Anti-Muslim rhetoric isn’t brave. By Fareed Zakaria. Washington Post, December 3, 2015.
Zakaria:
The most recent act of horrific violence in the United States — in San Bernardino, Calif. — was reportedly perpetrated by a Muslim man and woman. There are about 3 million Muslims in the United States, almost all of whom are law-abiding citizens. How should they react to the actions of the couple who killed 14 people on Wednesday?
The most recent act of horrific violence in the United States — in San Bernardino, Calif. — was reportedly perpetrated by a Muslim man and woman. There are about 3 million Muslims in the United States, almost all of whom are law-abiding citizens. How should they react to the actions of the couple who killed 14 people on Wednesday?
The
most commonly heard response is that Muslims must immediately and loudly
condemn these acts of barbarity. But Dalia Mogahed, a Muslim American leader,
argues eloquently that this is unfair. She made her case to NBC’s Chuck Todd.
“According
to the FBI, the majority of domestic terrorist attacks are actually committed
by white, male Christians. . . . When
those things occur, we don’t
suspect other people who share their faith and ethnicity of condoning them. We
assume that these things outrage them just as much as they do anyone else. And
we have to afford that same assumption of innocence to Muslims.”
Muslims
face a double standard, but I understand why. Muslim terrorists don’t just
happen to be Muslim. They claim to be motivated by religion, cite religious
justifications for their actions and tell their fellow Muslims to follow in
their bloody path. There are groups around the world spreading this religiously
infused ideology and trying to seduce Muslims to become terrorists. In these
circumstances, it is important for the majority of Muslims who profoundly disagree
with jihad to speak up.
But it
is also important to remember that there are 1.6 billion Muslims on the planet.
If you took the total number of deaths from terrorism last year — about 30,000
— and assumed that 50 people were involved in planning each one (a vastly
exaggerated estimate), it would still add up to less than 0.1 percent of the
world’s Muslims.
The writer
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a tough critic of Islam. She divides the Muslim world into
two groups: Mecca Muslims and Medina Muslims. (The Koranic revelations to
Muhammad made in Mecca are mostly about brotherhood and love; the ones in
Medina have the fire and brimstone.) She estimates that 3 percent of the
worldwide community are radical Medina Muslims, the other 97 percent
being mainstream Mecca Muslims. Now, 3 percent works out to a large number, 48
million, and that’s why
we spend lots of time, money and effort dealing with the threats that might
emanate from them. But that still leaves the other 97 percent — the more than
1.55 billion — who are not jihadists. They may be reactionary and backward in
many ways. But that is not the same as being terrorists.
While I
believe that Muslims do bear a responsibility to speak up, non-Muslims also
have a responsibility not to make assumptions about them based on such a small
minority. Individuals should be judged as individuals and not placed under
suspicion for some “group characteristic.” It is dehumanizing and un-American
to do otherwise.
It also
misunderstands how religion works in people’s lives. Imagine a Bangladeshi taxi
driver in New York. He has not, in any meaningful sense, chosen to be Muslim.
He was born into a religion, grew up with it, and like hundreds of millions of
people around the world in every religion, follows it out of a mixture of
faith, respect for his parents and family, camaraderie with his community and
inertia. His knowledge of the sacred texts is limited. He is trying to make a
living and provide for his family. For him, Islam provides identity and
psychological support in a hard life. This is what religion looks like for the
vast majority of Muslims.
But
increasingly, Americans seem to view Muslims as actively propagating a
dangerous ideology, like communist activists. It’s not just Donald Trump.
Republican candidates are vying with each other to make insinuations and
declarations about Islam and all Muslims. And it’s not just on the right. The
television personality and outspoken liberal Bill Maher made the expansive
generalization recently that “If you are in this religion, you probably do have
values that are at odds [with American values].”
What is
most bizarre is to hear this anti-Muslim rhetoric described as brave
truth-telling. Trump insists that he will not be silenced on this issue. Chris Christie says that he will not follow a “politically correct” national security
policy. They are simply feeding a prejudice. The reality is that Muslims are
today the most despised minority in America. Their faith is constantly
criticized, and they face insults, discrimination and a dramatic rise in acts
of violence against them, as Max Fisher of Vox has detailed superbly. And the
leading Republican candidate has flirted with the idea of registering Muslims,
a form of collective punishment that has not been seen since the internment of
Japanese Americans in the 1940s.
This is
the first time that I can recall watching politicians pander to mobs — and then
congratulate themselves for their political courage.
