Loading ...Syed Farooq is an American: Let’s stop the Muslim vs. Christian debate and take a look at ourselves
Steven Salatia
Dear Compatriots:
I address you in a moment of collective stress, with another mass shooting, this one in San Bernardino, California, dominating the news. Guessing the identity of shooters—black or white, Christian or Muslim, man or woman (though masculinity is almost guaranteed)—has become a vicious social media ritual. Too many people seem to believe we can discern motivation by ethnicity, or that ethnicity alone determines what type of terror can rightly be deemed terrorism.
It was with much sadness that I witnessed your gleeful reaction when police named Syed Farooq, a devout Muslim, as one of the suspects. You seem to be under the impression that a Muslim shooter absolves the United States of brutality, forgetting that Farooq is also an American. This worldview allows you to embrace mythologies that exonerate you of political violence.
But we must acknowledge Farooq’s nationality, because his terrible deed does not arise from an unknowable foreign culture, but from one endemic to the United States. You can exempt yourself from Farooq’s actions only if you are willing to exclude minorities from your national identity. Many of you are happy to do that, but it’s an intellectually lazy choice.
It is why I greet you as a compatriot. The greeting might make you uncomfortable because I am Arab, but I am also American. Being American requires no special ethnic, religious, or ideological character, even though our nationality contains implicit demands. One of those demands is to not be Arab or Muslim.
Enough about technicalities, though. I don’t approach you to be pedantic or to beg for your acceptance, nor do I have any interest in situating mass murder into hierarchies of tolerability. I merely ask you to consider why those hierarchies exist and why it’s so easy to name state violence as necessary or desirable. There’s a connection between the supposed deviance of Farooq’s shooting and your endless, adamant justification of U.S. bloodletting throughout the world.
To put it plainly: thinking about violent behavior as something innately foreign is a terrific rationale for delivering violence to foreign places. It forces you to hate people and demands your loyalty to institutions designed to contravene your interests.
I think you’ve been hoodwinked by politicians and luminaries into hating Arabs and Muslims. This hatred is bad for Arabs and Muslims, of course, but it also does you little good. It might make you feel better about your place in the American racial hierarchy. It might alleviate your majoritarian anxieties. It might reaffirm the superiority of your faith. It might make patriotism easier to accept.
It doesn’t, however, help you better understand this world and it certainly won’t keep food on your table. In fact, it deprives everybody of intellectual and economic sustenance.
The attitudes you possess—that Arabs are beholden to violent culture, that Islam singularly produces religious evil, that Syrian refugees threaten American safety, that the Middle East and South Asia are places of mystical barbarity—have existed since before 9/11, but they seem to have a particular resonance in the current presidential election.
It’s become remarkably disturbing, to be honest. It reminds me a bit too much of the rhetoric preceding the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. I don’t select the analogy at random: more than one eminent conservative has suggested interning Muslims. Liberal beacon Wesley Clark did, too, when he spoke approvingly of interment and proposed it as a remedy for the “disloyal.”
Source: www.salon.com