Bush’s rhetoric reduced Islam to a single object judged against Western values.

Evidence

Orientalism informed not only how race was understood during the formative stages of American history, but also how it was constructed. Orientalism helped guide, and fluidly tweak, the parameters of whiteness. And in the same way that blackness stood as the racial antithesis of whiteness, the necessary other without which whiteness would not exist, the Orientalist construction of Islam marked the faith as the civilizational foil of the West, a contrast that was necessary for the emerging United States to envision itself as an extension of Western civilization. In order to solidify itself as part of the West, and an extension of Europe in the Western Hemisphere, the United States had to follow in the footsteps of Europe and establish itself as the mirror opposite of the Muslim world. — Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Understanding…, 154 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim
• XREF: connects to: Bush’s ‘Islamo-fascism’ rhetoric framed Islam itself as democracy’s enemy — Green, Todd H, The Fear of Islam_ An Introduction to…, 290; The US needed Islam as a foil to define itself as Western — Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Understanding…, 154; Al Smith reduced complex fiscal arguments to single devastating rhetorical questions

Related

• The US needed Islam as a foil to define itself as Western (similarity 0.91)
• Islamic challenge forged the collective identity of ‘the West’ (similarity 0.86)
• The West required the Rest as a conceptual opposite to define itself. (similarity 0.85)
• Flattening Islam into one object enabled civilizational judgments against it (similarity 0.83)
• Bush’s inclusive rhetoric on Islam directly contradicted his militaristic Middle East policy. (similarity 0.83)
• The West defined itself as the mirror opposite of the Muslim world. (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalist discourse frames Westerners and Orientals as absolute binary opposites. (similarity 0.82)
• Orientalism supplied the pre-existing tropes that the War on Terror redeployed against Muslims (similarity 0.82)
• Western ideological camps all reduce Islam to a scapegoat (similarity 0.82)
• Islamophobia is a conflict over American identity rooted in racial and religious bitterness. (similarity 0.82)
• Bush to Obama was a rhetorical shift masking unchanged imperial fundamentals. (similarity 0.81)
• Islamophobia is rooted in imperialism and Orientalism; Western conceptions of Muslims as inferior beings arose when European nations were positioned to dominate once-powerful Muslim empires. (similarity 0.81)
• European Orientalism was normalized into a coherent US scholarly consensus (similarity 0.81)
• The Middle East itself is a product of Orientalist construction. (similarity 0.81)
• The West defined itself as the mirror image of the Muslim Orient (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• The US needed Islam as a foil to define itself as Western #corroborates (0.70) — Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Understanding…, 154