US interventions in the Middle East needed moral justifications rooted in anti-Islam narratives

Evidence

American hegemony in the Middle East after World War I required a narrative that morally justified military interventions in Muslimmajority countries. As expansion of its global influence became a priority in the second half of the twentieth century, the US government took great interest in controlling the large oil reserves of Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries. Meanwhile, Europe’s dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after World War I and mounting pogroms in Eastern Europe triggered mass migration and land purchases by European Jews seeking a permanent homeland in Palestine with little regard for the rights of indigenous Palestinians. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 99

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Orientalist binaries made imperial intervention in Muslim societies seem morally obligatory. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 184