Fighting back against Islamaphobia! Part 2

(for the second clip of the
You Tubed film) is now here. As with Part 1, posted earlier, these
materials are intended as counter curriculum to accompany the film.
This section (Part/Chapter 2) follows the sequence of the second
section (2/10) of the film Obsession the movie on You Tube.

UNSILENCING RESOURCES

This is a follow up from a statement in my last blog… "On the one side, there needs to be a critique of the kinds of tactics used to sway arguments. On the other, we need counter information that unsilences the narratives left out of films like these. Unsilencing is site/event specific.” So, here are some places to find information as you work with your students to create materials and dialogue that unsilences some of the people whose voices have been silenced or misrepresented in the film.

The materials here are intended for use in teacher education classes.

Looking back it seems absurdly naive to think that I imagined my blog entries on Islamaphobia would be a single or a few short entries. I thought last week that I could swallow my disgust at an article that appeared in the Washington Post that framed the recent bombing of the Marriot in Islamabad (Pakistan) in which 53 people lost their lives as hardship for Marriot empire.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/20/AR200809...

Then I found out about this,

http://www.obsessionthemovie.com/

Obession is a free movie that is Islamaphobic propaganda and being widely distributed in America through newspapers as a free insert. By "widely" I mean 28 million DVDs sent to 28 Million US homes according to the website. Then, on Saturday a chemical irritant was sprayed into a mosque in Daytona where Muslims were praying during this holy month of Ramadan.

 “Days are where we live,” proclaims the poet Philip Larkin. Recently returned from Pakistan I am struck by how much Larkin’s phrase takes for granted. Where we live perhaps but not where they live. Here in the US, our Islamaphobic media, seems to constantly imply that they (the Other, Muslims, those who are not us) live only in ideologies and in vitriol. The right to live in days, in other words in an embodied and nuanced existence seems reserved for a select few, and Pakistanis are not among them.