Muslim villain stereotypes persist despite negligible statistical basis

Evidence

Fantasies about Muslims are convincing. Muslim men are viewed as terroristic villains, despite the fact that statistically, an infinitesimally small number of Muslims participate in violent political acts. These representations matter; if they did not, we would not have “the Muslim problem,” a phrase that American news host Bill O’ Reilly uses to describe the existence of Muslims as a pestilence, a biblical descriptor that has anti-Semitic resonances of “the Jewish problem” and suggests that a solution must be found. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 38

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘Muslim problem’ phrasing directly echoes the historical ‘Jewish problem’ — a transferable template of pestilence rhetoric the reader’s inquiry about manufactured monsters will want to track.
• SEED: Angle for an essay or section: how ‘the X problem’ as pestilence-framing is a reusable rhetorical technology, applied from Jews to Muslims to immigrants — the biblical plague metaphor doing political work.