{"id":24458,"date":"2026-06-26T11:42:04","date_gmt":"2026-06-26T15:42:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/georgetown-law-journal\/?page_id=24458"},"modified":"2026-07-02T11:58:54","modified_gmt":"2026-07-02T15:58:54","slug":"telling-war-stories-innocence-indictment-and-engendered-terror","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/georgetown-law-journal\/in-print\/volume-114\/volume-114-issue-5-may-2026\/telling-war-stories-innocence-indictment-and-engendered-terror\/","title":{"rendered":"Telling War Stories: Innocence, Indictment, and (En)gendered Terror"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"p1\"><i>The law is replete with dominant narratives endorsed by its letter and <\/i><i>amplified by connected and conspiring levers of power. This Article cen<\/i><i>ters the discursive power of law, and specifically, the War on Terror\u2019s <\/i><i>grand narrative <\/i><i>of <\/i><span class=\"s1\">\u201c<\/span><i>masculine Arab and Muslim terrorism.<\/i><span class=\"s1\">\u201d <\/span><i>By gender<\/i><i>ing terror threat, this dominant wartime narrative marks Arab and <\/i><i>Muslim <\/i><i>men and boys as a terrorist bloc that justifies pre-crime indict<\/i><i>ment, collective punishment, and hegemony.<\/i><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><i>By focusing on <\/i><i>law and its discursive echoes that brand Arab and <\/i><i>Muslim men as presumptive terrorists, this Article: (1) theorizes the gen<\/i><i>dered dimensions of Arab and Muslim threat, building upon formative <\/i><i>frameworks of <\/i><i>othering and racialization within and beyond the legal lit<\/i><i>erature; (2) develops the concept of masculine terror indictment assigned <\/i><i>collectively <\/i><i>to Arab and Muslim men and boys; (3) interrogates War on <\/i><i>Terror law as the forceful conduit of the dominant metanarrative of mas<\/i><i>culine Arab and Muslim terrorism, which brands anybody fitting that <\/i><i>profile <\/i><i>as a justifiable target of extrajudicial violence; and (4) centers the <\/i><i>counter-stories of men in Gaza, who repurposed new media to challenge <\/i><i>the War on Terror narrative of masculine terrorism that erases their indi<\/i><i>vidual identities from legal, scholarly, and popular view.<\/i><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><i>While legal scholars <\/i><i>have examined the distinct plight of Arab and <\/i><i>Muslim women, this Article asks, <\/i><span class=\"s1\">\u201c<\/span><i>what about the men?<\/i><span class=\"s1\">\u201d <\/span><i>and stands as <\/i><i>the first to reconstruct their humanity through legal counter-storytelling <\/i><i>and intimate profiles of the men themselves. As an emanation of law <\/i><i>itself, legal scholarship contributes to the power struggle of whose sto<\/i><i>ries are told and untold, highlighting the urgency of this Article and the <\/i><i>unheard <\/i><i>voices within it. Through critical interrogation of dominant law <\/i><i>and lore, this Article challenges the gendered War on Terror narrative. <\/i><i>By introducing the stories from men in Gaza, it contributes the first coun<\/i><i>ter-narratives of this kind to legal scholarship and writes the humanity of <\/i><i>Arab <\/i><i>and Muslim men into its pages.<\/i><\/p>\n<p>Continue reading <a href=\"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/georgetown-law-journal\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/26\/2026\/06\/Beydoun_Telling-War-Stories.pdf\"><strong><em>Telling War Stories: Innocence, Indictment, and (En)gendered Terror<\/em><\/strong><\/a><em>.<\/em><\/p>\n<div class=\"wp-block-pdfemb-pdf-embedder-viewer\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/georgetown-law-journal\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/26\/2026\/06\/Beydoun_Telling-War-Stories.pdf\" class=\"pdfemb-viewer\" style=\"\" data-width=\"max\" data-height=\"max\" data-toolbar=\"bottom\" data-toolbar-fixed=\"off\">Beydoun_Telling-War-Stories<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The law is replete with dominant narratives endorsed by its letter and amplified by connected and conspiring levers of power. This Article centers the discursive power of law, and specifically, the War on Terror\u2019s grand narrative of \u201cmasculine Arab and Muslim terrorism.\u201d By gendering terror threat, this dominant wartime narrative marks Arab and Muslim men [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13871,"featured_media":0,"parent":24456,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"abstract.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-24458","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/georgetown-law-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/24458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/georgetown-law-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/georgetown-law-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/georgetown-law-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13871"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/georgetown-law-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24458"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/georgetown-law-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/24458\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24599,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/georgetown-law-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/24458\/revisions\/24599"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/georgetown-law-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/24456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/georgetown-law-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}