|
Achtung Muslims!
By Ali Asadullah
14/09/2001
I was not yet Muslim when the Gulf War broke out in 1991, and I am too young to remember the often violent and repressive attacks perpetrated upon Black Americans in the 1950s and 1960s. So my frame of reference for homegrown American hate is lacking to a certain degree. I surely remember the racial slurs of my childhood, aimed at making me feel ashamed of my mixed Black and Caucasian heritage. But never did I fear mob violence or some larger scale attack that would threaten my very existence.
As of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, my frame of reference has changed however, and not for the better.
Since the terrorist acts that so shocked America and the rest of the world took place, America has been a very difficult place in which for Muslims to live. As a journalist who helps edit a Muslim publication it is my job to stay abreast of current affairs, especially in the Muslim community, and by Tuesday night the stories I was hearing from Muslims around the country were shocking.
While chatting online with one of my writers about the day's events, I asked in passing, "How are Muslims taking all this there in Chicago?"
"Terrified," he replied.
It was a simple one-word answer that spoke volumes to the state of affairs for Muslims in America.
Over the past three days almost every American Muslim organization that exists has released statements condemning Tuesday's attacks in the strongest terms. These statements have reached all the major media outlets and governmental institutions in the country. For some reason however, the sincerity of these condolences and offers of help have fallen on deaf ears as far as the average American citizen is concerned. How else would one explain the pig's blood that was thrown on the front door and stairs of a San Francisco mosque? How else would one explain the attack on a man of Moroccan origin at a Chicago gas station after he was asked his ethnic origin? And how else does one explain the young man, one of a crowd of 300 white teenagers who tried to march in protest on a Chicago mosque, who told an Associated Press reporter, "I am proud to be an American and I hate Arabs and I always have."
Obviously, the Muslim message is not getting through.
Since Tuesday, bomb threats have been the order of the day at mosques, Muslim elementary schools and even at various businesses where Muslims work. Many Muslim women, conspicuous by
their delicate and modest headscarves, have chosen to remain barricaded in their houses for fear of being spat upon and attacked as so many of them were in
1995 when Timothy McVeigh destroyed the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City with a massive car bomb.
A large part of the reason why such instances of hate occur is that the media has failed in its duty to provide real journalistic coverage of this catastrophe. Consider the following quote from Fox News' John Gibson Thursday night:
The Philadelphia Daily News, a major paper, is drawing our attention to this photo. It is an Associated Press photo showing a plume of smoke billowing into the sky. But the Philly Daily News says that thousands of people have seen something sinister in that smoke - something that those folks says looks like the face of Satan, complete with beard and horns and a foul menacing expression. This photo, the paper says, has not been retouched in any way. The picture is a symbol, some believe, of the hideous nature of this deed. What do you think?
I think Fox News, which is now more popular than even CNN in America, is pandering through sensationalism to an audience already predisposed to overreaction. Gibson's rehash of the
Philadelphia Daily News story - which makes an almost subliminal suggestion that Muslims are in some way cohorts of the Devil - helps feed already rising irrational anti-Muslim sentiments, sentiments like those expressed by a co-worker of a friend of mine.
Upon returning from work Thursday, my friend related an interaction he had with this co-worker earlier in the day. A middle-aged white man with work experience as a Hollywood executive, now working as a Silicon Valley consultant, this co-worker suggested to my friend that Arabs and Muslims should be forced to wear arm patches issued by the government that would assure that they were "government approved".
Whether he intentionally meant to raise the specter of Germany's treatment of the Jews in World War II, that was what he did. In one short suggestion, he proved that even in the so-called home of freedom and democracy, people still conjure up the most repressive and racist ways to deal with people they don't understand.
I only hope that in the coming weeks of what will no doubt be large-scale military assaults on countries with large Muslim populations, rational thinking will prevail in America. Otherwise I fear "Achtung Muslims!" could become the slogan of the day.
|
