The Cold War-era terrorist archetype was Arab and Palestinian, not Muslim

Evidence

When the Soviet Union fell in 1990, American policy makers warned that Islam would replace Communism as the global threat to US national security. The first post–Cold War decade began what the September 11 attacks finalized: the association of terrorism with Muslims first and Arabs second. During the Cold War, however, the quintessential “terrorist” was Arab first and Muslim second. More specifically, he was Palestinian. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 619

Categorization

• QUESTION: The shift from ‘Arab as terrorist’ to ‘Muslim as terrorist’ is a sharp temporal boundary — worth verifying against actual media content analyses of terrorism coverage across the 1990s.
• DEFINE: Clarifies the precise ordering of racialization tropes: Arabs were the pre-9/11 archetype, Muslims the post-9/11 one.
• XREF: connects to: A tiny fraction of terrorist actors drove Arab stereotyping as default terrorists.; The Arab terrorist figure predates and evolves into the Islamic terrorist. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 97; The Arab and Islamic terrorist archetype originated from the neocon-Likud alliance after 1979 — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 473