Terrorism experts constructed the category linking Islam to irrational terror

Evidence

In Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented “Terrorism” Lisa Stampnitzky chronicles how terrorism experts and the field of studies on the subject helped to produce new definitions around terrorism, aiding in sustaining the War on Terror. She describes how political violence was once described as insurgency but later came to be defined as terrorism through the development of terrorism experts and terrorism studies. … But in the 1980s, the Islamic world replaced the Soviet Union as the next major threat to the West. Influenced by the clash of the civilizations theses by scholars like Lewis and Huntington, this “new terrorism” was characterized as irrational and without political motives (Stampnitzky 2013). … The American public was not provided with any political motivations for the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, which only confirmed the supposed irrationality of Islamic terrorism. … Even though terrorism has been on the decline while mass shootings, which have been typically perpetrated by white men, have increased over the last decade, any terrorist attack by a Muslim solidifies the belief that Muslim men are terrorists and should be surveilled. — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 32

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s existing surveillance/racialization map and COINTELPRO-era knowledge-building; also directly relates to Beydoun’s work on Islamophobia as a manufactured category. — connects to: Terrorism is framed as irrational fanaticism rather than political response; Orientalist scholars supplied the transhistorical ‘Islamic terrorism’ narrative at the 1984 conference — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 444; the MOC “The Enemy-Making Machine: How Ourselves, the True, and Every Other Are Built from War”
• SEED: Angle: the manufactured ‘new terrorism’ doctrine parallels how other ‘irrational enemy’ categories get constructed by state-funded expertise — a pattern piece.
• QUESTION: What exactly did the 1993 WTC coverage omit — and who decided what political motivations to suppress?