Barbarians in/of the Land: Representations of Muslim Youth in the Canadian Press

This paper examines representations of Muslim youth in a major Canadian newspaper, The Globe and Mail, over a four-year period (2010 to 2013). The first part of the article reviews some of the relevant literature regarding Muslim representations in the Western, mainstream media, paying particular attention to representations of Muslim youth. Based on a close analysis of a corpus of 158 news stories, a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the coverage is presented. Using a postcolonial and critical race perspective, this article traces the ways in which Muslim youth are represented, illustrating the ways in which a racial logic inscribes them. The findings suggest that Muslim youth are cast not only as an enemy within the nation state, but also as a contaminating force that must be disciplined or ejected from the body politic. They are, in short, barbarians in and of the land. At the same time, these representations cohere to produce an image of the nation as benevolent and dedicated to universal standards of truth and justice.


Introduction
Since the time of Edward Said's (1978;1981) groundbreaking work documenting Orientalism, there is now a wealth of literature that details Western media stereotypes of Muslims and Islam (e.g. Karim, 2000;Mamdani, 2004;Muscati, 2002;Razack, 2008;Steuter & Wills, 2009). Maira (2009, p. 29) cynically refers to this as the bourgeoning "post 9/11 area studies". Ushered in by the tragic bombings of 9/11, these "area studies" have embraced both a progressive, critical 38 In their analysis of the news coverage regarding the "Toronto 18" case and the arrest of eighteen Muslim youth on the grounds of their complicity in planning and executing terror plots, Miller and Sack (2010) argue that the majority of the coverage utilized a "home-grown terrorism frame". This frame effectively assembles the tropes associated with Islam and terrorism (Karim, 2000), and sutures them to issues of state security. In other words, the securitization of the state is made possible by a discourse of terrorism which pivots on play of orchestrated stereotypesyoung Muslim men driven by a sense of grievance, unable to 'fit in', and incapable of performing as docile citizens. They are "Generation Jihad: Angry, Young, Born-Again Believers" according to a headline from The Globe and Mail quoted by Miller and Sack. Yet, the template used in the coverage of "Toronto 18" was etched before -in the mainstream media's coverage of "Operation Thread" (Odartey-Wellington, 2009) that involved the arrest of 23 young Muslim men, most of them marked by the first name Mohammed -many of whom were subsequently deported. They were arrested for participating in a terror cell, a network whose existence was tenuous at best. The coverage, as Odartey-Wellington points out, generated a moral panic in which "young Arabs and ethnic minority Muslims serve as the objects by which the threat can be mediated, recognized by the public, surveilled and controlled by the relevant state apparatuses" (p. 36). As Stenvall (2003) notes, The elements of threat inherent in the terrorist network metaphor largely depend on the secrecy and unpredictability of these networks. Terrorist networks are presented as "clandestine" and "shadowy"; and since they are "multinational", it is implied that no one in the world can feel safe. Accordingly, it can be argued that the sense of the word terrorist in public discourse really has changed, in that the word today evokes even stronger -and more persistent -negative emotions (such as fear and terror) than it did before September 11, 2001. (p. 397) So strong is the terror stigma attached to the male Muslim body, that it has followed even that of Omar Khadr, a child soldier who was apprehended in Afghanistan and subsequently jailed in US prison in Guantanamo Bay for eight years before being transferred to a Canadian prison for another eight year term (Jiwani, 2011). We shall come back to the Khadr case as it was a notable thread running through our corpus of news coverage. What is important to note is that race and religion, as Bahdi (2003) astutely observes, have become the proxy for risk. Young Muslim men are the embodiment of risk; a risk made more evident in Canada's refusal to accept them as part of its intake of Syrian refugees (The Guardian, 2015).
Nonetheless, there is another side to this stereotype, and this deals with Muslim youth attempting to "fit in". The performative aspects of citizenship have been emphasized in the literature dealing with the negotiation of Muslim identity in diasporic communities in the West (e.g. Harris & Roose, 2014;Kassam, 2011;Maira, 2009). At the same time, the influence of consumer culture as a passport to "fitting in" has also been noted (Jiwani, 2014). However, "fitting in" also constitutes the sign of the "good Muslim", one who can set aside the lived aspect of Islam and privatize it, much as religion is privatized in a secular society -present but absent from the public gaze. As Mamdani (2004) observes, "good Muslims are modern, secular, and Westernized, but bad Muslims are doctrinal, anti-modern, and virulent" (p. 24). How then are these stereotypes prevalent in contemporary press reporting of Muslim youth? In the sections that follow, we discuss some of the findings from our corpus of news articles from The Globe Journal of Contemporary Issues in Education, 2016, 11(1), pp. 36-53. ISSN 1718-4770 © 2016

Methodology
A census (Sampert, 2006) of articles concerning stories of youth in The Globe and Mail was conducted using the Factiva database. The search terms utilized included the following: youth, young people, teen, teens, teenage, teenaged, teenager, teenagers. Excluding stories in the Arts/Entertainment, Sports, Fashion, Globe Drive, Report on Business Snapshot, Report on Business Financial Profile, Home Cents, Number Cruncher (Stock Column) Sections, and international stories, the search yielded 2,337 news accounts in total. Of these, 158 were stories that either specifically focused on Muslim youth or significantly referenced them in passing. In the sections that follow, we focus on these 158 stories.
In parsing through the articles, we categorized them using the following descriptors: Radicalization & Terror for stories that discussed Muslim youth involved in terrorist activities or as having been radicalized; Surveillance for stories concerning state surveillance of Muslim youth; Immigration for those which commented on immigration issues involving Muslim youth; and, Honour Killings to reference and categorize Muslim victims of honour crimes. In addition, due to the high number of stories referencing Somali youth, we coded these stories separately within the larger category of Muslim youth. Gang violence, which was a common theme in the stories dealing with Somali youth was also coded separately, as well as in the Somali youth category where the reference was explicit. Additionally, stories that featured "positive" representations of Muslim youth were coded, as were stories where these representations were either mentioned in passing or were not the main aspect of the coverage. Those stories where Muslim youth were alluded to, or where there was an assumed connection, were demarcated as "floating or unsaid". In some cases, these included stories about individuals who had previously been identified as Muslim or terrorists. Not all of our categories were mutually exclusive and so we relied on the most dominant motif in an individual story to determine in which category it would best fit. While our corpus is not exhaustive and is contingent on the usual problems associated with database searches, it does provide insights that can help to map out the terrain of the mediascape concerning Muslim youth.
The diagram below offers a pictorial representation of stories in each of the categories. The red portions represent those stories featuring Somali youth. The blue signifies all other representations of Muslim youth. Education, 2016, 11(1), pp. 36-53. ISSN 1718-4770 © 2016    While articles on immigration were the highest in number, many of these were categorized as "floating" or where Muslim youth were mentioned in passing. In contrast, articles dealing with radicalization and terror were more likely to deal directly with Muslim youth. Tracking the themes over the four years reveals the following chronology: security concerns, terrorism, the 41 "new" profile of young "jihadists", gang-related murders, drug crimes and murder, and honour killings. Within this chronology, several issues dominated the coverage: the repatriation of Omar Khadr from Guantanamo, the murders of Somali youths, the court trials of the "Toronto 18", and the fatal shooting of Sammy Yatim, a Syrian youth by the Toronto Police. We turn now to a discursive analysis of the coverage.

Terrified/Terrifying Nation
The eviction of groups of people from political community begins with their difference, coded as an incomplete modernity that poses a threat to the nation. While nationalism has always demanded the stigmatization of the foreigner, increasingly that stigmatization carries with it the probability that the stigmatized group will be literally expelled (deported), marked permanently as undeserving of the full benefits of citizenship, or abandoned. (Razack, 2008, p. 84) As Razack remarks above, the differentiation of an "us" from "them" is a key discursive move by which targeted groups are alienated. In his insightful analysis of elite discourse and racism, Teun van Dijk (1993) identifies an "ideological square" as a primary discursive move by which the press makes and marks a difference between "us" and "them". Whereas, "we/us" are positively valued and valorized, "they" or "them" are negatively valued. In this way, the media projects all that is undesirable and contra hegemonic on to "them". "They" in turn become the threats that have to be expelled from the body politic, or isolated and marginalized. "Their" concerns become trivialized if not dismissed outright. But how is it possible to define an Other when "they" look and act like "us"? What "somatechnologies" (Pugliese, 2009) -technologies of the body, on the body and associated with the body -can one use to identify the difference that Razack (2008) speaks to? This is where Pugliese's concept of compulsory visibility comes into play; for the Muslim body is rendered, in the news media most especially, highly visible.

Homegrown Terror
The majority of news accounts focused on homegrown terrorism, stemming in part from the media's coverage of the trial of the "Toronto 18". The coverage in general stressed the emergence of a new generation of "jihadists"-a euphemism of terrorism linked to Islam. These "new" terrorists were the cause of considerable concern. For example, in describing the lead figure in the "Toronto 18" group, one news account portrays him as follows: An educated and affluent thirty something entrepreneur -born in the Middle East but raised in Canada -who allegedly saw an opportunity to profit from the chaos he would cause.…A decade older, better educated and far better off than most his co-conspirators, Mr. Abdelhaleem doesn't fit the profile of the teenagers and twenty somethings convicted to date. (Freeze, 2010) In a column concerning the apprehension of another terrorist suspect, Khurram Sher, columnist Margaret Wente pens the following: He doesn't fit our mental picture of a would-be terrorist. He's not a disaffected kid who fell in with the wrong crowd. He is not a hate-filled product of poverty and disadvantage. He's not even a second-class citizen, such as France's French-born

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Muslims who speak with perfect Parisian accents but will never break into the elites. Instead, Dr. Sher's the product of Canada's uniquely successful multicultural meritocracy -a homegrown, ball-hockey-playing, fun-loving fellow who zipped through one of the toughest med schools in the country and made fun of religious Muslims on Canadian Idol (Wente, 2010). Here, Wente alludes to the fear that the terrorist could be the person next door. In other words, "they" can look like "us" and act like "us" and therefore, we need to be on guard. The enemy is within, and can easily constitute a fifth column. News articles, as Miller and Sack (2010) contend, have a significant impact on audiences, particularly those who consider the columnist favourably, and Wente, it must be noted, has a considerable following.
However, while columnists can sway the public, the news media's reliance on official sources, such as government and security sources (e.g. the police) also command considerable legitimacy. Hence, an article that quotes credible sources such as reports by experts and specialized government agencies such as the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) is likely to not only draw more attention, but also elicit acquiescence on the part of the audience because of the inherent and assumed facticity of the information provided. Here, for example, is one such account of CSIS's report on radicalization titled "Canadian extremists likely homegrown: 'Secret' CSIS Report": ….none of the radicals studied by CSIS were "assessed to be poorly integrated into Canadian society." And these radicals tend to be relatively young and wellintegrated members of society.… "That data appears to match what has been claimed in the literature: i.e. that radicalization and terrorism is largely a young person's game" (18-35), the study says. (Freeze, 2013) Headlines, van Dijk (1993 contends, act as "cognitive organizers" -they tell us what to expect and summarize the story for us, from the viewpoint of those writing it. Here, what is interesting to note is that the implied notion assumes these young people don't really have any legitimate grievances. In other words, their involvement with terrorism is simply a "game". Further, that "game" is a lucrative one, not only for the profits it brings in terms of the presumed privileges of martyrdom, but also "because even nobodies can aspire to be somebodies. And a nobody who feels persecuted by society (petty criminals often have a victim complex) can be tempted to vent that hostility in murderous ways" (Wente, 2013).
The news accounts suggest that the turn to radicalism is illogical, indicating that those who are radicalized were normal at one time and then suddenly became abnormal. This is apparent in the following account concerning one of three friends, who presumably left Canada, to fight alongside terrorist groups.
In 2008, Aaron Yoon, the London, Ont., man who has been reported to be in an African jail under mysterious circumstances, was a "fun-loving" teenager who worked part-time at a local restaurant and hung out with friends from work. But according to a former co-worker, something changed in the Korean-Canadian teen over the next few years. She watched her former friend become increasingly isolated and religious. "My Facebook was flooded with posts about Islam... It was getting excessive so I just deleted him," the young woman...said. (Hui, Freeze, & Thanh Ha, 2013)

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This theme is reiterated in various other accounts leading readers to surmise that radicalization is this amorphous process that emanates from a phenomenon called "Islam", and is relayed by the Internet. It is as if exposure to Islam results in an alchemical reaction, drastically altering the individual's personality. One outcome of this is the legitimization of surveillance. The news accounts report on state authorities and police asking the communities to participate in this surveillance, and further, commending them for doing so and behaving like "good Muslims" (e.g. Chase & White, 2010).
A key thread linking homegrown terrorism to Muslim youth is the issue of immigration and crime. Numerous stories referenced the out-migration of Muslim youth as mentioned above. However, there were other accounts that referred to the deportation of youth who had been categorized as terrorists by the state, even though they had grown up in Canada (Wingrove, 2012). Immigration status then enhances the suspect nature of those who will not "fit", making them likely to be deported, and thereby exorcised from the body politic. On the other hand, if the nation can eject those it deems undesirable on the grounds that they do not legally belong, then it also makes itself accountable for citizens, who are also Muslim, imprisoned elsewhere. This is where immigration status becomes a strategic card that can be used to contest the state as occurred in the case of Omar Khadr.

Omar Khadr -An Anomaly?
A notable theme throughout the four years of coverage was the subject of Omar Khadr, his imprisonment in Guantanamo Bay, his status as a child soldier, the Canadian government's complicity with the US intelligence apparatus, and abandonment of this Canadian citizen. This is quite a departure from earlier accounts of Khadr in the mainstream press (see Jiwani, 2011;Shephard, 2008;Williamson, 2012). Apprehended as a child-soldier, Khadr was one of the only inmates at Guantanamo unclaimed by a Western nation whose citizens were confined there. The coverage that we examined pointed to a positive representation of Khadr, gesturing to and sometimes indicting the Canadian government for abandoning him and refusing his repatriation. A Supreme Court decision subsequently forced the government to bring him back to Canada under the condition that he plead guilty to the charges of terrorism and murder leveled against him. Khadr agreed, and subsequent reportage focused on his return and rehabilitation.
The interesting aspect of the news coverage is the stark contrast between the portrayal of young Muslim men as terrorists incarnate, and Khadr as a victim of government inaction and politics. On the one hand, these positive portrayals, which tended to express a sentiment of benevolence and fairness on the part of Canadians, consistently made mention of the Khadr family's connection with terrorism. Khadr thus becomes an exception marked by his age at the time of his apprehension (a 15 year-old), the conditions under which he was found -which seem to refute his involvement in the murder of an army officer, -and Canada's violation of an international treaty concerning the treatment and rehabilitation of child-soldiers.

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Canadian government then declared, "Let the process work." Some process. (The Globe and Mail, 2010, November 1) However, the editorial ends with a statement reiterating Khadr's identity as a terrorist but calling on Canadian values of fairness and justice to recognize his status as a youth. Notwithstanding the benevolent stance of many of the editorials covering the Khadr case, the tone of opportunism was an emerging theme once Khadr was repatriated. For instance, there were allusions to how the Canadian justice system was soft and would work in favour of Khadr by enabling his early release (e.g. Makin, 2010).
This transformation in Khadr's representation may be attributed to the concerted grass roots mobilization that occurred as a result of his imprisonment in Guantanamo, and the publicity that advocates managed to garner. That aside, it may also have to do with the more important ideological task at hand -shoring up the national imaginary of Canada as a fair and just nation.

Gangs/Drugs, Murders and Terror: The Somali Connection
The theme of drug and gang warfare, often culminating in the murder of young Black men, was also a prominent theme in the corpus we examined. The nexus connecting these various issues was the youths' Muslim identities. In these reports, the figure of the Somali youth is the site where race and religion come together to signify a potent and toxic mix of danger, risk, mayhem and savagery. Here we see the Somali body making a journey from the housing projects of Toronto and its outskirts to Fort McMurray in Alberta. The relocation is a quest for stable work and money, but the Somali body ends up on the street, victimized by murder, and tainted by the drug trade. The news accounts make clear that this is a "lost generation": Mr. Jama is among what some fear is a lost generation of Somali-Canadian young men. About two dozen have been killed in Alberta over the past half-decade, overwhelmingly Canadian-raised and involved in drugs. Somalis call them the ciyaal baraf, or children of the snow. It's a kind of insult -neither truly Somali nor truly Canadian. (Wingrove, 2012) The quote above suggests that Somali youth are caught in a culture clash -between the traditions of their parents and the modernity of Canada. However, a structural analysis would reveal that for many Somali youth, dead-end jobs, discrimination and the sense of abandonment they experience growing up in Canada, impact their sense of identity and belonging to the nation. As Black and as Muslims, they face the interlocking influences of racism and Islamophobia.
Many of the articles on Somali youth focus on policing strategies such as outreach, collaboration with mosques and community groups, and the hiring of Somali-Canadian police officers. However, what is most interesting is the ambivalence communicated in these accounts. On the one hand, there is a glowing commendation of Somali communities who have alerted the government and police about radicalized youth in the community, and on the other hand, there is a sense of hopelessness about this "lost generation." That hopelessness is also communicated through the use of exemplars of exception, as for instance, a young "Canadian-trained" Somali doctor who was able to transcend the limitations imposed on her by her race, class, and gender (Anderson, 2013), implying that if she can do that, so can the others. Education, 2016, 11(1), pp. 36-53. ISSN 1718-4770 © 2016

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The recruitment of Somali youth into terrorist cells abroad was a constant motif in the coverage. In a story ostensibly about the declining numbers of Somali youth going to join al-Shabab, the terrorist network in Africa, readers are reminded that: …the flow of aspiring fundamentalist fighters from the West to Syria is accelerating as that conflict becomes a global epicentre for self-styled jihadists. "They are going in great numbers," said a former federal official, adding that there has not been a migration like this since Afghanistan in the 1980s. Overall, he said, "you're talking hundreds and hundreds." (Freeze & Friesen, 2013) Again, the reliance on numbers and the need to provide context constitute the rationale for the inclusion of this piece of information. However, against a background where the association between Muslim youth and terrorism is so sharply etched in the collective imagination, its inclusion combined with its articulation from an authoritative and hence credible source, reinforces the stigma. More than that, this information feeds into a moral panic (Odartey-Wellington, 2011) about Muslim youth as embodiments of homegrown terror, importing and exporting terror at will.

The Case of Sammy Yatim
On July 27, 2013, Sammy Yatim, an 18-year-old Syrian youth, was shot by Toronto police in the downtown section of the city. At approximately midnight, Yatim was travelling in a streetcar and had apparently told the passengers to leave after having first indecently exposed himself. As the situation continued, everyone but Yatim -who was now wielding a three-inch knife -had vacated the streetcar. According to the news accounts, police arrived and ordered him to "drop the knife" and step out of the vehicle. The incident was video-taped by an eyewitness and soon went viral. Yatim was shot nine times and then tasered and according to the accounts, "crumpled" after the first 3 shots were fired (Mahoney, Andreatta, & White, 2013). The tragedy sparked widespread protest and calls for police accountability. Thereafter, one of the 22 police officers on the scene, who had fired the shots, was charged with manslaughter.
Yatim was not branded a terrorist. Instead, as the subsequent stories revealed, he was a Christian Arab from Syria. Hence, instead of reverting to the terrorist frame, the coverage of the incident attempted to offer a logical explanation -Yatim as "brandishing a knife" and therefore as threatening to the passengers on the streetcar. When this didn't work because other passengers corroborated that he didn't seem rational and that even when presented with the opportunity to hurt a fellow passenger, he simply told everyone to leave (Blaze Carlson, 2013), the story shifted to Yatim himself. Under the title, "Caught between two worlds; A shy kid who had a fascination with knives; A teenager who grew up between two countries; A son with concerned parents, and a classmate eager to be cool," Blaze Carlson and Vidya Kauri (2013) elaborate on this victim of a culture clash, commenting that it was "his collection of knives that ultimately, albeit indirectly caused Mr. Yatim's demise". In his column on the shooting, Marcus Gee (2013), another popular columnist at the paper, opined: "There is, thankfully, no evidence of racial bias here, or even of simple 'police brutality'".
This denial of racial profiling and bias remained a consistent theme in the coverage even when it was found that there had been no need for the use of such excessive force by the police. Instead, Education, 2016, 11(1), pp. 36-53. ISSN 1718-4770 © 2016 University of Alberta/Centre for Global Citizenship Education and Research http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/JCIE 46 the articles that recounted this story pointed to several cases where excessive force was used by the police on mentally challenged individuals. However, one could surmise here that the connection between Middle Eastern "looking" youth and terrorism is so conjoined in the popular imagination that it may perhaps have influenced how the police dealt with Sammy Yatim; their actions propelled by the view of Muslim youth as dangerous and lethal (Dossa, 2008). So, although he wasn't a Muslim, Sammy Yatim looked like a Muslim, much as the Sikh men who were murdered in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 in the US, appeared "like" Muslims (Maira, 2009).

The Reader-Generated Series: "Time to Lead"
In the first week of July, 2011, The Globe and Mail initiated a series focusing on Islam and youth in Canada. The series began with a story titled "The gap between two solitudes; Young Canadian Muslims say bridging the 'us and them' divide requires breaking down some harmful, outdated stereotypes" (Bascaramurty, 2011). It concluded with the following description: "Time to lead is journalism driven by our readers -the ideas come from you. This week's series focuses on Muslims in Canada, as they find their way between tradition and modernity." As Hall et al. (1978) note, by identifying the situation and thereby imposing the limits of the debate, the news media constrain and curtail information to fit the frame. In this case, the paper's emphasis on defining Islam as "tradition" and Canadian society as "modernity" effectively framed the issue. The articles in the series focused on the culture clash, but also in the third installment, published a selection of the reader response. This response was largely concentrated to giving voice to public anxieties about Islam and Muslims, and in particular, the threat represented by both. The second installment of the series featured a longer comment from a Muslim woman that presented the argument that it was not the parents who were traditional but rather "it's their children -in desperate need for identity -who have turned to conservative, hard-line and politicized Islam for answers". This trend to embrace a politicized Islam has led to bloodshed in many parts of the world and is growing rapidly -and going unchecked -in Canada" (Fatah, 2011). What is apparent here is the voice of the native informant -the "good Muslim" who informs on her community and performs the role of the dutiful citizen. She alerts the public about the dangerous Muslim youth who need to be surveilled and disciplined.
Moreover, the very title of the series, "Time to Lead" presupposes that Muslim youth and communities haven't already been leading the way, begging the question: "To where should they be leading their communities?" The implicit message is that Muslim youth need to be trained (domesticated) to lead their communities and additionally, to demonstrate their capability in ways that are intelligible to the nation. In other words, they need to become more like "us."

Rescuing Young Muslim Women
If young Muslim men are dangerous and lethal, then young Muslim women are passive and oppressed -imperiled as Razack (2008) puts it. That seems to be the general equation suggested and, even more so, underscored in the coverage of the murders of three young women of the Shafia family. Framed as "honour killings", the news accounts posthumously rescued the young women (see Jiwani, 2014;Olwan, 2013) from the oblivion facing so many women victims of Journal of Contemporary Issues in Education, 2016, 11(1), pp. 36-53. ISSN 1718-4770 © 2016 University of Alberta/Centre for Global Citizenship Education and Research http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/JCIE 47 domestic homicide. At the same time, a subordinate discourse is also emergent in the coveragethat young Muslim women's insistence on wearing the hijab (see Fatah, 2011) is a sign of their radicalization. Jasmin Zine's (2009) analysis of various flashpoints involving Muslim women in Canada provides a useful framework for analyzing the press coverage here. Zine posits the following logic as underpinning racist and discriminatory responses against Muslim women: death by culture, death of culture and disciplining culture. Death of culture speaks to the fear generated by the growing population of Muslims in Canada, a fear that was articulated most cogently in the reader driven response reported in the paper as part of its special series "Time to Lead", and also evident even in the paper's foregrounding of Muslim population figures in its series concerning a statistical profile of religious affiliation in Canada. These accounts seem to suggest a fear of being engulfed by Muslim masses and of the country being over-run by religious fanatics; this is also well documented by the large number of articles in our corpus that referenced matters of immigration. On the other hand, death by culture refers to the presumed victimized status of Muslim girls and women -their oppression as a result of being members of Muslim communities. Zine's notion of "disciplining culture" refers to both the invocation of a law and order response to stem what the media described as the growing tide of honour killings (Olwan, 2013), and the necessity of incarcerating young Muslim men in order to thwart terrorism.

Cognitive Organizers and Repetitive Genealogies
An interesting aspect of the coverage was the classification of the stories under particular capitalized headings. These headings were then followed by the actual title of the story. Discursively, these capitalized labels act as cognitive organizers, positioning the stories in a way that primes readers as to what to expect. For example, some of the stories concerning terror plots in Canada were prefaced by capitalized headings -"TERROR". At other times, this macro signifier was changed to "SECURITY". The links between terror and security were thus repetitively yoked. Another editorial, for instance, used the macro signifier "TERRORISM/LONE WOLVES" underscoring the element of fear embodied in the figure of pathological single Muslim man on the loose but yet connected to an amorphous terrorist network.
The stories also recirculated previously published information, ostensibly to provide contextual information. Thus, in the news accounts about Omar Khadr, his family's connections with al-Qaeda were repeatedly raised. Similarly, in accounts concerning domestic terrorism, previous terror plots or terrorists were consistently mentioned, such as the Boston Marathon bombings (e.g. Freeze, 2011). There is a lineage established and it's a genealogy that helps to make sense of the newly posted information.
While the mention of such background information may be necessary, in the case of terrorism plots, such a systemic frame seals the interpretation of Muslims as problematic communities and Islam as an irrational phenomenon. To be sure, The Globe and Mail editorials consistently brought home the message that there are "good" Muslims out there and that Islam is not to blame (The Globe and Mail, 2010, October 5). But, this was often in an adhoc manner, and as a way to soothe any criticisms of bias that Muslim communities consistently level at the mainstream Journal of Contemporary Issues in Education, 2016, 11(1), pp. 36-53. ISSN 1718-4770 © 2016 University of Alberta/Centre for Global Citizenship Education and Research http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/JCIE 48 media. What stands out though is that coverage of other issues like violence against women, for instance, does not usually garner this same kind of systemic focus. Instead, in those cases, the news media tends to privilege singular interpretations; interpretations that construct a particular murder as more of an aberrant case and not part of a larger methodical pattern (Easteal, Judd, & Holland, 2015).

Concluding Remarks
While the analysis presented here is by no means exhaustive and additional research is required to reach any substantive conclusions, we can surmise that the news media's representation of Muslim youth tends towards more negative and stereotypical portrayals that cohere around terrorism and crime, as well as clashes between tradition and modernity. Islam remains the central identifier in this nexus, connecting these youth in ways that surpass the commonplace and common sense notions of youth as a troublesome and rebellious category.
In the carceral gaze of the dominant society, the body of the Muslim youth is identifiable through the prism of soft and hard power; the hard power of the state in terms of incarceration, deportation and legal abandonment; and soft power in terms of "culture talk" (Mamdani, 2004). This is where the issues of youth alienation, and culture clash between tradition and modernity, assume a heightened legibility. Within the news media, and most especially in the press (which offers a more fixed interpretation and where information can be archived more readily), Muslim youth are both the enemies within and the enemies outside. They are barbarians in and of the land.