My apologies for my poorly worded question and any offense it may cause.
I'm currently reading Jack Kerouac's novel "On the Road", I was baffled by the fact that a book written in 1951 would contain the following line
"Dean had a sweater wrapped around his ears to keep warm. He said we were a band of Arabs coming to blow up New York."
This must be rooted in some historical or cultural event that predates modern arab/islamaphobia and associated prejudices. Can anyone offer any insight?
The events described in On the Road took place about the same time as the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, so there's that.
Before that was World War II, but I can hardly imagine that the Arabs stood out in that context as more violent than anybody else.
In World War I, the exploits of T.E. Lawrence, or Lawrence of Arabia, gained a lot of fame by romanticizing his adventures leading mounted Arabs blowing stuff up and taking no prisoners.
Are you asking about Arabs or Muslims?