Orientalist scholarship directly shaped US interventionist foreign policy

Evidence

Samuel Huntington, a political scientist at Harvard, also wrote about the incompatibility of Islam and the West. In his seminal article, “The Clash of the Civilizations” (1993) published in Foreign Affairs, Huntington argued that the next major global conflict would be Islam versus the West. Like Lewis, Huntington reduced this clash to cultural differences between Islam and Western societies, further perpetuating the idea that Islamic societies are inherently antimodern and anti-Western. Not only were Lewis and Huntington writing for an academic audience; they also reached the ears of state authorities and were highly influential in American foreign policy. In the 1970s, Huntington served as the coordinator of security planning for the National Security Council under President Carter’s administration. … These concepts of Muslim rage and Islamic barbarity contribute to the notion that the terrorist is both Muslim and male, which can be seen in his subjugation of Muslim women. The casting of Muslim men as backward, antimodern, violent, and filled with rage initially fueled American aspirations for a military presence in the Middle East (Kumar 2012). — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 31

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s existing map of the Global Racial Enemy and to Beydoun/Rana on how ideology precedes policy. Also parallels Edward Said’s Orientalism thesis about academic knowledge enabling imperial power. — connects to: Neocons deliberately leveraged academic Orientalist authority to sanction their wars
• DEFINE: The passage grounds the claim that the terrorist figure is constructed as ‘Muslim and male’ — the racialized-masculinized threat template the book then traces into surveillance practice.