Social Roles of Jews and Muslims

In this chapter we analyze the social roles attributed to Jews and Judaism in the West and to Muslims and Islam in the West in two superregional German newspapers. We thereby focus on the ascription of victim and perpetrator identities within the theoretical framework of the needs-based model as well as on the ascription of these two groups as sources of symbolic, realistic, and safety threat. Based on our statistical analysis we find our hypotheses confirmed that Jews are more frequently portrayed as victims than Muslims are, while Muslims are more frequently portrayed as perpetrators and as sources of symbolic, realistic, and safety threat than Jews. Simultaneously, we find Muslims to be more frequently depicted as victims than as perpetrators. All intergroup differences were highly significant and detected in both newspapers. Our results thus confirm the preexisting notion of the German media portrayal of the two non-dominant groups being clearly different from one another. We discuss our findings within the relevant literature on the subject and conclude by assessing the societal relevance of our findings for the two non-dominant groups as well as for the German dominant group.