Muslims Prone To Homegrown Terrorism: Deconstructing The U.s. Government Discourse

To confront homegrown terrorism, the U.S. government constructed a discourse on which it based its policies. The latter ones fixate almost entirely on Islam, treat Muslims as suspects and encroach on their rights. In this article, we aim to question the legitimacy of the U.S. government's response to homegrown terrorism by assessing the U.S. government discourse. To that end, we proceed to a critical discourse analysis to uncover the key assumptions underlying this discourse, first. Then, we take a genealogical approach to identify the roots of such assumptions. At last, we use theological arguments and empirical data to evaluate the soundness of those assumptions. We conclude that the measures that encroach on Muslims' freedoms are illegitimate in that they derive from discourses based on flawed assumptions