Muslim students less likely to be awarded top class degrees.

[Belacqua]

Well, you usually meet the Middle Eastern who is self-hating; trying to copy-cat westerners in everything to appear more civil. So many people in here got their self-esteem destroyed for good and instead of it a complex of deification for almost everything westerner settled.
You guessed it right: propaganda's effects in its best form. 

People here are taught to hate themselves, hate their religion, hate their heritage, hate their history.

[...]

The Islamic terrorism scapegoat is being milked over and over to destroy the self-esteem of any Muslim and justify the robbing of natural resources in their lands.

Just like destroying the Egyptian's self-esteem by the British Empire; the same is being repeated over and over.

You know, I had never thought about this before -- but that just shows how provincial I am. It makes perfect sense once you talk about it.

All the mass media pretty much shows that America is unquestionably the greatest and most desirable place. Even for people who know a little history and know that's not true, the constant propaganda value is bound to have an effect. The media invariably show Muslim countries as colorless and oppressed. And Americans abroad often behave as if their superiority is to be assumed. 

There are aspects in which America really does have the advantage, of course -- for the time being, anyway, a US graduate school is still probably a better stepping stone to a career than one in most Muslim countries. The carrot and stick approach, attracting the best students by wrecking the economies of the places they want to get out of, will lead to complicated reactions in people's feelings. 

Here in Japan, US occupation is still a living memory. For the most part everyone's views of America are positive (except about the air bases), but it's still clear that media propaganda is powerful. Japanese people almost invariably assume that Americans are freer and more capable of individual expression than they are. Even Americans believe this about themselves, though the truth is more complicated. 

any attempt to break through would be met with pointing fingers and news about 9/11 and ISIS -as if that is Islam-. 

This is the definition of bigotry that I've been prompted to come up with recently: looking at a huge and diverse group of people and pretending that the very worst members of that group are its essence. It's as widespread as ever, I think.

I wonder if things will start to change as America continues its downward slide. The rich are busily turning it into a "Third World" nation, life expectancy is declining, Bernie Sanders' centrist government goals are prevented by election cheating, universities are dumbing down to save money, science is suffering a "crisis of reproducibility" etc. etc. The current health thing is showing that the rest of the world can't count on us any more. At some point even Hollywood won't be able to persuade people that the US is superior. It might mean that oppression will lighten up -- or maybe America will just bomb everything to hell to prevent that from happening.