during the Cold War, the prism behind the appointment of the Soviet enemy was based on stigmatisation of totalitarian and militarist logic. This outright condemnation of the political system was particularly evident in international crises. For example, the destruction of a South Korean Boeing in 1983 was part of this simplified approach, which guides the interpretation of the event according to the prevailing ideology. The political rhetoric of the governors is not the only material relevant in this respect. The print media also offers a significant form of access to reductionist images of the enemy. It makes it possible to grasp changes in strategic representations, particularly in the post-Cold War. Thus, one of the salient features since the Gulf War in 1991 has been a trend replacement of the ‘green’ enemy in the south for the Soviet Eastern Red enemy, which tends to strengthen the legitimacy of certain critically questionable paradigms, such as the shock of civilisations. The events of 11 September seem to have revealed this transfer mechanism again. They create a communication environment favourable to the reactivation of Western prejudices about Arab-Muslim interference. After a short genealogy of Western stereotypes against Islam and Arabity, a comparative study of the French written press was carried out in September 2001 until the US attack in Afghanistan (from 12 September to 8 October). The corpus consists of the three main national daily newspapers (Le Monde, Le Figaro, Libération) and three weekly newspapers (Le Point, Le Nouvel Observateur, L’Express): the aim is to identify a common line of argument beyond the heterogeneity of media channels. Such an approach seeks to verify the hypothesis that the designation of the enemy ‘al-Qaida’ is sedimented around a Western imagination which, without responding exhaustively to Huntington’s culturalist predictions, is based on amnesia and redactions.