Demonizing Palestinian Men

Terrorists Until Proven Otherwise

When Edward Said wrote, “I am an Oriental writing back at the Orientalists, who forever thrived upon our silence,” he did so as a Palestinian scholar.

But even more narrowly, he penned that perspective from the vantage point of a Palestinian man.

His landmark work, Orientalism, was a text about the systematic European and then American demonization of the “Muslim world.” It was deeply gendered, even if not explicitly, with analysis rebutting the orientation of Arab and Muslim men as the principal purveyors of fundamentalism, violence, and warmongering.   

Said, a Palestinian man, surveyed the world from that lens. While the world saw him and his Arab and Muslim male counterparts as security and demographic threats, and reported as such on corporate media outlets and newspapers, as western governments enacted laws that policed, punished, and prosecuted them.

While Arab women were caricatured as submissive and suppressed, and western feminist efforts to “liberate them” beat the drums for war, the men were always the primary targets of violence.  They remained the principal objects reduced into “human animals” whose only reason for being was terrorism, then systematically killed because of that ascription.

Arab and Muslim men are instantly guilty, stripped of the presumption of innocence and the right to due process. They are never individuals, judged upon the merits of their actions, but always lumped up into an anonymous monolith that inspects their bodies through the lens of terrorism and instantly assigns guilt because of their identity.

They are terrorists until proven otherwise. And that until seldom even comes.

They are branded with that label by a system of Islamophobia that is rooted in the Orientalism Edward Said reckoned with four decades ago, which is never more potent than today.

We see this, vividly and violently, in Gaza.  

We saw it, most virulently, yesterday, in Beit Lahia in the northern section of the Gaza Strip. Atop the bombed soil in between shattered homes and shuddered businesses, where Palestinian men were laid down like criminals, stripped of their clothes and their dignity, then lined into rows.

They were civilians. Men who worked at schools and shops, government agencies and private businesses. Many of them were fathers, all of them sons, who lost loved ones during two months of genocidal violence that seemingly has no end.

They too, were victims.

The facts of who these men are, like their clothes, were violently stripped from view. In an instant, the world saw them through the lens of terrorism, and the Israeli military capitalized on the immense power of this stereotype to claim that they were “Hamas fighters.”    

Whether they were or were not, did not matter. What mattered is that they were Arab men, Palestinian men, only seen then scrutinized by western media outlets and governments through the prism of terrorism.

Their faces and names, ethnicity and geographic locale provided the corporal evidence needed to draw that conclusion, and the Israeli military weaponized that stereotype to claim a fabricated military victory.

Then, the IDF peddled the propaganda for all the world to see. In the image of beaten down, bare naked Palestinian men lined across their native soil, then dragged off like cattle toward a destination that ended with torture, death, or some morbid stop in between them.

The world gave them the green light. Principally the United States “war on terror” machine, which gave global license to the trope that Arab and Muslim men are presumptive terrorists unless proven otherwise.  

This was echoed by pundits and politicians during the sixty-day stretch of the crisis, even among those calling for a permanent ceasefire. Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, five weeks after, stated that “Israel must stop ‘this killing of women, children, babies’ in Gaza.

He made no mention of Palestinian men.

Four days earlier, President Emmanuel Macron of France held:

"These babies, these ladies, these old people are bombed and killed. So there is no reason for that and no legitimacy. So we do urge Israel to stop.”

Palestinian men, again, were conspicuously absent from his words. Entirely absent, as individuals worth saving, from Macron’s call for a cease fire.

Nonexistent in his words and the world alike, as real human beings, let alone victims. But rather, putative terrorists unworthy of being seen through the neutral lens of individuality. And therefore, unworthy of being saved from the march of genocide that marks them as terrorists, wherever and whoever they are.

The demonization of Palestinian men is a project rooted in longstanding Orientalist narratives and emergent Islamophobic discourses. Their humanity is written out of news stories and redacted from demands for ceasefires.

Intentionally, by design, because prevailing interests are invested wholly in the demonization of Palestinian men, and the destruction of a masculinity conflated with terrorism. 

This is why innocent men are paraded around as terrorists, stripped of their dignity and stripped of their masculinity, for the whole world to see. Humiliated, then reduced into animals and objects of scorn.

We saw it in Abu Ghraib and we see it, again, in Gaza.

That is how the world has come to see us.

I see myself in those men. My faith and name, phenotype and ancestry connects me to them as I peer at their sullen faces and bare bodies from beyond a screen.

A screen where the only guilt I see is worn by their captors, and the complicit and conspiring governments that enable this inhumanity.

---

Khaled A. Beydoun is an author and law professor. He publishes his insights daily on his socials at @khaledbeydoun.