Since the release of the Oscar nominated film American Sniper there has been plenty of heated discussion about the life and attitudes of the film’s protagonist Chris Kyle. A brief look at some of the excerpts from his autobiography reveals a soldier immersed in delusions of American exceptionalism and the rightness of the US invasion of Iraq. Pitifully little of this made it into Eastwood’s film but this is to be expected. Imperial societies are notorious for their inability to look in the mirror. Constructing elaborate fantasies about one’s own benevolence and heroism is much less painful. Nevertheless, those serious about overcoming this severe moral deficiency would not pass over this norm silently. In particular, one would not ignore the critical role that anti-Arab racism and highly reductionist conceptions of Muslims plays in ensuring that dehumanizing portrayals of Arabs, like those featured in American Sniper, are ignored or, more insidiously, celebrated. Steven Salaita’s Uncultured Wars: Arabs, Muslims, and the Poverty of Liberal Thought is essential reading for those willing to explore this recurring theme in American entertainment culture and US political culture at large. Consisting of twelve essays covering topics from anti-Arab racism in Michael Moore’s healthcare documentary Sicko to the thinly veiled bigotry embedded in liberal critiques of Israel’s 2006 invasion of Lebanon, professor Salaita challenges readers to move beyond the obvious and interrogate those prejudices which form the foundations of intellectual discourse about Arabs and Muslims in the US. On the topic of Israel, he highlights the tendency of commentators to begin their criticism from the position that Israel’s interests are paramount. In this form of criticism the fate of the Palestinian and Lebanese people is rendered invisible.
As Wisconsin-based political analyst John Nichols stated in response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006, “Israel’s attack on Lebanon, which has already killed and wounded hundreds and destroyed much of that fragile democracy’s infrastructure … has done nothing to make Israel safer or more secure from threat posed by the militant Islamic organization Hezbollah.” Nichols went on to add “no one in their right mind thinks Israel is going about the mission in a smart manner.” This position, that illegal wars of aggression should be evaluated on the basis of its efficacy (is the war crime “smart”) and not on the basis of international law or morality, is standard in liberal circles. Focusing on this practice, Salaita notes, “Nichol’s analysis reinforces Israel’s right to violence and then encourages it not to terminate its attacks but to practice a wiser form of aggressiveness.” Incidentally, this type of unquestioning support for violence as a purely tactical matter was replicated in President Obama’s condemnation of the 2003 invasion of Iraq as a “dumb war.” Like Nichols’ critique of the Israeli invasion, Obama was merely calling for a “wiser form of aggressiveness.”
Another notable example of the liberal disregard for Arab and Muslim lives could be found in Michael Moore’s healthcare documentary Sicko. In an attempt to lampoon the US healthcare system, Moore exploited the very real and intense suffering of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. After Republican Senator Bill Frist made the claim that “prisoners on the US military base at Guantanamo receive excellent healthcare,” Moore attempted to make the healthcare available to ailing 9/11 rescue workers who were “unable to obtain adequate medical coverage.” Ostensibly, the premise of the action was to illustrate that the US healthcare system was so hopelessly corrupt that it would more readily attend to the healthcare needs of “terrorists” than 9/11 rescue workers. But this point could only be made if Moore completely ignored the verifiable fact that many of the prisoners at Guantanamo were kidnapped and imprisoned illegally in violation of international law (therefore, they weren’t “terrorists”). Furthermore, many of the prisoners were also subjected to cruel and sadistic forms of torture, another fact conspicuously omitted from Moore’s documentary. Consequently, Moore’s critique of the US healthcare system relies on the invisibility of the victims of US power, an erasure that is made more troubling by the appeal to patriotism. “The detainees,” observes Salaita, “are rendered props in Moore’s rhetorical circus and are thus precluded from the luxury of basic human identification … Here the Guantanamo prisoners become dehumanized tableaux.”
Aside from these scathing critiques of “well-intentioned” liberalism, Salaita’s book also offers emotionally moving autobiographical glimpses into the life of a public intellectual grappling with the complexities of being an Arab in America and the Othering effects that come with this particular ethnic and cultural identity. Reflecting on the national mood during the First Gulf War, Salaita states, “I knew that I wasn’t merely an American, I was also an Arab, like the Iraqis. Like Saddam Hussein. This reality wasn’t lost on my classmates, who routinely demanded that I reaffirm my loyalty to the United States.” Accordingly, Salaita reaffirmed his “loyalty” by “[pumping] [his] fist along with everybody else when American warplanes blew things up”, acts that “weren’t traitorous but immoral.” Stories of this kind echo those featured in his previous book Anti-Arab Racism in the USA. In both cases they touch on a highly relevant theme in American nationalism, namely the theme of redemptive violence and how the politics of exclusion are necessary to cement a “national identity” (what Salaita calls in Anti-Arab Racism “imperative patriotism”).
Special treatment is given to the topic of redemptive violence in the essay on the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre. Departing from conventional narratives that portrayed the mass shooting as a shocking aberration which was entirely unpredictable due to the fact that the killer was thoroughly “assimilated”, Salaita argues that Cho Seung-Hui’s crime must be understood within the context of American society at large and how the survival of American institutions depend crucially on the reproduction of violence, physically and systemically. Taking these realities in mind, we must acknowledge “the ugly truth” that “the American government does a fine job on its own nurturing a culture of violence in the United States.”
Reviewing the hideous record of anti-Arab racism, regularly intensified by periodic military “incursions”, one gains a new understanding of the significant barriers that prevent the emergence of a genuinely humanistic discourse free from the patronizing and simplistic explanations of establishment liberal discourse. In order to surmount these difficulties it will be necessary to dispense with Orientalist assumptions about Arabs and Muslims. Moreover, it will be necessary to listen to those who are on the receiving end of US violence. In Salaita’s words, “Please disagree with me; please argue with me; please point out where I am wrong; but please don’t be so damn certain from the outset that I represent a culture or world-view that is fundamentally inferior.” Sadly, such certitude is something that Hollywood movies like American Sniper are designed to cultivate, a fact made glaringly obvious when one considers the public expressions of bloodlust that have characterized some of the more enthusiastic fans of the film. Throughout his autobiography Chris Kyle refers to the Iraqi people as “savages.” This attitude did not form in a vacuum. It was nurtured by a political culture that rationalizes the most barbaric of actions under the pretext of “national security”, “patriotism”, and “American values.” Professor Salaita’s essays are indispensable in demystifying these pernicious doctrines and combatting the Chris Kyles of history, the big screen, and (if these insights aren’t seriously absorbed) the near future.
If there ever were a manual designed to instruct colonial administrators on how to best manage an oppressed population there’s little doubt that one of its leading principles would be to repeatedly, and emphatically, portray every resort to violence, no matter how egregious, as an heroic attempt to promote peace. Such is the case with Israel’s long, brutal, and US-backed (crucial detail) occupation of Palestine. After the Palestinian Authority’s decision to seek membership in the International Criminal Court, what Newsweek described as Abbas “[rolling] the statehood dice”, US and Israeli officials wasted little time in venting their rage. While Israel reacted “by saying it will withhold $120 million of tax and customs receipts it collects on behalf of Palestinians each month” (a reality that flatly contradicts the Israeli self-image as a fortress of “democracy” and not a military occupier), the US State Department, in typical paternalistic fashion, condemned Palestinians for making a move that “badly damaged the atmosphere for peace.” Conversely, US military support for Israeli atrocities, a policy that made 
In a society permeated with stereotypical portraits of Muslim communities intellectually honest narratives are regularly subordinated to sensational fairy tales replete with fear, xenophobia, and dehumanizing tropes purporting to explain violent behavior. Examples of this are too plentiful to enumerate. Dr. Omid Safi’s Memories of Muhammad chronicles the life of the Prophet Muhammad, the historical developments that characterized his time, and the various scholarly and theological interpretations that followed to provide an incredibly detailed description of Islamic teachings and the enormous influence they continue to exert today. In doing this Safi offers a much needed refutation to the monolithic conceptions of Islam that pervade US discourse. As Safi puts it, “If we are to understand the Islamic civilization that rightly sees itself as being shaped by the revelation given to Muhammad, it behooves us to engage the multiple ways in which Muslims have come to cultivate the memory of Muhammad.” Several realities must be factored into this analysis. Among these realities is the fact that “perhaps over 600,000 hadith reports came into circulation in the centuries after Muhammad’s passing” (“classical hadith scholars … accepted only 1 to 2 percent of the hadith in circulation as reliable”), that there is a rich tradition of devotional poetry uplifting the example of the Prophet Muhammad, and Muslim communities, from Sunni to Shia and Sufi, have brought their own unique interpretations to this body of work.
Whenever the US decides to bomb another country it is not uncommon to have that decision accompanied by debates about the efficacy of the bombing campaign, its stated pretexts, and its long term goals. Always underlying these displays of state violence is an unavoidable truth namely that these military attacks can only take place on the scale and frequency that they are occurring because the US is an imperial power and therefore feels entitled to behave as other imperial powers before it. Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism explores this unavoidable truth in many dimensions. Drawing from the wealth of cultural and literary traditions of France, Britain, and the United States, Said demonstrates how doctrines of colonial domination permeate nearly every aspect of life within metropolitan society.
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