Hollywood cinema and Islamophobia: Reproduction of Islamophobia in post 9/11 Hollywood cinema

Although the concept of Islamophobia seems to be a religious concept, it is a concept with a historical and ideological background. Ever since the first contact of the West with Islam, polarization, otherization and hostilities have emerged. It is known that the geographical, scientific and cultural progress of the Islamic World has continued from the Umayyad Caliphate until the Treaty of Karlowitz, when the Ottoman Empire experienced its first major defeat in its Western front. However, with the The Age of Discovery, Renaissance and Reform movements, it is seen that the West has started to surpass the Islamic world in many ways. This political situation seems to cause the world to become more polarized on an axis of the West and the East. The East is now an exotic fairy tale that is backwards from the Western point of view and needs its intervention. This view is called Orientalism. The fact that the East is still behind in many ways allows the Orientalist perspective to endure. Orientalism connotes some Western scholars to alienate the East with their ideological and political biases, try to generalize everything in it and show the East as a place dependent of the West. Thus, the interventions on the East from the West are being legitimized. Orientalism seems to be taken over by the US in the early 20th century. This is the era when the Cinema began to exist in the United States, with Islam and the East being transferred to the cinema according to the Orientalist view. However, developments in the 20th century are not limited to this. The first half of this century saw the both world wars. The second half of this century saw the Cold War, the end of this war, the emergence of Third World countries and a major, worldwide change in the World's political equilibrium. It appears that these major changes have laid the foundation for Orientalism to evolve towards Islamophobia. The Arab-Israeli Wars, the Petroleum Crisis, the Hostage Crisis, the collapse of the USSR and finally the 9/11 attacks seem to have caused Islam to be perceived by the West and especially by the USA, something that is both feared and hated. Islam is now the new enemy, the new antagonist of the USA. Instead of Communism and the USSR, it is now Islam in the role of the new threat. Throughout its historical timeline, Hollywood cinema; which is the largest collaborator of every American government which cannot be considered apart from politics, fulfils the task of creating and strengthening this perception. Hollywood cinema, with new films produced every year, reminds that the current enemy of the United States and the West is Islam, spreading and consolidating Islamophobia and anti-Islamism on a social level. This study focuses on films with reproduced Islamophobic themes in Hollywood Cinema after 9/11. It also focuses on how this reproduction process is shaped in terms of content and form.