American anti-Semitic iconography transferred smoothly onto Arabs after 1973

Evidence

Yet after the 1973 war the Arab appeared everywhere as something more menacing. Cartoons depicting an Arab sheik standing behind a gasoline pump turned up consistently. These Arabs, however, were clearly “Semitic”: their sharply hooked noses, the evil mustachioed leer on their faces, were obvious reminders (to a largely non-Semitic population) that “Semites” were at the bottom of all “our” troubles, which in this case was principally a gasoline shortage. The transference of a popular anti-Semitic animus from a Jewish to an Arab target was made smoothly, since the figure was essentially the same. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 726

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s Islamophobia scaffold — the racialized visual grammar of the ‘Semite’ moves across targets, a mechanism worth carrying into readings on contemporary anti-Muslim imagery.
• SEED: Essay angle: the ‘Semite’ as a mutable racial figure whose antisemitic career spans Jewish and Arab targets, tracing the visual continuity across a half-century of American cartoons.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 726