Ever since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the tropes of Islamist extremism, Islamic terrorism or terrorist Islamism, and suicidal violence have become pervasive in public discourses about global politics and Western governments' rhetoric of the "War on Terror." This is partly due to the numerous terror attacks, mostly suicidal, by militant Islamists around the world, with locations ranging from the U.S., France, England, and Germany to Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. These suicide attacks

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... e been generating worldwide fear, anger, and anxiety towards a militant Other who is equipped with an extremist ideology and a readiness to use their own body as a weapon to destroy the enemy. Yet, the equations of Islam with terror and Muslims with terrorists show the post-9/11 Islamophobic fruit of a longstanding Orientalist representation of "the rest" by the West and for the West. Perhaps old but still worth citing is Edward Said's classic definition of Orientalism "as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient-dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient" (Said 3). 2 Due to the Western media's strategy of what Said (1997) terms "covering Islam," Western publics seldom learn about the U.S.'s own history of neo-colonial interventions Islamophobia without Islamophobes: New Strategies of Representing Imperialist...