The War on Terror taught the public to equate extremism with Islam.

Evidence

The man made no mention of Christian or Jewish fundamentalism, or the Hindu supremacy marching through India, or the weaponized secularism driving modern French nativism, treating the terms “fundamentalism,” “extremism,” and their modern cousin, “terrorism,” as inherent and exclusive to Islam. In fact, these descriptors were not only exclusive to Islam, but synonymous with it. But how could I blame him for what the War on Terror, and the three presidential administrations steering it, had taught him? — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 362

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s global-synthesis goal: the line already gestures to India and France, where the same taught equivalence operates.
• QUESTION: Testable claim worth chasing later: did the three administrations (Bush, Obama, Trump) differ in how each advanced the Islam-equals-terrorism frame?

Related

• The War on Terror trained people to see extremism as exclusive to Islam (similarity 0.95)
• The War on Terror fused the concepts of Muslim and terrorist. (similarity 0.88)
• The War on Terror made the words Muslim and terrorism virtually synonymous (similarity 0.86)
• The War on Terror exported Muslim-suspicion doctrine that nations adapted locally (similarity 0.85)
• The War on Terror emboldened populists to scapegoat Muslims and seize power (similarity 0.85)
• The War on Terror functions as an imperial project spreading Islamophobia globally (similarity 0.85)
• The War on Terror recycled pre-existing Orientalist academic discourse into state violence (similarity 0.85)
• The War on Terror conditioned voters to demand explicitly Islamophobic leadership (similarity 0.85)
• Every US president from Bush through Biden sustained the global War on Terror (similarity 0.85)
• Popular conflation of Arabs, Muslims, and terrorism enabled the Iraq war. (similarity 0.84)
• Terrorism is not uniquely Islamic but often stems from state negligence and empire. (similarity 0.84)
• Public conflation of Arab, Muslim, and terrorist identities enabled the Iraq war (similarity 0.84)
• The War on Terror unites disparate national crusades against a single depersonalized Arab object (similarity 0.84)
• Each successive president advanced rather than curtailed the War on Terror (similarity 0.84)
• The War on Terror was deliberately marketed globally from its start (similarity 0.84)