Epic Encounters

Epic Encounters Images of the Middle East in American popular culture and mass media are generally shape the ideas that most people in the United States ever get to this region, nor do they have specialized training and education that would provide them with more factual information. This influences include movies, novels, television broadcasts and news programs, especially those that dramatize terrorist incidents like the Iran Hostage Crisis, the bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon, the wars with Iraq and of course September 11, 2001.

Among the most important influences are the ideas of white evangelicals and fundamentalists about the key role that Israel will play in the End Times and the Second Coming of Christ, and the imperative to support it against the Muslims. This particular group has had a disproportionate influence on politics, especially in the Republican Party, and on the election of hawkish presidents like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.

Of course, another major concern has been the security of the oil supply, particularly since the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979, and the more recent one in 2007-08. All of this had a highly damaging impact on the U.S. economy and also on the administration that happened to be in power at the time. Israel played a key role in American culture, and not only for American Jews who were motivated by memories and images of the Holocaust to support a strong Jewish state.

In the Leon Uris novel Exodus and the 1960 film by the same name, the Jewish refugees and resistance fighters who founded the new country were idealized, while the Arabs were shown as being led by fascists and escaped Nazi war criminals. Israel's victory in the 1967 Six Day War against Soviet-supplied Arab armies that vowed to push the Jews into the sea also had great appeal to the American public, especially with the country bogged down in a seemingly endless war in Vietnam (McAlister 158).

For American evangelicals, the reestablishment of Israel in 1948 and the recapture of the Temple Mount in 1967 also played a vital role in Biblical prophecy. Hal Lindsey's pioneering book The Late Great Planet Earth (1970) sold twenty-eight million copies by 1998. Its main point was that the final battle in history would be fought at Armageddon in Israel, after which Jesus Christ would return again to rule the world from Jerusalem.

For evangelicals and fundamentalists then, just about all violent events in the Middle East could be taken as signs of the End Times (McAlister 167). Although Jimmy Carter was the first 'born again' president, in the end the shift of white evangelicals into the Republican Party was vital to the victories of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and George W. Bush in 2000 -- and both claimed to be evangelicals as well.

It still has an important effect in the Republican Party today, not only among those who believe Barack Obama was a Muslim born in Kenya, but social conservatives who dislike the Mormonism of Mitt Romney or the moderate conservatism of John McCain. Evangelicals had taken little part in politics for decades prior to the 1970s, at least not as an organized bloc, and Israel was hardly the only issue that motivated them (McAlister 172).

They were also motivated by the Supreme Court decision allowing abortion in 1973, the ban on prayer in public schools, and hostility to feminism and gay rights, but in foreign affairs they always favored a strong military, nationalistic suspicion of the United Nations and other global organizations, anti-Communism and total support for Israel against Arabs and Muslims. Among the most powerful images that had a major impact on American culture and politics were those associated with the 444-day Hostage Crisis in Iran from 1979-81.

A failed rescue mission in 1980 and the oil shock that led to another doubling of oil prices and a spike in inflation and unemployment all damaged Jimmy Carter's presidency irreparably. It also led to a patriotic revival in the U.S. with the first Yellow Ribbon campaigns, and along with Vietnam and Watergate was one of the "most widely covered stories in television history" (McAlister 198).

All television newscasts began with a count of how many days the hostages had been held, and frequently showed frenzied mobs burning American flags in Tehran for the benefit of the cameras. All this led to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, with his "determined reassertion of U.S. political and military hegemony in the Middle East" (McAlister 199). From this point onward, Islam merged in the public mind with terrorism, which was reinforced by September 11, 2001 and many other terrorist attacks. Reagan and later George H.W.

Bush intervened regularly in the Middle East, by supporting Iraq in the war of 1980-88, sending Marines to Lebanon, bombing Libya in 1986, and then defeating Saddam Hussein in 1990-91 after he invaded Kuwait. Few Americans knew the real history of Iran of the Middle East, of course, such as the 1953 CIA coup or American support for his.