Huntington's reductionist position enabled the attendant ideas, discourses, and propaganda that Muslims were backward, warmongering, and inclined toward terrorism. This flat characterization of Islam allowed the United States, and the broader "Western civilization" it which it belongs, to continue to uphold itself as the bastion of modernity, progress, and liberalism. Revitalizing the principal Orientalist binary of "us versus them" and "they are everything we are not," Huntington echoes, "Unless we hate what we are not, we cannot love what we are." Huntington appropriated the basic theoretical tenets of Orientalism, dressing them with new phrases like "bloody borders," "civilizational clashes," and "Islamic extremists" to explain the Middle East and the world as he saw it.

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's Orientalism and the broader critique of Western civilizational discourse. Builds on: "Huntington framed Islam as the West's post-Soviet existential threat."

Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Unde…, loc. 229