The War on Terror recycled pre-existing Orientalist academic discourse into state violence

Evidence

The foundational War on Terror myth was anything but novel. In two hours’ time, Edward Said synthesized his magnum opus, Orientalism, into a master class tied to the War on Terror and events that were unfolding at the time. A sage on that stage, Said demystified how Islam was flattened by scholarly discourses old and new, and how ideas shaped in ivory towers oriented Muslims as the enemy—ballads that preceded the bullets fired by snipers in Iraq, or the battalions in Afghanistan that bludgeoned innocent families and then branded them as “collateral damage.” In ways that only he could, Said tailored Orientalism’s definitive ideas to break down how the Bush administration deftly suspended civil liberties in the name of national security and persuaded a frightening majority of the American polity that Muslims, regardless of their legal status, were “impossible Americans”—a fifth pillar cast out of the caste of meaningful citizenship. With even greater diabolical deftness, the Bush regime carried forward a baseless war against a nation entirely disconnected from the 9/11 terror attacks: Iraq. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 267

Categorization

• XREF: The intellectual genealogy from ivory-tower discourse to military action directly parallels Said’s own argument in Orientalism, which the reader knows well; also echoes the ‘ideas precede bullets’ mechanism relevant to the reader’s Iftikhar comparison. — connects to: American Orientalism justifies therapeutic violence against Arabs as civilizing mission — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 235; The Islam-is-violent frame deflects attention from empire’s violence — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 345; The 1984 conference fused Israeli, neocon, and Orientalist voices into a terrorism ideology — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 443 (+4 more)