C'mon @JoyAnnReid, this aint it. https://twitter.com/ZahraBilloo/status/1300872605067481089

So, let's talk about this a bit because this is a moment lots of people can learn from and an all too common trend in commentary, coverage and public discourse.

There is this thing where people, especially here in the US, feel the need to borrow from the context of the Middle East or the Arab and Muslim world to make a point about violence.

Why do people feel the need to borrow from a different context, that varies in so many ways (culture, history, politics, etc) to describe political violence in the United States when we have our own lengthy history of political violence in the US?

There are so many examples of this and I have seen it constantly in recent weeks.

Have a look at this, for example https://twitter.com/ryanlcooper/status/1298776726626021377

Or when journalists describing the state repression of protests we have seen on our streets in recent weeks and months as "scenes that remind you of the middle east" as if state repression of protest is a foreign or borrowed concept in America

This is both a product of hyper-Orientalism and American exceptionalism and it is very prevalent today. Perhaps we can call it GWOT-derangement syndrome.

When people do this, consciously or not, they are reinforcing two very dangerous myths. The first, an orientalist trope, is that there is something uniquely violent about the Middle East, or its peoples, or their culture, or their religion.

The second myth, which is born out of this fantasy of American exceptionalism, is that this sort of violence is foreign to America and we a best able to understand it by looking elsewhere, not introspectively.

Of course there is not shortage of political violence in American history. No shortage of religiously-inspired radicals. No shortage of genocide, ethnic cleansing or political repression.

And it is these figures and episodes in American history, from its colonialism and slavery, to Andrew Jackson, to the KKK that inform us far, far more about political violence in the American present than anything that is happening or has happened 7,000 miles away.

There is this bizarre tendency to reach for analogies from the Middle East to explain political violence in America to Americans. Why?

A big reason for it is because the coverage and discussion of political violence has been dominated by the GWOT frame, which promotes both Orientalism and american exceptionalism....

and thus American audiences are conditioned to link political violence w/ a different place, people, etc AND ignore their own history. This is nothing short of a colossal failure of the American media environment and it has come to the fore in the era of Trumpism. /end