The overarching context was the Arab-Israeli conflict, the growth of the PLO, and the use of armed struggle in the pursuit of national liberation. As we saw in previous chapters, the association of the enemies of Israel with “terrorism” began around this time. One of the first legal manifestations of this logic in the United States occurred after an infamous incident at the 1972 Munich Olympics in which a group of Palestinians took Israeli athletes hostage and murdered them. In response, the Nixon administration launched “Operation Boulder,” giving law enforcement agencies “carte blanche authorization to investigate individuals of Arabic-speaking origin, whether citizen or not, allegedly to determine their possible and/or potential relationship with ‘terrorist’ activities related to the Arab-Israeli conflict.” Thus, a violent act committed in Munich by a handful of Palestinians became the basis on which all Arabs were designated as suspicious and therefore worthy of investigation.

XREF: Connects to histories of racial profiling, surveillance of Arab Americans post-9/11, and how single events reshape whole populations' legal treatment.

Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politi…, loc. 442