The racism coming from the mouths of populists and pundits regarding Ukraine found unison among liberal and centrist media voices. Charlie D’Agata, of CBS News, cried on air, “[Ukraine] isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan, that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilized, relatively European—I have to choose these words carefully—city, one where you wouldn’t expect that, or hope that it’s going to happen.” … His message was clear. “European” meant “white.” Which together stood for everything wholly and “relatively civilized.” Unlike Iraq or Afghanistan, the two nations decimated by two decades of American war and terror, which represented bastions of incivility, extremism, and “forever war.” Immigrants fleeing these nations, and refugees flung across the world, carried the threat of terror with them. Stained with this stigma and devoid of the whiteness held by Ukrainian refugees, they were cast as undesirables by the very nations that opened their borders and arms to the blue-eyed and blond-haired victims of the Russian siege.

DEFINE: Explains how 'European' served as a racial dog-whistle equating whiteness with civilization in media discourse.

Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamopho…, loc. 1202