President Bush's speech, which specified that America's target were terrorists who "practice[d] a fringe form of Islamic extremism," was saturated with appeals to an ideological, cultural, and civilizational war—indeed, the very standoff Huntington wrote about in The Clash of Civilizations. The speech was more than just a demonstration of resolve to the American people and the world at large; it was, most fundamentally, a declaration of war, a "war on terror," as it came to be known, against an enemy the state explicitly identified as Al Qaeda and the "Islamic extremists" who supported it. In practice, the war on terror has been against Islam as a civilization, and a war on Muslims everywhere.

XREF: Connects directly to Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations thesis, which frames the war on terror within a civilizational conflict narrative.

Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Unde…, loc. 276