In a chapter on the 1979 Iran hostage crisis in her classic study Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and the U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000 Melani McAlister writes:

Terrorism's presence on the world stage enabled a narrative that constructed the United States as an imperiled private sphere and the Islamic Middle East as the preeminent politicized space from which terrorism affected its invasions For more than a decade that narrative had worked to produce a type of American identity, defined by the production of individuals who were 'free of politics.' Within this world of vulnerable families and lovers, terrorism threatened precisely what ha to be threatened in order to establish the disinterested morality of the state's militarized response in the international arena.