United States, and only a very small percentage of Muslims are truly radically Islamic. To diminish the threat of Islamic terrorism further, another small percentage of radically Islamic terrorists infiltrate the United States and successfully murder civilians. Statistically, “there aren’t very many Islamist terrorists, and most are incompetent,” as seen by Mohammed Taheri-Azar’s failed attempt to claim the lives of UNC students (Kurzman 64). We are constantly hearing this threat of how Islamic terrorism will enter the United States, when in reality “global Islamist terrorists have managed to recruit fewer than 1 in 15,000 Muslims over the past quarter-century and fewer than 1 in 100,000 Muslims since 9/11” (Kurzman 61). So why is this such a pressing issue in American politics?
Used as a moral panic, terrorism has served as a platform to enable some of “the worst abuses of power since Richard Nixon’s years in the White House” (Victor 9). American politicians have used this fear of terrorism in order to gain political power. Jeffrey Victor argues that “when a new kind of threat is recognized, political leaders commonly use certain rhetorical claims to increase their influence and power to deal with the situation” (Victor 10). Terrorist rhetoric has noticeably increased since the 9/11 terror attack, leading to billions if not trillions of dollars being spent on expending military troops in the Middle East. In fact, Victor supports the claim that Bush potentially won due to “senior voters who shifted their votes to him because of his appeal to their worries about terrorism and safety” (Victor 10). But as I covered in my last blog post, is terrorism really that big of a threat to the everyday American?
The Family Guy clip suggests that all Asians are bad drivers. In reality, obviously not all Asians are bad drivers, but this can be equated to how some people view Muslims, and how politicians have framed the threat of Islamic terrorism in order to ascend to political power, and maybe even president.
