Besides the fact that the Iranian hostage crisis may well have been the event that catalyzed an American media frame defined by pervasive fear of radical Islam as a threat to the Western world, I was also struck by the power of inflammatory rhetoric, on both sides, that allowed the Iranian crisis (as well as the Lebanon crisis) to develop into the situations they became. In America, newspapers came to place generalized blame on radical Muslims, while in Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini’s denunciation of the US as “the great Satan” drove the captors into a frenzy that encouraged and empowered them to prolong the hostage situation as long as it did.¹ Likewise, in Lebanon, the leaders of Hezbollah applied similarly derogatory rhetoric to describe Western nations (particularly the US) while Americans degraded the Islamist radicals in Lebanon.²

To try and capture this sense of mutually driven escalation, I superimposed the text collage from the previous page onto a mural of “the great Satan” that was painted onto the wall of the American embassy in Iran. ³

Just as Americans came to fear the “simple barbarism and unreasonable, naked malevolence” that they perceived Iranian Muslims to have against the US, Iranians (and later, the members of Hezbollah in Lebanon), too, came to view Americans in the same light.⁴