For over two decades, national security law and policy has served as pretext for myriad forms of discrimination against Muslims by government and private actors. The reason for this, I argue, lies in the social construction of Muslims as a racial minority, rather than or in addition to being a religious minority. I call this social construction The Racial Muslim. Four factors converge to produce The Racial Muslim: 1) White Protestant Supremacy, 2) xenophobia arising from coercive assimilationism, 3) Orientalism, and 4) American empire. In this paper, I focus on how Orientalism the Palestinian terrorist trope (which preceded the Muslim terrorist trope) converged with American imperialism in the Middle East to legitimize infringements on the civil and human rights of Muslims and Arabs in the U.S. European Orientalism historically situated Islam as the antithesis of modernity and enlightenment such that a clash with Western Christendom is perpetual and inevitable. Dating as far back as the Crusades, many European Christians viewed Islam’s alleged propagation of ignorance, violence, and sensuality as a threat to Christianity’s perceived light, knowledge, and reason. Starting in the 1960s, the quintessential terrorist trope in American culture was an Arab Palestinian. Palestinian savagery, according to this racist narrative, was understood initially to reflect opposing values between Arabs and the civilized West, and later—when Arab resistance movements developed using Islamic terms of reference in the 1980s—as reflecting opposing religious values. By the 1990s, that opposition would be imagined as a clash of civilization between the predominantly Muslim Orient and the Judeo-Christian Western. The pre-9/11 social construction of The Racial Muslim construct was grounded in Christian Zionism. A number of high profile evangelical Christian leaders throughout the twentieth century believed American imperialism in the Middle East was divinely ordained. Politically influential American Zionist organizations, established decades prior, leveraged Christian Zionism to perpetuate portrayals of Arabs in general, and Palestinians in particular, as bloodthirsty terrorists and anti-Semites whose violence was driven by an irrational hatred of Jews—rather than a desire for self-determination. The U.S. government and media’s depiction of Arab Americans’ dissent as anti-democratic and anti-Semitic built on European Orientalism’s racing of Muslims as illiberal, violent and uncivilized. Consequently, Arabs and Muslims were surveilled, deported, and targeted for political suppression. Accordingly, this paper shows how the September 11th attacks buttressed American Orientalism and anti-Palestinian racism into a permanent racialization of all Muslims as presumptively terrorist, anti-Semitic, and illiberal.