Abstract

Khaled A. Beydoun, Telling War Stories: Innocence, Indictment, and (En)Gendered Terror, 114 Georgetown Law Journal 1017 (May 2026) (357 footnotes). (Full Document)

The soldiers herded the mass into view. Next, they were arranged in lines like criminals. Even worse than criminals, terrorists. Hands cuffed and blindfolded. Every man stripped naked from head to toe. All of their clothing removed, exposing their brown skin and bare limbs for all to see. Only their underwear and a narrow piece of cloth, wrapped around their eyes, remained.

The world saw this class of men, all over again, not as real subjects, but as objects of scorn. Their faces entirely removed from sight. No trace of their names, ages, or origins was presented. They had no backstories or front-facing vignettes, no pasts and no description as to how they arrived at this frightening present. None of that mattered. Every element of their individuality was stamped out by wartime orders that branded them as  ““terrorists.” That cardinal stain and counterterror sin, terrorism, was seared onto their skin like a permanent tattoo. A badge of enmity that empowered the soldiers to do whatever they pleased with them. A menacing mass, these men and boys, cast as the quintessential “outsiders” by the dominant War on Terror narrative that rolled into that corner of the Gaza Strip.

“Yalla, yalla!” The shouts rang out from the soldiers, and the men and boys responded without uttering one word. Only with motion, collective motion, under the order of guns and over a war-torn soil. They walked, walked, and walked until the soldiers ordered them to stop atop a path of brown soil. The shouts rang out, again, ordering them to collectively stop. Believing that the end could come at any instant, the men looked forward into the blinding strip of black, seeing only a present and past that blurred into an absurd whole.

“Drop to your knees!” Another soldier shouted in familiar Arabic, echoing it again until every set of legs were lowered to the land. The prisoners, from ripe teens to old men, fell to the soil. Gaza was no country for old men, and a place where innocence grows foreign to boyhood. The next orders rang in, and their bodies prostrated with their heads dipped downward, resembling the holy ritual that these residents of the Holy Land knew so well.

However, this was no prayer. The soldiers standing above the men and boys were delivering no sermon but crafting a military elegy. The men and boys were not in collective prayer, but collective prey--lined up as sheep for slaughter. Masculine subjects of suspicion and scorn instantly indicted of “terrorism” by ““War on Terror” law and lore, amplified after September 11, 2001, and wielded decades later and a hemisphere away in Gaza.

Between the target of “counterterrorism” and the “shared rage” of dominant war propaganda, the details of each man and boy were erased to form an indistinguishable line of terror suspects. Exclusively male suspects. Men and boys whose race, religion, and gender were strung together to form the indictment. This construction was less an outcome of ““intersectional” circumstance but rooted in the Orientalist and Islamophobic discourses branded onto their skin.

“Stand up!!” The men and boys were summoned back to their feet. Denied food and drained of energy, the young among them made it to their feet while the old men stumbled, struggling to stand up in order to avoid that final fall. Next, they were all carted off like sheep within jeeps, herded off by soldiers who shot their bare bodies with their camera phones. As soon as they drove off, their images were blasted across X, Facebook, and other social media platforms to be seen by the entire world.

The image went viral, immediately. Virality accelerated the propaganda campaign to indict the mass of men. Disseminating the dominant story that “terrorists were captured” would justify expansion of the war into Gaza under color of law or the War on Terror’s marching narrative. Two months after the terror attack of October 7th in Israel, the siege spiraled into scenes that resembled Black Mirror. The dystopic landscape disfigured by perpetual airstrikes and mounting ground forces, which the world watched from their phones, was surreal. Yet this was not fiction, and the chill of it all but affirmed that this was no Netflix drama. The world watched, through the digital voyeurism of mobile phones, seeing an anonymous mass of men only--not individuals.

For captive American and global audiences, these images and their attendant stories of masculine terror were not new. They saw them before in Iraq and Afghanistan, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Precedent sites where the War on Terror justified the systematic erasure and indictment of Arab and Muslim men, followed by the collective punishment that followed. They are all ““military-age[d] men,” Israeli government spokesman Elon Levy stated, and Israel had to “work out who indeed was a ... terrorist and who is not.” Arrest and indict first; assess facts later.

While reduced to voiceless and faceless objects, these men had stories too. Counter-stories, in fact, challenging the story of masculine Arab and Muslim terrorism that domineered over them and rendered them silent. Without uttering a word, they provided cautionary tales that the War on Terror echoed unabated. A masculine terror indictment that persists after a phased ceasefire agreement was reached on October 9, 2025, still stalking the bodies of Arab and Muslim men in Gaza and global sites far from it.

* * *

Law shapes stories and meta-stories. Perhaps more potently than any other medium. Law is not only a vehicle for the transmission of ideas, but its authority rubberstamps ideas with truth and objectivity. Thus, law is the most forceful amplifier of dominant propaganda, which “can stir imagination in ways in which more conventional discourse cannot.” Even more, law itself is a story comprised of whose voices are heard and whose voices are silenced. Those empowered by law to tell their stories reap the benefits of casting it as the truth. Whereby the objects on the end of the dominant narrative are silenced and stripped of the chance to tell their side of the story.

The global War on Terror is a lurid example. It is a powerful grand narrative of terrorism and counterterrorism, dynamic heroes and one-dimensional villains, “civilized” altruists and “uncivilized” barbarians, innocent women to be saved and masculine menaces to be slain. Powerful tales laden with gendered messages that strip its targets from agency and identity, which for those on the dark side of the dominant story, must be reclaimed through counter-stories rooted in law’s redemptive power.

In Storytelling for Oppositionists, pioneering Critical Race Theorist Richard Delgado highlights the restorative impact of counter-storytelling. By centering the voices of erased and othered subjects, Delgado highlights the discursive power of law as a meta-narrative that valorizes those who wield it and vilifies those dehumanized by it. In relation to this Article, Delgado theorizes how law constructs the very terms applied to subjects for saving and objects of punishment, subsequently echoed by presidents, prime ministers, all the way down the chain of command to the soldiers tasked with enforcing it.

Law not only makes rules and dictates, but as the War on Terror reveals, makes men into monsters unworthy of its protection. An entire class excised entirely from the civilian class by official state discourse, whose collective slaughter warrants neither legal protection nor political condemnation. On account of their race, gender, and location, the men are instantly viewed through the lens of terrorism, indicted on account of who they are versus what they did. There are seldom, if any, calls to stop the killing of men and boys amid the echoes to stop the “killing of women ... [and] children.” This is not unintentional, but deliberate omissions reflecting the deeply gendered War on Terror narrative that drives “western” counterterror law, propaganda, and the dominant narrative that enables both.

This grand narrative is rooted in Islamophobia and its “redeployment” of Orientalism, which profiles Arab and Muslim men and boys as a monolith of putative terrorists. A story formed and then disseminated to advance American empire, and political interests emanating from and connected to it. “Stories are the oldest, most primordial meeting ground in human experience,” and the War on Terror is a quintessential expression of its most domineering and dehumanizing effects.

This Article centers the discursive power of law, and namely, the War on Terror’s narrative of 'masculine Arab and Muslim terrorism.’ By constructing terrorism through the lens of race, religion, and gender, War on Terror law and legend mark Arab and Muslim men and boys as a terrorist monolith that justifies pre-crime indictment and collective punishment. By focusing on law and its discursive echoes that single out men and boys as presumptive terrorists, this Article: (1) Theorizes the gendered dimensions of the Arab and Muslim threat, building upon formative frameworks of othering and racialization within and beyond the legal literature;

(2) Develops the concept of masculine terror indictment assigned collectively to masculine Arab and Muslim subjects. This indictment is rooted in War on Terror policy, and namely, pre-crime policing models that focus on preventing “radicalization” toward terrorism;

(3) Interrogates War on Terror law as the forceful conduit of the dominant metanarrative of masculine Arab and Muslim terrorism, which brands anybody fitting that profile as a justifiable target of extrajudicial violence; and,

(4) Centers counter-stories of men in Gaza, who repurposed new media to challenge the dominant War on Terror narrative of masculine terrorism that erases their identities from legal, scholarly and popular view.

As an emanation of law itself, legal scholarship contributes to the power struggle of whose stories are told and untold, highlighting the urgency of this Article and the unheard voices it writes into legal literatures for the first time. In doing so, this Article broadens the arc of storytelling for oppositionists and extends Critical Race Theory’s aim of making visible those pushed to the law’s margins. While legal scholars have examined the distinct plight of Arab and Muslim women, this Article asks, “what about the men?” and stands as the first article to reconstruct masculine Arab and Muslim individuality through legal analysis and counter-stories.

This Article proceeds in four parts. Part I examines Orientalism and Islamophobia, which drive prevailing discourses around Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian identity. These discourses, woven together, drive the epistemological baselines that enable the terror indictment cast on Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian men and boys today. Part II centers Arab and Muslim women by examining the gendered dimensions of Orientalism and Islamophobia. Through a focus on gender as a locus of distinction, the dominant tropes about women as subjects in need of saving and men as objects of counterterror scorn are distilled and crystallized. Part III surveys the legal production of masculine terrorism rooted in foundational War on Terror domestic and global policy. It interrogates, then critiques, how the War on Terror, as a military and epistemological crusade, relied centrally on the demonization of Arab and Muslim men to expedite its ends. Part IV challenges the dominant War on Terror narrative that erases and indicts Arab and Muslim men. It then introduces the subaltern counter-stories of men in Gaza, contributing the first narratives of this kind to 'imperial’ literatures that limit their coverage of Arab and Muslim men to terrorism.

 [. . .]

“I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he survived it.”

--James Baldwin “I feel like the whole world want me to pray for 'em[,] But who the f**k praying for me?”

--Kendrick Lamar

Shortly after assuming the White House for the second time, President Trump announced his new 'Gaza plan.’ The real estate mogul turned president revealed a vision that sounded more like a property transaction than a diplomatic resolution, buoyed by the intensification of War on Terror rhetoric that helped propel him to the presidency in 2016.341 It was a radical turn, on brand for Trump and his “weapon[ized]” toxic masculinity that advances his interests but “hurt[s] America.”

“The Gaza Strip would be turned over to the United States by Israel at the conclusion of fighting,” Trump stated on February 5, 2025, days after reclaiming the White House. But after sixteen months of horrific violence on the soil and unprecedented counter-stories rising from it and digital screens, something changed. The world no longer saw Arab and Muslim men and boys exclusively through the lens of War on Terror law and lore. More than ever, through the counter-stories that rose from the besieged grassroots of Gaza onto the black squares held in our palms, the world now saw them through the lens of Arab men and boys themselves. These counter-stories from Wael, Khaled, and Motaz offered powerful responses, permanent rebuttals, to the dominant narrative that lined the men and boys up for extrajudicial indictment and erasure. During a time when the dominant narrative and its tie to the “rule of law seemed to mean relatively little” for the men and boys in Gaza, the only legal defense they had were their voices.

Therefore, these men crafted counter-stories on digital platforms that challenged the dominant narrative, and later, the plan peddled by Trump. The images and stories seared onto the minds of billions globally by the courage of these men, like Motaz, mobilized sympathy for a demographic long indicted by law. For the first time, we heard their voices, and even more lucidly, saw their faces. Trump’s Gaza takeover plan was disrupted in part by the stories and faces we now knew well, spurring a scale of global opposition that would not have been possible without the counter-stories of these oppositionists.

The world saw and heard these men. They saw the journalists under-fire of Wael, who remained committed to exposing the perils of genocide while they sucked him in, and stripped him of his beloved family members.

They saw Khaled, who clutched onto his granddaughter’s lifeless body for that final time, and resorting to prayer as a source for divine surrender instead of Islamic “radicalization.”

They saw Motaz walk atop that hill of rubble, piled up between destroyed buildings and darkness. The dust of death filling the air, with its black and grey hues swallowing every shade of in Gaza and within our screens. We remember that black and grey scene, and the bright blue vest and bloodred teddy bear, which Motaz lifted into the lens of the camera. A camera tethered to a phone that would be his mouthpiece to the world. His eyes stared up in that direction, sitting beneath spectacles and atop a beard that, in Gaza, signals masculine terrorism. He knew that indictment well.

He lifted the red bear up proclaiming that he was still alive. That “we [are] still alive. Till now.” The doll proclaimed his innocence. On that day, atop the rubble, that stand was enough. His story was heard, loud and clear. The mise en scene more absurd than any Jean-Paul Sartre or Albert Camus novel, amplifying his words then and a year later against Trump’s radical policy.

In that, we saw and still see an existential tale that reshapes how we saw the forlorn man. But this was Motaz. Not Meursault.351No stranger to a world that saw him redefine Arab and Muslim masculinity against legal stories and lethal sieges that slayed men like him along the coastlines of Algeria and Gaza. His soft voice and softer eyes defied the tropes of brooding, threatening Arab terrorists, and his face seared into our memory like a tattoo:

Like the scar of age

Written all over my face

The war is still raging inside of me

I still feel the chill

As I reveal my shame to you

I wear it like a tattoo.

Motaz’s counter-story was etched into our heads, permanently. In turn, giving face to the nameless monoliths paraded on legacy news outlets and social media platforms, reclaiming his manhood and theirs in the process. Motaz affirmed their humanity, a deferred humanity, against the gavel of gendered indictment that sought to stamp out his innocence and existence, as it did theirs. A denied humanity previously unseen by lay people and readers of legal scholarship.

Through words and wounds never seen or heard before, Motaz wore the shame of wars that claimed the lives of men and boys like him. He “narrowly ... survived” this burning chapter of the War on Terror to tell his story, and in doing so, the counter-story that legions of Arab and Muslim men were never able to tell. “Ain’t nobody praying for me,” or men like us, his expression spoke without uttering a single word.

With the “war ... still raging inside” of him, Motaz and the men profiled herein stated their case against the War on Terror. And in doing so, wrote against its loaded laws and lies that buried unseen brothers under its ashes. The war of words, on the uneven battlefield of the law, may be the more determinative confrontation in the grand arc of time. It not only remains long after the last body is slain, but for those fighting to be heard and seen, aims to give life to those buried long ago. It lifts the listener, and the men and boys buried under landscapes of anonymity and the letter of the law, from the “intellectual apartheid” that the War on Terror conspires to sow upon places of battle and pages of history.

Associate Professor of Law, Arizona State University Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law; author of American Islamophobia: The Roots and Rise of Fear and The New Crusades: Islamophobia and the Global War on Muslims.