The 9/11 Terrorists in Comic Books: President George W. Bush's Rhetoric of 'Caves and Evil' in Fiction

Abstract

The 9/11 Terrorists in Comic Books: President George W. Bush's Rhetoric of 'Caves and Evil' in Fiction Topics a priori so little related to each other such as religious subjectivities and comic books have unfortunately clashed resulting in violent protests again and again for the last decade. In September 2005, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published twelve cartoons depicting Muhammad, which brought about Muslims throughout the world rioted. The whole issue ended up in more than two hundred reported deaths (Cohen A3), including the bombing of the Danish Embassy in Pakistan. In November 2011, the French newspaper Charlie Hebdo's office in Paris was fire-bombed because it had published an issue featuring Muhammad on its cover. In September 2012, the French government, fearing violent reactions to a reissue of the Muhammad cover, closed the French embassies, consulates and international schools in more than 20 Muslim countries. How has this controversy between Western cartoons and Muslim communities escalated into such violence and geopolitical crisis? One of its precedent and definitive but still not much explored first discrepancies is the graphic representation of Muslim subjectivities in 9/11 cartoons, especially when the portrayal of the 9/11 terrorists in US comic books made room to demonizing discourses including all Muslims, Arabs, and Middle Easterners. In October 2001, President George W. Bush enjoyed the highest rate of public support ever achieved by a President of the United States: an approval rating of 90 percent according to the official CBS News/New York Times polls (Frankovic). President Bush's post-9/11 public discourses were worldwide broadcast, and in the wake of 9/11 they had an enormous influence on a stunned audience who was sitting in front of the TV set trying to find some kind of explanation. Cartoonists were part of this audience, and a lot of them could not help portraying some ideographs used by President Bush when describing the terrorists. Although the terms fanatics and madmen were used more than once to refer to the terrorists, the two most frequent conceptualizations of the 9/11 terrorists displayed by President Bush focused on the terrorists' supposed archaic way of living, with caves as its most recurrent signifier as if they were animals to be hunted, and the terrrorists' supposed innate evil nature. This article will show how these two dehumanizing images gradually permeated President Bush's post-9/11 public discourses when he portrayed the 9/11 terrorists, and how some 9/11 comic books represented the 9/11 terrorists following these same animalizing and demonizing lines opened by President Bush.