Rhetorical conflation of Arabs, Muslims, and Middle Easterners legitimized mass execution.

Evidence

Killing an Arab is central to the geopolitical dramas of the last two decades. It formed the mandate of the American War on Terror, which weaponized law and rhetoric to legitimize the mass execution of Arabs and Muslims and other peoples in foreign wars. In the popular imagination, “Arabs” and “Muslims” and “Middle Easterners” are one and the same, blurred together by the blinding force of Orientalism and the Islamophobia it spawned after the 9/11 terror attacks. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 1175

Categorization

• XREF: Feeds the reader’s global-synthesis view that Islamophobia is a coordinated global condition, not an American anomaly. — connects to: Mass killing requires ideology to overcome taboos against killing — Erin K. Jenne and Promise Frank Ejiofor, Ethnopopulism and genocidal…, 18; Lynch mobs justify murder by merging contemporary Muslims with mythic demons — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 1204; Death concerns strengthen appeals to kill culturally designated evil groups. — Jeff Greenberg and Spee Kosloff, Terror Management Theory: Implications…, 68