Eurocentric historical discourse tends to paint a flattering picture of Europe during the "Age of Discovery" while denigrating the newly colonized peoples. At the time of the onset of colonialism and conquest, Europe was a rather brutal and superstitious place, dominated by a "demonological discourse" (Delumeau). Church-sponsored brutalities towards Jews and Muslims have to be seen therefore on the same continuum as the forced conversions of indigenous peoples of the Americas who, like the Jews and Muslims in Catholic Spain, were obliged to feign allegiance to Christianity.
cultural studies researcher and lecturer in New York, originally from Israel
Hussein as the villain, Bush as the hero, and the US rescuing the victim is typical of colonial narratives...The analogy insists, furthermore, on a Eurocentric approach to Jewish history. In seeing Jewish history through a Euro-American Jewish perspective, the US media have presented Israel simplistically as a Western country populated by European Jews. Reading and watching media images from the Middle East, one is led to believe that there are only Euro-American Jews in Israel and only Moslem Arabs in the rest of the Middle East. One finds few images of Iraqi, Moroccan, or Ethiopian Israelis, even though Oriental Arab Jews compose the majority of the Jewish population in Israel.
From the very inception of the Gulf Crisis, the dominant US media failed to fulfil the role of independent journalism. Instead it acted as public relations for the State Department, assimilating the language, terminology, and the assumptions of the administration, thereby undermining any critical perspectives upon the conduct of the war. Any attempt to discuss the media's coverage of the Gulf War must examine some of the ways in which it structured identification with the Pentagon's agenda, and the interests of an international elite.