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[No Sympathy for Terrorism by [United] States or Groups/Individuals on any pretext]
Other realms are perceived as a threat to western culture, paving the way for a clash of values; writes Al Kabalan, Special to Gulf News. Assassination of Osama Bin Laden by US Special Forces last week has once again underlined the importance of culture perceptions in defining US US Middle East , lie in the European-Islamic centuries-old relations. European writings on the Middle East played a vital role in shaping American perceptions of Islam. After the Second World War, American contacts with the Islamic world substantially increased as the US
Post-Second World War US-Islamic contacts led to forging contemporary stereotypes — most of them emerged in response to Middle Eastern crises — where pictures of religion, culture and politics have become all mixed. These stereotypes are firmly established now in the US
In fact, the cultural dimension in the US Middle East . It affects the world at large and is shaped by two approaches. The first is prescriptive: based on a particular understanding of how the world ought to look. This “ethnocentrism”, Herbert J. Gans, an American sociologist, believes “comes through most explicitly in foreign news, which judges other countries by the extent to which they live up to or imitate American practices and values”. In this respect, Gans presented a list of the hidden social values in the US US
In the Middle East, the cultural dimension is derived from a longstanding tendency to reject, and possibly substitute, what is believed to be a ‘traditional and inferior culture’ that needs to be abandoned, or at least modernised, and a ‘backward people’ who need to be civilised. The reluctance of some Americans to accept the multicultural nature of the world, on one hand, a tendency that has become increasingly clearer since the end of the Cold War, and the unwillingness of Arab Middle Easterners to abandon their own cultural dispositions, on the other hand, have led to a perceived cultural clash, at least on the part of the latter, prompting some fears of western cultural hegemony. Furthermore, when some Americans admit that western culture is unique but not universal, they do recognise other cultural realms but they perceive them as a threat to the western culture, paving the way for the culture clash vision.
Apprehensions
Furthermore, it is widely accepted that the US US
Pro-Israeli journalists in major US US
The US US
All these reasons prevent the US
Dr Marwan Al Kabalan is Lecturer in Media and International Relations, Damascus University , Syria
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