Political rhetoric weaponizes sex and disease metaphors to racialize whole peoples.

Evidence

Vatikiotis’s terms are weighted and colored emotionally by appeals (from the right) to humanity and decency and by appeals (against the left) safeguarding humanity from sexuality, cancer, madness, irrational violence, revolution. Since it is Arab revolution that is in question, we are to read the passage as follows: This is what revolution is, and if the Arabs want it, then that is a fairly telling comment on them, on the kind of inferior race they are. They are only capable of sexual incitement and not of Olympian (Western, modern) reason. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 794

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the construction-of-the-Other toolkit and how racialized representation operates; also echoes Frantz Fanon’s work on colonial psychology of the colonized as irrational.
• DEFINE: Shows how orientalism in its ‘latest phase’ operates: it moves from describing Arabs to race-reading them via a morally-loaded vocabulary of sexuality and madness.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 794