America should be beyond orientalism

Who is ISIS? It’s just like U.S. President Barack Obama said during his speech directed to the UN: “No God condones this terror. No grievance justifies these actions. There can be no reasoning — no negotiation — with this brand of evil. The only language understood by killers like this is the language of force.” Obama calls upon the UN “for a new compact among the civilized peoples of this world to eradicate war at its most fundamental source.” Sound familiar? Replace ISIS with Al-Qaeda, and you’d have nearly the same words used by former President George W. Bush in 2003 just before the invasion of Iraq. History has a terrible tendency to repeat itself, and the discourse surrounding the Middle East, Islam and terrorism has not changed.

The fact of the matter is that the U.S. perceives ISIS — a paramilitary organization the U.S. itself played the principle role in creating and empowering — as an imminent threat and a part of an ongoing trend in radical Islam, and that the U.S. is intent on pursuing its God-given altruistic mission of vanquishing evil for the good of all mankind through “humanitarian” intervention. This type of imperialist narrative is the same type of discourse that Western countries have been espousing for centuries, and Obama's speech is only the most recent example.

Postcolonial studies are an academic area of interest that analyzes the cultural legacies left by colonialism and imperialism. Orientalism is a book written by Edward Said in 1978 and is an integral text in postcolonial studies. It analyzes the representations in the Western world, or the Occident, about the Orient, specifically African, Middle Eastern and Asian countries. Said was especially focused on the way that Eurocentric biases were always put in place against the Arab-Islamic world, plagued by prejudices and racial stereotypes. The underlying assumption behind Said’s writings is that knowledge about the East is not gained through facts or reality, but rather by the presumption that Eastern countries are similar to each other and dissimilar to Western countries. This is, as Said puts it, "a Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient."

When it comes to ISIS, this reductionist West vs. East, good vs. evil, Sunni vs. Shia picture fails to capture the true history of this conflict. For at least eight years, the US and its Gulf Cooperation Council clients — primarily Saudi Arabia — have led a policy of bolstering “Sunni” militants in the region to incite sectarian aggression against the perception of an expanding “Shia crescent” consisting of Iran, Syria and Hezbollah. This has continued in the form of NATO/GCC-sponsored Wahhabi insurgency across the border in Syria, tens of thousands of foreign fighters, thousands of tons of arms and billions of dollars thrown at ISIS and its intermittent “moderate rebel” allies and competitors. However, Obama reduces this story into a historically inaccurate idealist binary of a Sunni-Shia divide in Iraq, through which alleged Shia repression of the Sunni community has resulted in the “natural expression” of the Other: the Savage ISIS.

Winners write history. Western narratives manipulate images to justify imperialism. Eurocentric biases and assumptions about the East are tainted by prejudices and stereotypes. Don’t believe everything you hear, and take any information garnered from the media with a grain of salt. This time, let’s not let history repeat itself.