Hostage-crisis coverage warned Americans about a domestic Muslim takeover.

Evidence

News coverage of the hostage crisis echoed Carter’s words to a captive American audience that watched the news in record numbers. Special programming such as ABC’s America Held Hostage communicated the message that America at large, and Americans everywhere, were being victimized by the brown, bearded Muslim extremists in the Middle East. The fear stoked by the mainstream news also warned of a Muslim takeover stateside, corroborated in the minds of viewers by the rising Muslim population and the “significant rise in the number of mosques and Muslim associations in the 1970s and 1980s.” Again, citizenship did not protect Muslim Americans from being roped into guilt and conflated with an incident that was neither representative of Islam nor unfolding domestically, but one perpetrated by a specific nation-state on the other side of the world. — Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Understanding…, 249

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the 9/11 conflation of all Muslims with foreign attackers — the mechanism behind private Islamophobia directed at citizens. — connects to: Iran hostage crisis coverage monetized the fear of an encroaching Muslim threat. — Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Understanding…, 250; Anti-Islamic fear imagined Muslims colonizing America into apostasy from afar. — Peter Gottschalk and Gabriel Greenberg, Common Heritage, Uncommon Fear:…, 81; American media conflated Iranians, Arabs, Sunnis, and Shiites into one Muslim menace. — Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Understanding…, 254
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Understanding…, 249

Broader Connections

• Iran hostage crisis coverage monetized the fear of an encroaching Muslim threat. #corroborates (0.85) — Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Understanding…, 250
• American media conflated Iranians, Arabs, Sunnis, and Shiites into one Muslim menace. #expands (0.60) — Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Understanding…, 254
• Anti-Islamic fear imagined Muslims colonizing America into apostasy from afar. #contradicts (0.55) — Peter Gottschalk and Gabriel Greenberg, Common Heritage, Uncommon Fear, 81