Bush’s with-us-or-against-us ultimatum fueled both global Islamophobia and the spy thriller genre.

Evidence

In his address to a joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001, President George W. Bush effectively inaugurated the war on terror by offering an uncompromising ultimatum: “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Striking the keynote in a civilizational struggle, this speech and others like it allowed for an understanding of political conflict that took on a moral flavor and that—despite the notoriously porous nature of the terrorist threat—conveniently situated the conflict in the known and more manageable confines of nations. In its geopolitical guise, the ultimatum indirectly created the conditions for Islamophobia to be played out over the globe as well as among the multicultural countries of the West. In aesthetic terms, it prepared fertile ground for the thriller genre, in particular the spy thriller, with its interest in the possession of knowledge, covert action, group rivalries, and paranoid visions of the nation under threat. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 314

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Connects to the with-us-or-them binary that Hamid and Naqvi dramatize; useful hinge vocabulary for the reader’s own novels.