Some of the greatest purveyors of the Islamophobic narratives that characterised much of the post-9/11 period in the United States included David Horowitz, who consistently sought to connect Palestinians with terrorism and called for profiling to make Palestinian identity itself a security concern; Daniel Pipes, who often characterised Muslim organisations as potentially or secretly militant, casting suspicion on Muslim advocacy; Steven Emerson, who sought to popularise infiltration narratives to try to turn mainstream Muslim organisations into security subjects; Brigitte Gabriel, who regularly framed Islamism as a civilisational threat, thus casting Israel as a front-line defender of the West; and David Yerushalmi, who sought to expand the threat narrative to Sharia law and Muslim political influence, thus casting Muslim political participation as potentially subversive.
The general logic of these narratives was that terrorism was effectively synonymous with all things Palestinian/Arab/Muslim and thus Israel’s security model should be seen as legitimate, if not ideal, by Americans.
