The terrorist enemy America fights is an imaginary being distinct from real violent actors

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

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: This is the Modern continuation of the book’s core ‘image preceding reality’ thesis - the manufactured monster as a container for Western anxiety, connecting the medieval monster chapters to the post-9/11 terrorist figure.
• SEED: The ‘fear without an object’ thesis gets its sharpest modern example here: the West fights a fictional terrorist while real people commit real violence - a perfect opening or closing frame for an essay on manufactured enemies.
• DEEPTHINKING: The distinction between the real human perpetrator (whose violence is understandable though condemned) and the imaginary monster (who is unreal) is a subtle, paradigm-shifting move that collapses the usual ‘enemy’ category entirely.

Related

• The terrorist America fights is an imaginary monster, not a real person. (similarity 0.95)