A year after the 9/11 terror attacks, Leti Volpp, law professor at the University of California in Berkeley, published the influential legal treatise “The Citizen and the Terrorist” in the UCLA Law Review. The article drew an essential conclusion—and an even more essential connection—to Said’s Orientalism and its potent role in driving the War on Terror’s foundational and ferocious tropes. … Volpp observed that the War on Terror, through its propaganda and war-making machines, was potently remaking and “redeploy[ing] longstanding Orientalist tropes.” These four words—compact but cogent, efficient yet immensely instructive—tied the vicious rise of Islamophobia to the potent bank of misrepresentations of Muslims that were embedded in the imaginations of governments, institutions, and people long before the 9/11 terror attacks took place. In short, as I have written before and echoed countless times, Orientalism is the mother of Islamophobia, and its dense memory of intentional distortions, meticulous lies, and “mythical abstractions” accelerated the War on Terror and expedited its spread on the domestic and global fronts. Americans did not have to look far to source their disdain for Islam and its adherents—American legal and political history was saturated with damning stereotypes and destructive narratives.

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's Orientalism and its legacy beyond literary study into political and legal discourse.

Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamopho…, loc. 278