Be careful not to create climate of ‘Americanophobia’

I refer to the letter “US media can be skewed when it comes to Islam” (Sept 20).

The writer stated that the commentary “Why a beheading makes us feel different” (Sept 17) did not “clarify that the Islamic State is unrepresentative of Islam and account for the context surrounding the group’s rise in the first place”.

But was that Mr David Brooks’ main purpose in writing his commentary? Besides trying to make sense of why a beheading is more disturbing than other forms of execution, he presented why the group chose this course of execution.

Therefore, I fail to see why the letter writer highlighted the practical, political and economic factors in the Middle East for many who join the Islamic State.

Nowhere in Mr Brooks’ article was this issue dealt with, so how could he be distorting the various reasons people join the group?

Mr Brooks did show why the conflict revolving around the Islamic State is as much a spiritual war as a political and military one and, in the process, differentiated between mainstream Islam and extremism. He stated that it is “religious zealots who are prone to commit or celebrate acts such as beheadings” because they often “hew to a fringe of their faith that holds that the spirit and the body are at war with each other”.

He argued that besides the need for “some sort of political and military coalition” to stop the Islamic State, a “superior version of Islam” would achieve the ultimate victory over terroristic interpretations of the faith.

It is thus clear that the Islamic State is a case of a section of the community choosing to magnify a fragment of its faith and making it the only thing that matters.

This clarifies that the group is unrepresentative of Islam, even if this was not Mr Brooks’ main focus. How can he be seen as creating Islamophobia, and how can a single article be representative of the entire American media?

In the recent articles on the Islamic State republished in TODAY, a distinction is always made between mainstream Islam and what the letter writer described as an “essentialist version of Islam”.

Just as we should not replicate Islamophobia found in some sections of the West, we should not replicate “Americanophobia” found in some sections of regions that have known Islam for 1,000 years.