Muslims may make up fewer than one percent of the US population, but they were nearly 13 percent of victims of religious-based hate crimes in 2010, The Nation magazine of the US reports.
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“It’s fair to say that we have in America today two systems of citizenship: one for Muslims and one for non-Muslims,” Lalami says. “Muslim citizens live under a cloud of suspicion, no matter what they do, and no matter what they say.”
Anti-Muslim attitudes have reached deep into the workplace. Muslims make up only about one percent of the US population, but account for more than 20 percent of religion-based filings with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Mustafa Bayoumi, a Professor at Brooklyn College, city of New York, writes in a related Nation article, that until a few years ago American Muslims were regarded with suspicion of engaging in terrorist activities, but “the new narrative operates more along the axis of culture.”
“Simple acts of religious or cultural expression and the straightforward activities of Muslim daily life have become suspicious,” he explains. (Indeed, the ACLU reports that anti-mosque activity has taken place in more than half the states in the country.)
Bayoumi notes that Muslims filing for divorce invokes the bizarre charge of “creeping Sharia” and a dual-language Arabic-English high school in New York gets demonised as a madrassa.
Incredibly, some of the anti-Muslim hatred is being stoked by the federal and local law enforcement agencies. Last September, Wired broke the story that the FBI makes wild charges about Muslims to the counterterrorism agents it trains. Bayoumi accuses the FBI of spreading the line that “mainstream American Muslims are probably terrorist sympathisers…….and that the religiously mandated practice of giving charity in Islam is no more than a ‘funding mechanism for combat’.”
Also, Bayoumi points out that the NYPD as part of its training screened The Third Jihad, a film that claims that “the true agenda of much of Islam in America” is “a strategy to infiltrate and dominate” the country.
The rise in hate crimes parallels the growing unfavourable opinions the Americans hold of Muslims. A Washington Post/ABC News poll made in October 2001 reported that 39 percent of the Americans held unfavourable opinions about Muslims. That number rose to 46 percent in 2006 and 49 percent in 2010.
At the forefront of this spreading prejudice, “is a series of well-funded, politically-motivated campaigns dedicated to painting Islam as an inherently violent and savage religion,” writes the award-winning author, Jack Shaheen.
“These campaigns are the work of a small group of wealthy donors, misinformation specialists like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, and groups of interconnected anti-Islam organisations: Steven Emerson’s Investigative Project on Terrorism, Daniel Pipes’s Middle East Forum and so forth.”
“Together,” Shaheen continues, “they pound home the myth that mainstream Muslims have ‘terrorist’ ties, that Islam is the new global ideological menace and that Muslims are intent on destroying Western civilisation.”
One film that Shaheen scores is Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against The West” brought out in 2005 by the Clarion Fund, a pro-Israel non-profit organisation. “Steeped in hatred, the film’s…….frighteningly Islamophobic message…….draws parallels between Islam and Nazism.” Clarion persuaded major dailies to distribute 28 million DVD copies to their readers without charge, he writes in The Nation’s July 2 issue.
Bayoumi warns: “Anti-Muslim attitudes are not merely absorbed by law enforcement and the military or reflected on the airwaves and in the words of our politicians. Rather, the idea that American Muslims are to be feared or loathed or excluded from the US is being actively promoted.”
n The writer is an award-winning reporter based in Florida, USA. He has worked for
The Miami Herald and Chicago Daily News. This article has been reproduced from Veterans Today.
