content: Copy pasting myself here. You are right, this started to happen in the 90's, but you are missing the reason why. For centuries we used the term "Near East" when referring to the Arab/Muslim world. The change in the verbiage, where the UK would call Arabs/Muslims "Asian", was a deliberate effort by the medias bosses when crime started to rise in the UK. Too many people were questioning whether immigration was a benefit to their country. All the media had to do to combat people making the grim connection between immigration and crime, was simply to change their ethics guidelines for reporting to state that journalists should refer to Arab Muslims as Asian. This made its way into university curriculum and the guidelines of every major news outlet. If you are an aspiring journalist it isn't good for your career to go against the published ethics for journalism and piss off your editor, so all the reporters started using the term "Asian" which crept into the general vernacular . Obviously, this has nothing to do with accurate reporting. Otherwise the media would refer to a criminals origin by either the country or the region. The purpose was of these changes was to distort from the growing crime rates among Arab migrants. Under the current guidelines there is no way to determine whether a crime was committed by a Saudi national, an Afghani, or a Pakistani. If the general population heard "Afghanistan rape group" 20 times a month they might start to put two and two together. Now if the Muslim happened to achieve citizenship in a western country, the media will only refer to the criminal as a citizen of that country (e.g. German man runs over 20 in a rented truck) Please note, calling Arabs "asian" almost ONLY applies to stories that could paint Muslims in a negative light. Often when there is a positive story about one of the groups the media is free to report on the country of origin regardless of citizenship (e.g. Afghanistan Refugee earns his MD and now serves the poor) The media did the same thing in 2006 when Romania wanted to join the EU, but there were major concerns with their Gypsy population. Gypsies, for those who aren't aware, are a non-white Indian tribe that has lighter skin but has never integrated into any society they have been a part of. They formed enclaves and live off of welfare while subsidizing their lifestyles with organized crime (sound familiar?). The media knew that no one in Europe wanted to deal with gypsies freely roaming in their streets so the media started calling Gypsies "Roma" out of the blue. Roma sounds like Romania, not too hard to see where this is going. So when crime rates exploded and Gypsy beggars lined the streets of Paris and London, the media in France and the UK started blaming the "Roma" which actually lead to discrimination against the Romanian people. I swear, I have heard Europeans refer to Romanian crime so many times that I can't help but admire how effective this psy-op was. And when I hear people, even people claiming to be "red pilled", say that the UK always called Muslims "Asian" and passionately defend that statement as fact, I realize how hard the fight to save our culture is going to be.