Anti-Muslim Rhetoric Dangerous and Un-American

In recent weeks, the political world has largely been focused on ways to deal with "Radical Islam“ and its roots in terror attacks here and abroad. The conversation has been characterized mostly by misinformation, hypocrisy and a few rather frightening ideas from those who want to be our leader.

Donald Trump thinks we should ban all of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims from entering the United States–even those who are U.S. citizens and are currently abroad–while also starting a domestic registry of Americans who practice the religion.

 

Trump, the front-runner to receive the Republican Party’s 2016 presidential nomination, has been denounced by many members of the party, though the GOP has not shied away from the similarly inflammable rhetoric from candidates like Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz, who have proposed limiting refugee status to Christians only, or Marco Rubio, who says we might have to start shutting down mosques and other gathering places.

Let’s start with the hypocrisy. A week earlier, a radical Christian terrorist shot up a Planned Parenthood clinic in Denver, citing his own extreme religious beliefs as his inspiration. As usual, the whole radical Christianity element was left out of the story on all fronts. Robert Dear was instead framed as a mentally-ill lone wolf. However, when a California couple, Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, planned and executed a mass shooting the very next week, the response was much different.

At first, the narrative was shaped to imply that the wife, who entered the U.S. on a K1 "Fiancee Visa“ in 2014 to marry her American-born husband, had somehow radicalized him.

 

However, on Wednesday, the FBI released a report that showed the American husband had already begun talking about such things years before, and that the couple’s shared brand of crazy was part of the courting process. Dear’s ex-wife and other associates also describe him as someone with long-harbored grudges against society and no less of a surprise to go on a killing spree. So, why the grossly different presentations of two similar stories that seem to differ mostly by religious affiliation?

America has a mass shooting problem, and America has a gun violence problem. But if America has a radical Islam problem, then it also has a radical Christianity problem–a far larger one given the number of American Christians who commit mass shootings compared to American Muslims.

 

For some reason, incidents like Dear’s shootings, the Wisconsin Sikh temple shootings, the Knoxville Unitarian Universalist Church shootings or the Brookline, Massachusetts Planned Parenthood bombing are never associated with Christianity–radical or otherwise. Instead, when the killer is white and has a name that sounds familiar to us, we focus on the their apprehension, trial and punishment, but no larger issue.

When a Christian commits a terrorist act in this country, they seem also to immediately lose their Christian identity, and rather than being described as "radicalized," they become merely "mentally-ill.“

 

Meanwhile, a Muslim terrorist maintains not only their religion but their sanity, while picking up the additional tag of "terrorist“ that Christians always seem to avoid. When American Christians defend targeting Muslims by suggesting that it's not Christians out there shooting people and setting off bombs, it clearly requires this hypocritical double standard be applied.

I’m not suggesting that Christianity is responsible for any of the above acts, or the fact that Timothy McVeigh and Dylann Roof were Christians or that the KKK and nearly every other white supremacy movement has roots in radical Christian beliefs indicts an entire religion or should inspire a specific strategy to deal with its problem.

 

I am, however, pointing out exactly how absurd it is to suggest that because Farook, a domestic terrorist, happened to be a Muslim and looks to have drawn his sick and destructive conclusions from misguided understandings of that religion, it suggests that the millions of peaceful and sane Muslims in this country are a threat, any more than Mr. Dear’s acts speak to a threat from sane Christians.

Trump’s candidacy has indeed given bigots, racists, xenophobes, Islamophobes and other despicable elements of our nation a rallying point, and the success of his dangerous rhetoric suggests their number to be much greater than most of us probably imagined. We’re talking about a guy who announced his candidacy by reducing our illegal immigration problem to a single nation deliberately flooding us with rapists and murderers, and also condoned the beating of a black protester by his supporters.

Trump’s supporters have been emboldened to engage in even more disgraceful stunts when immigration activists show up at his rallies to protest, routinely spitting on, pushing, shoving and kicking them, often to the chants of U-S-A. None of these incidents have hurt Trump in Republican polls.

 

Away from the campaign trail, things have been far worse, yet still, Trump refuses to distance himself from even the worst of them. The billionaire business mogul seems to have tapped directly into a vein of nativism and populist anger that has long existed, though few credible candidates have had the bad sense to tap into it.

It turns out a lot of Americans might think that it would be a good idea to make Muslims register, or maybe even wear arm badges to identify themselves to the rest of us, like Jews in Nazi Germany–that rather than strengthen our real enemies, it will somehow make us safer in a country with hundreds of thousands of murders just since the turn of the millennium, a statistical blip of which have had anything to do with Islam or its practitioners. I just hope there are enough Americans to rise up against such perverse mindsets and prove to the world, ourselves and our children that we’re a better nation than that.