Mainstream media framed the War on Terror as religious crusade

Evidence

Political commentary justified the War on Terror by evoking a religious crusade between Christianity’s good and Islam’s evil. Countless articles, books, and media outlets portrayed Islam as a violent political ideology, thereby legitimizing state violence against Muslims. For example, in the four months after the September 11 attacks, the New York Times published articles with the following titles: “Barbarians at the Gate,” “This Is a Religious War,” “Defusing the Holy Bomb,” “The Core of Muslim Rage,” and “A Head-On Collision of Alien Cultures.” — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 723

Categorization

• SEED: A content angle: cataloguing the actual New York Times headlines from the months after 9/11 as a case study in how respectable media legitimized state violence through crusade framing.
• SHARE: The specific list of real NYT headlines—‘This Is a Religious War,’ ‘A Head-On Collision of Alien Cultures’—would land with anyone studying media framing of terrorism.
• ADDENDUM: This media-framing list parallels the moral-panic discourse on cross-cultural ‘Othering’ in ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’—both show respectable institutions generating civilizational-us-vs-them narratives.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes…, 723