The United States was locked in a “clash of civilizations” with Islam, prominent academics theorized and news anchors reported, pushing the state to enact laws and policy that aligned with this binary. Never mind the racial or religious identity of the Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, who represented the demographic that commits the vast majority of terror attacks on U.S. soil. Stereotypes, not statistics or specifics, mattered most to Orientalists, proponents of the clash of civilizations, and Islamophobes who would beat the war-on-terror drums in the era to come. Terrorism, for the state, was not defined generally or neutrally, but focused exclusively on Islam and Muslims.

XREF: Connects to broader critiques of the war on terror and Islamophobia discourse across contemporary political scholarship.

Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Unde…, loc. 260