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Terrorist; Jihadi fighter; suicide bomber; hate preacher; brainwashed
radicalised terrorists; these are the terms that often spring associate with South Asian Muslim men. Such terms create a biography of a group who are in
fact politically underrepresented, increasingly economically disenfranchised
and significantly unaccounted for in discussions surrounding mental health. In
order to understand the double standards that exist concerning our
understanding of extremism, Islam and mental health, the intersectionality
between religion and gender must be unpacked.
It is the war on terror that has re-constructed this notion of the orient and the occident perpetuating a culture of fear mongering and the
‘otherisation’ of an entire religion. This representation of the Muslim man as a
relentless evil jihadi fighter has hypermasculinsed the South Asian Muslim man and has homogenised the identity of an entire group leaving little room for debate about
the real issue at heart: poor mental health.
As major global media outlets have subtly alluded to, is the steep rise of
terrorist attacks with the so-called incompatibility between western democratic
values and Eastern culture. A study conducted by researchers at Georgia State
University found that
“the average
attack with a Muslim perpetrator is covered in 90.8 articles. Attacks with a
Muslim, foreign-born perpetrator are covered in 192.8 articles on average,
whilst other attacks received an average of 18.1 articles.US media outlets
disproportionately emphasize the smaller number of terrorist attacks by Muslims
— leading Americans to have an exaggerated sense of that threat. " The
frequency of the reporting of terrorist attacks coupled with the major
difference in language that is used to document such attacks makes salient that “mental
illness is rarely ever brought up when Islamic terrorism is the subject,
because Islamic terror is viewed through a narrowed lens ― a lens that points
in the direction of pure, unadulterated evil.” The brutal Charleston shooting serves
as a testament to the reality that South Asian Muslim men are marred by the
term terrorist whereas white terrorists are depicted as mentally ill. This
injustice is precisely why alternate media outlets as well as mental health
support services are essential to provide an accurate and just understanding of extremism across the globe.
The blatant separation of western and eastern cultures has reinforced
the ethno nationalist and ecological politics across the globe. In fact the
rise in right wing sentiment across Europe and the Atlantic correlates with the
rise in Islamophobia within these states.
This may seem far reaching, yet a recent report Anti-Muslimism Hate Crime and the Far Right by the Centre for
Fascists, Anti-Fascists and Post-Fascist Studies noted that “between
2010-2011 24% of hate crime against Muslims was committed by far right groups.”
However the perpetrators of hate crime across the UK are increasingly being
characterised by their ordinariness; which perfectly highlights the extent of
the problem within our societies today.