U.S. policies targeting Arab Americans stemmed from Middle East foreign policy, not domestic racism.

Evidence

All these actions stemmed neither from domestic race relations nor from how Arab Americans fit into America’s enduring ethnic hierarchies. Rather, they originated from U.S. foreign-policy interests in the Middle East. At times such policies and programs were reactions to nationalist terrorism (before “Islamic” terrorism was the foe), but—as with the L.A. 8—they were more often used to limit the speech of Arab Americans in order to cement U.S. policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 985

Categorization

• SEED: This is the framing claim of the whole book: domestic treatment of Arab Americans as a projection of foreign policy. Could seed an essay on how national identity categories get overdetermined by external relationships.
• XREF: connects to: US policymakers framed Arabs as racially predisposed to extremism in designing foreign aid. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 383