The terrorist America fights is an imaginary monster, not a real person.

Evidence

Like all postmodern stories, the war on terrorism rests upon an image that is disconnected from reality. Its villain is a fiction of imagination, not a real person. To be sure, there are flesh-and-blood human beings who really do blow up buildings and kill people. They are driven by pressures we cannot understand and do things we cannot and should not tolerate, things that are morally abhorrent and must be condemned. But they are not the monster America fights. The monster is an imaginary being we call “the terrorist.” — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 631

Categorization

• QUESTION: Chernus draws the monster/real-person distinction sharply — worth tracing how Arjana maps this onto her medieval monster taxonomy.
• XREF: Resonates with the reader’s guiding thesis that the Muslim monster is a container for Western projection, and with the medieval figure set (monster, demon, giant) from earlier in the book.