Every empire legitimizes itself by denying imperial motives

Evidence

Every empire tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, and its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 256

Categorization

• XREF: Weighs directly on the reader’s central question of how American Islamophobia differs from or recapitulates older imperial logics; dovetails with the ‘irrationalism masks power’ note from Frankfurt School. — connects to: Empire generates the scholarly paradigms that then legitimize its interventions. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 263
• QUESTION: Worth testing against specific historical cases — British, Ottoman, French — to see where ‘education and liberation’ rhetoric recurred verbatim.