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After Paris and California attacks, U.S. Muslims feel intense backlash
| You knew this article was coming. From WaPo. Way too long (and boring) so just the high points here. I'm only surprised that they beat the NYT to the punch... |
American Muslims say they are living through an intensely painful moment and feel growing anti-Muslim sentiment after the recent Islamic State attacks in Paris and this week’s San Bernardino shootings, carried out by a Muslim husband and wife.
| Does any of this anxiety cause you to turn in your crazy co-religionists to the police? No? How come? |
The motivations of the California killers are still unclear,
| No, WaPo reporters, the motivations were completely clear... |
although authorities are investigating it as a potential act of terrorism. Muslims said they are bracing for an even more toxic climate in which Americans are increasingly suspicious of Muslims.
| There are plenty of tolerant, decent, peaceful Muslims in the U.S. It sure would be great if they'd start ratting out the fools, crazies, and evil ones among them. We asked Irish-Americans to do the same during "The Troubles"... |
Muslims say that Americans, like many in Europe, often do not draw a distinction between radical Islamist militants, such as those associated with the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, and the religion of Islam and its followers who have no ties to extremism.
| It would help if you could give us some reasons why we should... |
Arsalan Iftikhar, a human rights lawyer who is working on a book on Islamophobia in the United States, said that headline was evidence of how people jump to conclusions about a suspect in a crime who is Muslim.
“When a Muslim American commits a murder, their religion is brought front and center,” he said. “With anyone else, [it’s] a crazy, kooky loner.”
| You deliberately obfuscate, Mr. Iftikhar. The press was trying to blame this attack on anyone BUT Muslims, going so far as to point out that the attack occurred within a short commute to a Planned Parenthood center so that the press then could gratuitously attack conservative Christians. |
Many Muslims said fear of Islam is being fueled by the heated rhetoric of Republican presidential candidates, particularly businessman Donald Trump, who has called for surveillance of some mosques and requiring Muslims to register with the government.
| Did Trump say that or did reporters plant those words? We've seen the latter a couple times recently, haven't we... |
That may be smart electoral politics: A 2014 survey by the Pew Research Center showed that 82 percent of Republicans said they were “very concerned” about the rise of Islamic extremism in the world, compared with 51 percent of Democrats.
| So even Democrats are worried. Then again, even a flatworm can feel pain... |
Estimates of the number of American Muslims vary from about 4 million to perhaps 12 million. The backlash against them has created a deepening sense of alienation. Talk of creating Muslim databases and noting Muslims’ religion on their IDs has echoes for many of the forced internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
| Recall that the response of many, many young Japanese men in that situation was to join the U.S. Army. They fought for America in the European theater and were among the most heroic troops we had. If you want to ally concerns, have your young men join the U.S. Armed Forces -- and be similarly heroic in defending America... |
Many mosques have asked local police for more security.
“There’s a constant climate of insinuation of terrorism and disloyalty that creates this pervasive sense of being an outsider,” said Haroon Moghul, a fellow at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding in Washington.
| That Institute is, of course, your typical progressive NGO and is always good for a quote for a reporter looking for something from a progressive NGO that has a neutral-sounding name... |
Pew studies show that since the 9/11 attacks, Americans have become far more likely to think that Islam encourages violence more than other religions might. A Pew survey in March 2002 found that 25 percent of Americans held that view, and the number reached 50 percent by September 2014.
| Why could that be? 9/11? London? Paris? Bedlam? Madrid? All the car bombings throughout the Middle East and North Africa? How on earth did Americans come to believe that violent Islamicists were violent? |
Research by Pew and CAIR shows that apprehension about Islam has increased sharply with the rise of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL, in the past two years, especially since the group’s highly publicized beheadings of foreign journalists and aid workers began in August 2014.
“After 2010, we had a few years where things seemed to be getting better,” said Corey Saylor, national legislative director at CAIR. But he said the beheadings “set us back down a darker path. . . . People of goodwill are trying to do work to bring people together, and it just takes a few moments of ISIS’s time to unravel all of that.”
| Yes, beheadings do make people anxious, particularly when the hard boyz doing the beheadings wave the bloody scimitar at you and tell you that you're next... |
Muslim leaders are also debating whether they need to apologize each time Islamic extremists carry out an attack, said Adem Carroll, a member of the Muslim American Civil Liberties Coalition in New York.
| We don't need you to apologize. We do need you to clean out your communities. We'd ask that of any community that is sheltering crazies. So get on it. |
Other Muslims think that moderate Muslims need to be more aggressive about denouncing acts of terror and rejecting the Islamic State’s call to establish a caliphate — a Muslim homeland ruled by sharia.
On Friday at the National Press Club in Washington, a group of American Muslims will announce the Muslim Reform Movement, calling on other American Muslims to reject the caliphate and advocate for the equality of men and women.
| By jove, somebody's got it! |
“We need to deal honestly with issues of extremism,” said Asra Nomani, an author and activist who is part of the group. “As long as Americans see denial and deflection, it feeds distrust.”
Muslims, Nomani says, need to directly address how extremist Muslims interpret the Koran and how that affects church-state relations.
“What we’re struggling with is on the far right, a lot of people who want to deal with Islam in a monolithic way, and on the far left, no one wants to acknowledge there’s a larger problem,” Nomani said. “The truth lies somewhere in the middle. There is an extremism problem. The majority of Muslims don’t live that way, and we have to reclaim a middle path.”
| You need to put your words into action... |
Posted by: Steve White 2015-12-05 |
