The Beirut port explosion was blamed on Muslims though caused by negligence.

Evidence

Time froze. And I stood there fixed along with it, absorbing surreal scenes of streets I knew so well, in a city seated deep in my heart. A place where our apartment building on Verdun Street was submerged by the gray smoke from the explosions and the ghosts of faded memories. A place where only twelve months earlier, my mother and I walked to family visits, to restaurants, and took evening strolls to maintain strength in her aging legs, only miles from the port where the explosions detonated and brought Beirut back down to its war-torn knees. Explosions that, in that apocalyptic aftermath that Beirut knew so well from wars past, revealed that more than 200 people were killed, 300,000 people were left homeless, and more than 100,000 homes were destroyed. For “a nation pitied” for its modern misfortunes with war and the internal rifts that sink it even deeper, the Beirut blasts revealed that terror is an enterprise not tied to any one faith or nonfaith. While news outlets and pundits pushed us to blame the catastrophe on the familiar list of Muslim networks, in line with War on Terror impulses, the truth revealed that global crusade’s fundamental lie: that terrorism is a uniquely Islamic enterprise. Sometimes, terror is a consequence of corruption, negligence, and as this book illustrates, religious and even secular ideology. More than often, terror is the outcome of old empires and their modern successors, chiefly the United States—my country—which occupies the citadel of neocolonial wars on terror and the new crusades they have spawned. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 32

Categorization

• XREF: Frames the whole book: the misattribution of Beirut’s blast to Muslim networks instantiates the War on Terror reflex this book traces. Connects to the Iftikhar global-synthesis reading.
• SEED: An article angle: how non-ideological disasters — corruption, negligence, secular mismanagement — get narratively conscripted into the ‘Islamist terror’ frame, using Beirut 2020 as the case.