America recycled its Cold War enemy frame from Communism to Muslims.

Evidence

By the mid-1990s, terrorism by Muslims became the global threat that replaced Communism. American pundits and politicians, looking for a new enemy, replaced the Red Scare with the so-called Green Menace. No longer useful as American proxies to fight the Soviets, Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda were the face of the new enemy. Once portrayed as freedom fighters in America’s global war on Communism, these mujahideen who formed Al-Qaeda in the 1990s now opposed US military presence on Saudi Arabian soil. They were the new enemies in America’s burgeoning War on Terror. Muslims who engaged in political violence were no longer insurgents; they were savages to be killed in warfare. The Arab (Palestinian) terrorist trope was morphing into the Muslim terrorist trope. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 667

Categorization

• SEED: Article angle: how the US enemy-of-convenience framework turned mujahideen who fought Soviets into ‘savages’ the moment they opposed US presence in Saudi Arabia — the strategic contingency of who America calls ‘terrorist.’
• XREF: Echoes the reading on how moral panics depend on who holds power to define the deviant — parallel to Cohen’s moral panic framework. — connects to: The UDHR preamble’s religious language encoded Western-civilization claims against Islam and Communism.; The Islamic-terror enemy replaced the Soviet Union as an archnemesis.