ABSTRACT
Misconceptions about the Arab world are pervasive, with media accounts and news headlines often portraying the Arab Middle East as a region of perpetual and often irrational violence, with radicalized religious groups that have nihilistic tendencies bent on the destruction of the “Western world” and its values. As Edward Said (1999, p. 24) observed long before the events of 9/11 and the subsequent “War on Terror:”
Uncounted films and studies have by now permanently impressed the average consumer of TV news and movie entertainment that Arabs are terrorists, and that unlike any other people connected to monotheism, such activities as permanent war against infidels and the gratuitous abuse of women and other disadvantaged people are congenital to the Arab psyche.
