The American Muslim’s Burden

Fifty years ago, the United States enjoyed prominence in the world as the Champion of World War 2, but at home there were questions to resolve. Not least among them, the status of many Japanese-Americans interred during the war. It’s intriguing to see how many people, including historians, gloss over the Internment Camps and the slipshod version of Justice handed out to people who committed no offense and who lost years of freedom and a large portion of their property simply because of their race. In these modern times I wonder how well we have learned the lessons from those days, if at all.

By that I not only mean that the United States government has to plan for future conditions where large-scale profiling may be crucially needed to address a threat, but also how a demographic group might plan to prevent suffering the same fate as those citizens from Japan did. We see the conflict coming, and must all of us prepare for what may be delicately put as The Muslim Question.

This week, a plot was revealed where a group of Muslims planned to attack hundreds of people at Fort Dix. In the past year, we have seen attacks by Muslim terrorists at the University of North Carolina, at an office in Denver, and at a Jewish Community Center in Seattle, not to forget the plan to bomb international airline flights with liquid explosives. The problem is growing, and at some point it is inevitable that the public will simply demand that the focus be brought to where the source obviously breeds: Fascist Islam.

I have said many times, and will say again, that since Islam, with over a billion adherents, is responsible for less than two thousand terrorist attacks in a year, it is foolish to blame the whole faith. In fact, it should become obvious that while Fascist Islam is a cause of Terrorism, Islam as a whole is not. A lot of people never noticed that in the Fort Dix case, there was close cooperation between the FBI and Muslim informants, this was hardly the first time that the Muslim Community in a town has alerted the authorities when a terrorist cell showed up. American Muslims as a group should be recognized as significantly different from the monsters we see on television, or those idiots at CAIR who refuse to admit even the most serious and obvious problems. But increasingly, Americans are seeing Muslims in general as anti-American and as enemies of our ideals. And the blame for that impression lies, in part, with the Muslims themselves.

We’ve all seen protests by Muslims. Protests against cartoons, against the United States (of course), against the Pope, and all sorts of things. But what we do not see, at least in the United States, is a protest against Al Qaeda, against the hijacking of Islam by psychopaths, or against the rising tide of hate speech by this Imam or that. A few mosques have made some gestures towards showing support for America and Freedom, but in the main Islam has been silent about all it receives from the West, from money to protection to guarantees of respect for Muslim culture. It is long overdue for Muslims to choose to support their country as well as their culture, and to show that they belong to the nation as part of it.