Vance Miguel Johnson’s Reviews > Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World > Status Update

This is as much of a book about Iran as it is about Islam in general

“In Lebanon, it was precisely those deviations mobile forced the [Western] experts had never documented or had consistently underestimated. Social dislocations, demographic shifts such as the emergence of the Shia population, confessional loyalties, ideological currents that tore the country apart so savagely.” Right, and who did those social dislocations? Who pushed as many Muslims as they could out? France.

“During the 60s Lebanon was portrayed as stable because one expert tells us ‘the inter-Arab situation was stable so long as that equation was kept up,’ […] Lebanon would be secure. It was never supposed that there could be inter-Arab stability and Lebanese instability mainly because […] any trouble had to come from the surrounding Arab environment, never from Israel or from the United States.” BOOM.

“For years [1946-1975] Lebanon had been regarded as a model of what a pluralistic or mosaic culture was supposed to be. Yet, so reified and static had the models been which were used for the study of Lebanon, that no incline was possible of the ferocity and violence of the civil war.”

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“Expert eyes seem in the past to have been extraordinarily transfixed by images of Lebanese stability.”

“Of course, no one has equated the Jonestown massacre, or the destructive horror of the Oklahoma bombing, or the devastation of Indochina with Christianity, or with Western of American culture at large, that sort of equation has been reserved for Islam.”

“But few people would construct a portrait of the essential West using only Christopher Lash on Narcism, the words of a fundamentalist preacher, Plato’s Cratylus, an advertising jingle or two, and as a case of the West’s inability to believe in a stable or beneficent reality, Ovid’s metamorphosis laced with choice verses from Leviticus.”

“Now play the following parlor game. Find a major Judeo-Christian cultural and social equivalent that Langan ascribes to the Persian. Overriding egoism; Rousseau. Malevolence of reality; Kafka. Omnipotents of god; Old and New Testaments. Lack of causal sense; Beckett. Bazaar mentality; the New York Stock Exchange. Confusion between words and reality; Austen and Cyril.“