A Letter Against Islamaphobia

The following is letter which I wrote (but never submitted) in response to an article by a Washington Post journalist. The article extrapolated the data from a Pew Research Center study about Muslims' assimilation into the U.S. and made rather odious assessments and predictions based upon these flawed extrapolations.

Nero feared Christianity and its followers flead underground, we fear Muslims and attempt to persecute them. The problem--maybe not the problem, but the answer-- is that Muslims are not cowards like early Christians were--perhaps this lack of cowardice can be attributed to the political atmosphere in which the religion has evolved, perhaps it can be attributed to globalization which facilitates rapid communication between different jihadi groups-- thus they defend their ideology by whatever means necessary. Unfortunately, those means do not exclude the use of violence or egregious attacks on civilians--what we call terrorism-- because that is the only way they can get results since they do not possess the economic or military capacity to overtly challenge the superpower. They learned how to fight in Afghanistan against the bastard Soviets and now they have transfered that knowledge to their battle against what they see as the domination of the world by Jews and Christians who are bent on eradicting "the mohammedan scourge" from the face of the planet.

Christians engaged in similar acts of violence during Crusades, only that was done out of resentment for what had been done to the prior to Constantine's rise to power and not out of reaction to ongoing persecution, forced conversion and/or renunciation, or attempted extermination-- all of which Islam currently faces.

Those are simply my thoughts--in a somewhat incoherent manner-- on what I view as the increasingly overt discrimination and persecution against Muslims as a result of the terrorist attacks of 9/11. I am not saying that terrorism is justified, but I can--in some ways--understand the minset from which it comes. I will not pretend to be the proverbial apologist for any religion, but I refuse to see one religion persecuted for the transgressions of a select few who go to extremes. Nero persecuted the Christians, Colonial Americans persecuted the Native Americans for practicing their own religion (see, for example, the Ghost Dance), Hitler persecuted the Jews, Pol pot the Buddhists, now it is the Muslims turn... again.



Our culture has suffered from a pervasive form of Islamophobia for nearly 6 years now, it is time for this to end. Islam is in no way more inherently violent or evil than is Christianity.

Also, a similar study was conducted of "average white assimilated Americans" to see what percentage felt that suicide bombings were sometimes justified. Can anyone guess what the results of that study were? 46 percent of "average Americans" felt that suicide bombings are sometimes justified. I'm not sure what percentage were unsure, but let's figure that it is as low as 4 percent. Based on that, half of all Americans feel that suicide bombings are sometimes justified. Based on the reasoning of the Washington Post reporter who editorialized on the Pew study, that means that there are nearly 150 million "average Americans" who would carry out suicide bombings. We are all screwed.

So does anyone see that this type of fear mongering reporting style is completely erroneous? I surely hope so. Furthermore, to single out Muslims because we are trying to institute some new "Red Scare" is an absolutely odious practice. Maybe this makes me an apologist for Islam, but I would much sooner be a naive apologist than ignorant bigot.