Orientalism relies on an international European – Eastern binary that reifies global structures of interstate and demographic violence.

Ahmad Sa'di (Arabic: احمد سعدي‎; Hebrew: אחמד סעדי; born 1958) is a Palestinian social scientist and a tenured professor in the Department of Politics and Government in Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in Beer Sheva, Israel.[1] He is the author of multiple books. Most notably he co-authored Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory (2007) with Lila Abu-Lughod. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmad_H._Sa%27di

In his afterword to the edition of Orientalism published in 1995, Said36 wrote: Not that Huntington, and behind him all the theorists and apologists of an exultant Western tradition, like Francis Fukuyama, haven’t retained a good deal of their hold on the public consciousness. They have, as is evident in the symptomatic case of Paul Johnson, once a Left intellectual, now a retrograde social and political polemicist. In the 18 April 1993 issue of the New York Times Magazine, by no means a marginal publication, he published an essay entitled ‘Colonialism's Back – And Not a Moment Too Soon’, whose main idea was that ‘the civilized nations’ ought to take it upon themselves to recolonize the Third World countries ‘where the most basic conditions of civilized life [have] broken down’, and to do this by means of a system of imposed trusteeships. Johnson is part of a large chorus of orientalists who had been invigorated by the intensification of Western intervention in the Middle East following the end of the Cold War and the identification of ‘Islam’ by Western powers as the new enemy. This group includes orientalists of various sorts such as Ibn Warraq,37 Irwin38 and Kaplan,39 among many others. As some critics of these new orientalists have unfailingly shown (eg Sadowski;40 Tuastad;41 Samiei42; Hamdi43) they have not added much to orientalism’s governing assumptions. Rather, they repeat conventional orientalist propositions regarding the uniqueness of Western civilisation and Orientals’ ontological incompetence. For example, Ibn Warraq argues that the Occident is uniquely characterised by three traits: ‘rationalism, universalism and self-criticism’.44 Furthermore, he and several other orientalists – such as Irwin – have claimed that orientalism has been driven by intellectual curiosity and is devoid of instrumental goals, as if the orientalist wrote in a socio-political and cultural vacuum. Such claims paradoxically support Said’s thesis regarding orientalism’s epistemology of setting up false binaries and decontextualising facts. It is beyond the scope of this article to dwell on the conservative nature of the orientalist discourse. It is sufficient to point to its citational methodology, and essentialising and decontextualising practices, which tend to block rather than encourage the introduction of new ideas and interpretations. However, given that neither the intent of dominance nor the Machiavellian methods of colonialism (called by political science scholars ‘realism’) have changed, a new and more sophisticated orientalist knowledge has been growing alongside and often overshadowing the above-mentioned old-style shrill and argumentative one. This neo-orientalist discourse has embodied various conceptual changes, which would make it appear more benign and ‘respectable’ so that it could be safely used by all sorts of groups, including liberals, in the public sphere. The most noticeable change is the disappearance of the construct of race and its substitution by the inoffensive and supposedly neutral terms of ‘culture’, ‘ethnicity’ and ‘religion’. Moreover, the hierarchal ordering of groups has given way to a supposedly egalitarian classification based on difference. Yet these concepts are decoded – to use Hall’s conceptualisation45 – according to a time-honoured legacy of orientalism. Consequently, extreme right-wing parties and movements in Europe and the United States who advance orientalist and racist agendas quite often argue that they are not against non-White immigrants per se; rather, they claim that people feel more comfortable among those who share their religion and culture and are threatened by strangers. Therefore, social distance, exclusionary practices and a ban on immigration along ethnic or cultural lines are acceptable, particularly against unassimilated minorities. They contend that such policies are justifiable on the grounds that they help maintain social cohesion and the essence of national identity. Yet sociologists realised long ago the racialisation of cultural identities, a phenomenon they call the ‘new racism’, whereby culture instead of biology becomes the criterion for social ordering.46 A similar strategy of otherness construction was advocated by Huntington, one of the most influential and articulate right-wing intellectuals, who was paradoxically a supporter of American interventionist foreign policy. He called for a restriction on the migration of those who did not adhere to the American creed, which he described as [T]he product of the distinct Anglo-Protestant culture of the founding settlers. Key elements of that culture include the English language; Christianity; religious commitment; English concepts of the rule of law, including the responsibility of rulers and the rights of individuals; and dissenting Protestant values of individualism, the work ethic, and the belief that humans have the ability and the duty to try to create a heaven on earth, a ‘city on a hill’.47 Although Huntington’s main concern was the fight against the migration of Mexicans, the tenets of his thesis are generalisable. More important is his allusion to the confluence of race and religion, variables through which large sections of ordinary Americans and some right-wing elites tend to construct the American (and the world) demographic landscape. Thus, Islam has been racialised, and like all racial categories, it has become a blanket label which is attached to a wide variety of peoples according to certain observable features. In this regard, Erik Love48 writes: Remember, because of race, nearly all references to ‘Muslims’ in discussions like these [on terrorism and counter terrorism] actually point to a racial category – the racial category that includes Arabs, Muslims, Sikhs and South Asians. Bigoted statements like ‘Most terrorists are Muslims’, or ‘Islamic culture encourages terrorism’ (as though there is only a single ‘Islamic culture’) are therefore necessarily racial statements that reinforce the perception that anyone who ‘looks Muslim’ may be dangerous. When public officials … propose policies to increase surveillance of ‘Muslims’, they not only place Muslim Americans in harm’s way, they also endanger Arabs, Sikh, and South Asian Americans as well because of race. Obviously, such a categorisation is a poor guide to making sense of social reality. For example, in a solo vengeance mission for the 9/11 attacks, a White American man shot and killed a Sikh. Later he stated that he wanted to shoot ‘… some towel-heads’.49 Several non-Muslims were victims of such racially motivated hate crimes. Even worse, Muslims have become the ultimate other for populist and right-wing movements in the United States and Europe. According to these movements, not only do Muslims not adhere to our ‘cherished values’, but they are essentially different. A considerable pseudo-scholarly literature has been published on such topics as the incompatibility of Islam with democracy and the violent nature of Islam. Despite the semantic and representational changes, both classical orientalism and neo-orientalism still employ binaries and oppositions in establishing their ‘facts’ and weaving their narratives. Yet the existence of various groups that do not fit their categorisations, such as hybrid populations and certain cultures – for example, the Japanese – defy their assertions. Moreover, the black populations who achieved citizenship in Western countries and have turned many Western societies into multi-cultural ones contest sweeping generalisations regarding a unified Western culture or ethnically based national identities. Therefore, the fight against the migration of people of colour has become a burning political and scholarly topic in the West. Immigrants are frequently portrayed by new-right and populist movements, and often by respectable media outlets and politicians, in the form of a new Dracula. They are accused of draining the country’s resources by their over-dependence on welfare and putting extra pressure on public services.50 They are also suspected of having double loyalties and hidden agendas. In Europe, immigrants are frequently accused of aiming to Islamise the continent. The emergence of the surveillance state since the early twenty-first century and along with it the securitisation of both the public discourse and public spaces amplifies the mistrust of immigrant (Muslim) populations in the West. The intense milieu of suspicion and fear that has consequently evolved, and the new technologies of surveillance that have been introduced, help to justify racial profiling, stigmatisation and the victimisation of innocent people of colour by putting them under surveillance.51 The relationships between neo-orientalist discourses and the technologies of security, war and surveillance are more complex and macabre and fall outside the scope of this paper. However, a telling example will be given later.