James Baldwin, the founding father of America’s hidden soul, adroitly observed that “history is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history.” Perhaps nothing represents this more than the War on Terror and its epistemological lifeline, which draws on the vile history of Orientalism to vilify, and then victimize, Muslims through state-sponsored Islamophobia and its accompanying tentacles of private propaganda and jingoism. Orientalism, and its deceitful history of fabrications and tropes, is an “invented past” that leaves Muslims in that deadly intersection of sub-humanity and threat, which its progeny, Islamophobia, seeks to perpetuate to drive new crusades, every bit as deceitful and violent, against Muslims around the world.

QUESTION: How does Orientalism's invented past continue to shape modern state policy toward Muslims?

Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamopho…, loc. 280