Example Of A Scapegoat Essay

The idea of a scapegoat prevails throughout history. From the Jews throughout the Middle Ages in Europe, to the Blacks during the early 20th century in the United States, minorities groups have beared the burden of discrimination and marginalization in all societies around the world. The majority peoples of societies dehumanized these minority peoples, and, thus, allowed themselves to blame these groups for the many problems they faced that were either unsolvable or were very difficult to solve. Often, power holders in these societies would use these scapegoats as tools for which these sovereign peoples could either blame these minorities for the malicious things the sovereigns did to their own citizens, or blamed these minorities in a red-herring …show more content…
For example, even though the tragedies of 9/11 occurred more than 13 years in the past, an ABC poll found that only 27 percent of Americans held favorable views of American Muslims (thedailybeast.com). This data also couples with the fact that, at this time in 2014, Muslims only comprised around 1-2% of the population of the United States, and that a contemporary Pew survey polled that, of the people included in the survey, 60% did not personally know any Muslims at all (thedailybeast.com). In this way, most Americans who fear Muslims have no personal connection in any way to the religion nor to the practitioners of that religion; therefore, these people would have an easier time dehumanizing these peoples in order to discriminate against them. Also, crimes against Muslims in the United States, though not at rates as high as after September 11, 2001, still rose tremendously in 2015, after certain terror attacks. For example, though previously there had been an average of 12.5 Anti-Muslim crimes committed per month, as a result of the ISIS attacks in Paris in November of 2015, this number rose to 38.5 attacks, almost tripling (nytimes.com). Finally, in 1996, after white supremacist Timothy McVeigh bombed the Oklahoma City Federal Building, American media stations quickly assumed Radical Muslims to be the culprits of the bombing. Even after McVeigh was captured, this Anti-Muslim sentiment still persisted, and persists even into today (huffingtonpost.com). These attacks on American Muslims prove no actual gain in combating terrorism and widening awareness of terrorism, but only serve to stereotype and disenfranchise American Muslims, a sizable minority in the United