The Muslim community in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area known as the “Triangle” is described as “reeling from the indictments of eight Triangle men on terrorism charges.” (“Muslims, law officials meet”).
Three of those defendants, including Daniel Patrick Boyd, have been indicted on charges of “conspiring to murder U.S. military personnel.”
But to the 100 or so Muslims who attended, (not to mention Boyd’s wife, son, and daughter) it’s not the terrorism charges that has brought unwelcome attention to their community. Instead, many of them “feel they are being unfairly targeted and subjected to profiling and surveillance because of their faith.”
Because of their faith.
It seems that the 9/11 attacks, (once you subtract all those dead people in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania and their loved ones), fell disproportionately hard on Muslim-Americans.
One participant, Burhan Ghanayem, “said the backlash following the terrorist acts of Sept. 11, 2001, left many American Muslims so bruised and vulnerable that they haven't had the chance to recover.”
The story’s bottom line is that, in spite of eight years' worth of effort by law enforcement to convince them they aren't singling them out for persecution, the Muslim community still somehow doesn’t trust the law enforcement agencies. Take a hint, law enforcement: you need to try harder.
Meanwhile, Paul Egan at The Detroit News has written about how FBI special agent in charge Andrew Arena meets with Middle Eastern residents several times a month. (“FBI works to cut tension with Arab community”). Dearborn attorney Ihsan Ali Alkhatib says that FBI-community relations are "conflicted."
“There is a strong sense in the community that we are a subject and not a partner with the government.And sure enough, (these articles are pressed out of a Play-Doh mold), we’re told that "On both sides, building trust remains a work in progress.”
“I think engagement is a must, but I am not as sure as I used to be about its usefulness.”
Imad Hamad, regional director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee in Dearborn, says:
"I see the progress, I see the advances. I think they are trying hard. Definitely they need to try harder. Giving people trust is not a matter of what you say. It's a matter of what you do, and more than that, how you do it."
The only ones who don’t have to try harder are America’s Muslims. You read over and over how trust is an issue on both sides. You always get the sense that the feds are guiltily creeping upstairs with their shoes in their hands for fear of waking up the old lady and getting a rolling pin over the head.
But even though “trust is an issue on both sides,” you’ll never hear why the feds don't trust the Muslims. You won't read a story that quotes an FBI agent saying, “For the love of Mike, these people just aren't helping!”
You see, the unspoken assumption beneath all these stories, and these are only recent samples, is that it’s America that’s broken trust with Muslims. The message is incessantly reinforced that non-Muslims have to prove to the Muslim community that we can be trusted. Remember how bruised and vulnerable those North Carolina Muslims were? That was their complaint in the wake of eight Muslims indicted on terrorism charges!
For the 1,000,000th time, we’ve never said that all Muslims participated in 9/11. But 9/11 was an all-Muslim operation, and it was unmistakably an Islamic attack on America. And still, in the insane histories of the ADC, CAIR, and countless other Islamic spokesgroups, 9/11 wasn’t an attack by Muslims on America, but an attack by America on Muslims. Ever since that day, when 19 Muslims, screaming “Allahu Akhbar!”, murdered 3,000 Americans, no Muslim in America feels safe—and shame on the FBI for making them feel that way!
I don’t expect innocent Muslims to apologize to America for what wicked Muslims have done. But isn’t it just a bit much to expect America to constantly be apologizing to Muslims because 9/11 cast Islam in a bad light?
If you’re an American Muslim, law-abiding, patriotic, and devoted to the idea of America, it’s unfortunate and unfair that so many, and such a variety, of your co-religionists keep making your religion look bad by claiming the religion of peace is compelling them to slay and destroy Jews, infidels, polytheists, and Americans. But there it is. If your religion looks bad because of these people, you need to put the blame on them, not on us.
Not one day has passed since 9/11 on which Americans haven’t heard reports, and on some days multiple reports, of horrendous violence claiming lives, committed somewhere on Earth by Muslims against their fellow human beings. We’re eight years after 9/11 and still we’re uncovering numerous plots, right here in the United States, by self-identified Muslims intent on committing violent jihad against Americans here or abroad. Western Europe, the historic beneficiary of the heroic Christian armies that broke the sieges of Islam, are seriously getting used to the idea of the Islamic Republic of Iran with a nuclear missile capability.
In spite of the million repetitions we’ve heard that every other religion in the world has a comparable history of violence, that bin Laden is a marginal character who no more represents Islam than David Duke represents Christianity, that al Qaeda no more represents Islam than the Ku Klux Klan represents America, the record doesn’t bear that out.
Even at the height of its terror the KKK never took over anyone’s country and invited racist armies to train there, the way al Qaeda did in Afghanistan, tried to do in Iraq, and is trying now to do in Pakistan; David Duke never pulled a 46% favorability rating in polls of the international Christian community as Osama bin Laden has done in the Muslim world; no one has seen a YouTube video of Jehovah's Witnesses beheading some poor guy because someone else tore up a copy of Awake! magazine; nor, in spite of uncountable hack references to them, does anyone, anywhere, even American Muslims, actually fear arrest by the Spanish Inquisition or pillage by rapacious knights of the Crusades, or even lynching by the Klan.
We all know the fear is of Islamic terrorism, and that the fear is rational and well-founded. And the more a person takes the time to investigate, the more rational and well-founded that fear becomes. And we all know that supporters of violent jihad number at least in the many millions, that they are global, that they are funded, that they are determined, and that they are growing in boldness and desperation.
But the American Muslim community, through its spokesmen like Imad Ahmad, and its false friends like the MAS and CAIR, continues to refuse acknowledgement of Islam as a contributing factor to jihadist terrorism, even if they were to say (if they can) that this jihadism is false Islam, and why it false, or even if they were to say (if they can) that true Islam is compatible with democracy, with free speech, with equality of women, with religious tolerance--in other words, compatible with America. Instead, the Muslim community keeps demanding apologies and concessions as the Number One victims of 9/11.
I believe that if the imams and the Muslim community organizers like Imad Ahmad had renounced Hezbollah and al Qaeda and Hamas and bin Laden and all these other prominent Islamic terrorists by name, many more Americans would believe that the Muslim community in America was not a nesting place for jihadists. But I know now, from all I’ve learned, that that is never going to happen. Not from these imams, these leaders, these community organizers, these front groups of the Muslim Brotherhood.
I do agree with Imad Ahmad that “giving people trust is not a matter of what you say. It's a matter of what you do, and more than that, how you do it."
And what are America’s Muslim leaders doing to make us trust them?
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