In his address to a joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001, President George W. Bush effectively inaugurated the war on terror by offering an uncompromising ultimatum: “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Striking the keynote in a civilizational struggle, this speech and others like it allowed for an understanding of political conflict that took on a moral flavor and that—despite the notoriously porous nature of the terrorist threat—conveniently situated the conflict in the known and more manageable confines of nations. In its geopolitical guise, the ultimatum indirectly created the conditions for Islamophobia to be played out over the globe as well as among the multicultural countries of the West. In aesthetic terms, it prepared fertile ground for the thriller genre, in particular the spy thriller, with its interest in the possession of knowledge, covert action, group rivalries, and paranoid visions of the nation under threat.

XREF: Connects to broader scholarship on post-9/11 culture, the securitization of Islam, and how political discourse shapes literary genres. SEED: Possible essay angle: tracing how a single presidential speech's binaries ('with us or against us') got translated into genre-fiction conventions like the paranoid spy thriller.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 314