New wars, in essence, are only contemporary extensions of preexisting campaigns. This was particularly the case with Islam, a target of American empire and aggression from the 1970s through the 1990s, well before it, and its global population of adherents, graduated to the pinnacle of racialized threat. In 1994, seven years before the War on Terror, Said made perfect sense of a world marred by it. In Representations of the Intellectual, a collection of masterful speeches Said delivered in London, he stated, “Dealing with the Islamic world—all one billion [plus] people in it, with dozens of different societies, half a dozen major languages including Arabic, Turkish, Iranian, [and English], all spread out over about a third of the globe—American or British academic intellectuals speak reductively . . . irresponsibly of something called ‘Islam.’ ” These European and American voices, which Said labeled “Orientalists,” flattened Islam into a singular system, a solitary whole stripped of any complexity or heterogeneity.

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's Orientalism thesis; the 'new wars' as extensions of preexisting campaigns echoes his broader critique of imperial epistemology.

Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamopho…, loc. 269