Stereotypes of Islam as totalitarian, backward, and hostile were deeply embedded in the American imagination, supported by news coverage that regularly showcased airplane hijackers from the Middle East, angry mobs of Arabs collecting in city squares shouting at the camera, and Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini—whom the media and policy positioned as the symbol of the faith at large (although he presided over one nation and was a member of a minority sect of Islam, Twelver Shi'ism) shouting on television, "Death to America, the Great Satan." Indeed, "at the end of the Cold War, Islam became deeply entangled in America's most recent search for a national identity" and was anointed as its new rival in the formation of this new identity.

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's Orientalism and his concept of how the West constructs the East through media and scholarship.

Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Unde…, loc. 225