viewed the parties of political Islam as allies during the Cold War. In the 1980s, however, Israeli right-wingers and a group of foreign-policy hardliners called the neoconservatives began to project “Islamic terrorism” as a global threat akin to the Soviet Union (see chapter 7). In the post–Cold War period, these arguments—bolstered by Lewis, Huntington, and others—started to gain so much ground that the Oklahoma City bombing was first pinned on “Islamic terrorists” before the homegrown Timothy McVeigh was identified. In the immediate aftermath of this incident, and building upon the attempted bombing in 1993 of the World Trade Center, the omnibus Counterterrorism Act ratcheted up the climate of fear against Arab and Muslim “terrorists” (see chapter 8). Even so, at the level of foreign policy, the first Bush and the Clinton administrations eschewed this “clash of civilizations” rhetoric in favor of a “balance-of-forces realist” stance. It was not until the events of 9/11 that domestic and foreign policy converged to project the overarching Muslim threat. In the following chapter, we will see that this was not a hard task, given that Orientalist assumptions about the “Muslim world” were accepted and even taken for granted by the liberal establishment.
