(Title image: US-allied British soldiers inspect Iraqi citizens outside of Basra in 2003.)
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Orientalism, Islamophobia, and the Tsarnaev Case; or, What I Learned in Grad School, Part 1: The Macro
In this three-part podcast miniseries, Tom “Attorney Dad” Frizzell plays host and invites his daughter Heather to share what she learned in her Master’s program in International Studies at the University of Washington. She discusses how writing her academic thesis on Dzhokhar “Jahar” Tsarnaev’s case helped her better understand not just the Boston Marathon bombing, but the War on Terror, American foreign policy, and systemic discrimination against Muslims.
In Part One, she tackles the “macro”: how the big picture issues influenced the US government’s treatment of Jahar as a suspect in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing. She discusses colonialism’s legacy in modern geo-politics, definitions of Orientalism and Islamophobia, Orientalist perceptions of the Russian-Chechen conflict, the flawed definition of “terrorism,” how the policies of America’s War on Terror were specifically crafted to oppress Muslims, and more.
Read Heather’s thesis here: Regimes of Truth: Why Everything “Known” About the Boston Marathon Bombing is Wrong
Episode Extras
Mentioned Publications
Orientalism by Edward Said
Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented ‘Terrorism’ by Lisa Stampnitzky
Episode music: “The Complex” by Kevin MacLeod
http://www.incompetech.com
US v. Tsarnaev 