#park51

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Is This Texas Suburb the New ‘Ground Zero Mosque’?

It may just be an empty field, but for Republican politicians and right-wing media figures it’s a bona fide sharia crisis.

Will Sommer at The Bulwark:

TOP TEXAS REPUBLICANS ARE falling over each other announcing investigations into a “Sharia city” set to be built outside of Dallas. But, at least publicly, there doesn’t seem to be anything illegal about the planned construction. Instead, figures like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton just seem really mad that a group of Muslims are trying to develop some land. Ground hasn’t even been broken on “EPIC City,” a 402-acre suburban development near Josephine, Texas. But it’s already attracted fury from both high-ranking government officials and grassroots activists.

The controversy, which has percolated up from TikTok and regional talk radio into Fox News segments in just a few weeks, recalls the “Ground Zero mosque” saga of 2010, when right-wing media personalities became convinced that a planned Islamic cultural center blocks from the ruins of the World Trade Center was in truth a secret Muslim victory edifice celebrating 9/11. Similarly, it’s not clear what specifically about the EPIC City plans, put forward by a development group associated with the East Plano Islamic Center (EPIC) mosque, has inspired the outrage, aside from the group’s religion. The project is set to include a Muslim school and mosque, and the developers have said they’ll abide by fair-housing laws and not bar anyone because of their religion. That’s all enough to garner EPIC City a sort of El Chapo–level investigative response from the Texas government. On March 31, Abbott ordered the Texas Rangers to look into EPIC for “potential criminal activities.” In an X post, he claimed that “a dozen state agencies” are “investigating” the project. Abbott has repeatedly suggested EPIC City’s planners intend the community to be a “no-go zone” where law enforcement would be banned from enforcing American laws. EPIC City has also become grist in the budding Republican Senate primary between Paxton and Sen. John Cornyn. Paxton has perhaps outdone even Abbott in his zeal to stop Muslims from building a neighborhood, announcing the first investigation into the project in March. Not to be left out, Cornyn himself on Monday called for a Justice Department investigation.

Again, it’s not really clear what the case is here. A journalist for KERA, a North Texas media nonprofit, noticed the same thing, writing that for all the announced investigations, Abbott hasn’t explained “what laws may have been violated.”

[...] Since then, EPIC City has been picked up by various right-wing talkers, from Glenn Beck to Christian nationalist Lance Wallnau. A guest on Mark Levin’s show speculated that people affiliated with the mosque appeared to have built “an observation post and possibly a shooting platform” near a police station to take on the cops. YouTuber Dave Rubin said EPIC City was going to be “a giant Islamic mega-city.” This anger is being felt on the ground in Dallas, too. On March 31, a county commissioner’s hearing about EPIC stretched for more than four hours, as residents opposed to the project testified that the development would be a sharia-law compound filled with stonings and honor killings.

[...] Unlike the “Ground Zero mosque,” EPIC’s opponents have struggled to find a kind of geographic symbolism on the level of the World Trade Center. But one critic has come up with an interesting idea involving the television show Dallas. Far-right activist Amy Mek, who has almost half a million followers on X, tried to key in on this story’s emotional resonance for opponents of the development in a post on Tuesday. The EPIC mosque group, she claims, once hosted an event at the Texas ranch where Dallas was filmed, and which now hosts an event center.

The right-wing faux outrage machine is whipping up Islamophobia reminiscent to the Park51 debate in the early 2010s, this time with EPIC City in Texas.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

The ‘Ground Zero Mosque,’ A Right-Wing Fever Dream That Never Was

What started off as a vision for an iconic Islamic center in Manhattan brought death threats and backlash. Muslim Americans are still feeling it.

Rowaida Abdelaziz at HuffPost: 

NEW YORK ― Building an Islamic center in Lower Manhattan was always ambitious ― not because the organizers anticipated it would be controversial, but because they wanted it to be a first of its kind.

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and his then-wife, Daisy Khan, wanted to call it “Cordoba House,” a reference to a period of relative tolerance and pluralism in medieval Spain under Muslim rule.

The proposed center would establish a landmark in bustling New York City where Muslims from across the state and the country could participate in everything from art classes to halal bazaars, sports and educational programming. The 15-story center would include a mosque, a swimming pool, a 500-seat performing arts center and child care facilities.

“For us, it was a way to feature Islam in its full glory and its full diversity and its cultural production. The music, the art, the cuisine, and the history,” said Khan, an award-winning speaker and women’s activist. “It would become an iconic center in New York.”

But Khan and Abdul Rauf’s vision for the multifaceted center would never come to be. Instead, a coalition of conservative antagonists managed to turn an entirely imagined version of it into the centerpiece of an ideological war in the aftermath of Sept. 11.

That began with the name itself: Cordoba House became the “Ground Zero Mosque,” despite the fact it wasn’t just a mosque and was not exactly located at Ground Zero, either.  

The “Ground Zero Mosque” took on a life on its own, inflaming a grieving city after 9/11 and inciting Islamophobic groups from across the country. Overnight, a local story about a community board meeting to discuss the proposed Islamic center became a fiercely debated international controversy. There was a 50% increase in anti-Muslim hate crimes the year after it was proposed.

The attacks came from many sides: Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani called the plan a “desecration” and said that “nobody would allow something like that at Pearl Harbor.” John Bolton, who later worked for the Trump administration, delivered a speech by video during one of the September 2010 protests against Cordoba House and questioned the “true efforts” of the mosque organizers.

[...]

Making Islam Feel American To Americans’

There are 3 million Muslims in the United States — approximately 1% of the population. Islam in America has no majority race, comprising descendants of slaves, immigrants from more than 70 countries, and many second and third-generation Americans.

More than 750,000 Muslims live in New York City alone, and the five boroughs are home to 285 mosques. Almost 50 of them are in Manhattan, according to a 2018 tally from the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, and at least two are located in Lower Manhattan.

But at the turn of the century, spaces and resources were growing limited in many mosques, and they often had to run back-to-back congregational prayers to accommodate the large crowds for Friday worship.

That was true at Abdul Rauf’s Lower Manhattan mosque, Masjid al-Farah, which inspired him and Khan to build something bigger. They made an unsuccessful bid on a former consulate and townhouse in 1997, followed by another on the McBurney YMCA in 1999.

“The timing had nothing to do with post-9/11,” said Khan. “We had the whole business plan by then. People don’t realize the reasons as to why we wanted to do this.”

[...]

Holding On To What’s Left

Throughout 2010, Abdul Rauf still hoped they could quell concerns, answer questions and promote their original vision. They renamed the project “Park51,” a generic reference to the center’s street address. But it was already too late.

In January 2011, Abdul Rauf, Khan and El-Gamal parted ways and dissolved their partnership.

“I knew viscerally that the enemy was a very strong enemy, and that the enemy was stronger than us. All we could do is survive at that point,” said Khan. “I needed to survive for whatever was going to come in the future, and I needed to keep my people safe and my family safe, and my community safe.”

El-Gamal tried to maintain some hope that the property could be used for good. In September 2011, he announced the opening of a photo exhibition alongside a much smaller prayer space.

El-Gamal’s Soho Properties acquired 49-51 Park Place in 2014, and he continued to use part of the new space for prayers. But in 2015, the property closed down entirely for demolition, and in 2017, Soho Properties announced it was building a 43-story luxury condominium high-rise tower on the block, with the cost of a 1-bedroom unit to start at $1.92 million.

Khan hasn’t seen the new condos. Just the thought of passing by overwhelms her with sadness.

Looking back, she said she would do some things differently: She would not have showcased every part of the project right away, would have involved the 9/11 families earlier and formed an interfaith board at the start. But deep down, she knows the manipulation and coordinated attacks probably would have happened anyway.

Khan sees the same Islamophobia that brought down the dream of Cordoba House happening in other venues: in the attacks on Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), the first two Muslim congresswomen, and in fights over other Muslim community centers around the country. Just last year, a mosque in New Jersey filed a discrimination lawsuit against its local city and zoning board claiming the township had discriminated against the Muslim congregants.

“It just keeps morphing from one situation to another, but the template is the same,” she said.

Meanwhile, attacks on mosques have spiked nationwide since 2005, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, with at least 300 incidents reported between 2010 to May 2021. Across the country, mosque opponents have used zoning ordinances, traffic concerns and parking restrictions as a pretext to block places of worship for Muslim Americans.

States like New Jersey, California, Texas and Florida ― all of which have sizable Muslim populations ― have all seen heated resistance not just to mosques but also to Islamic schools, cemeteries and other centers. In 2017, one New Jersey town paid $3.5 million to settle a federal lawsuit after it denied an application to build a mosque. In Tennessee, mosque opponents filed a lawsuit seeking to block the construction of a mosque in 2012 but were ultimately turned away when the Supreme Court declined to hear the motion. Similar settlements have been paid across the country to resolve disputes over religious freedom.

Remember the massive Islamophobic backlash to Park51 (aka "Ground Zero Mosque") back in 2010? There were plans for a community center for Muslims that wasn't near Ground Zero to feature the full aspects of their culture and faith.

[cheapnchalu]

Why India Needs A Non-Crippling Policy On Religion!

People in India have religious freedom. So do people in USA. The ambiguities surrounding the interpretations of 'religion' have seeped into the rights and 'not-so-right' of religious freedom too. The debate over Park51 (the controversial area near ground zero where Muslims have been offering prayers for quite sometime now but a mosque has recently been proposed) is flaring the sentiments of the residents of US, Muslims and non-Muslims alike. But, the debate and the exchange of heated arguments are well in place as they are avoiding conflicts and loss of life and property. The situation in India is strikingly different though the issues are largely the same. The difference arises out of the intervention of law of the land and the priorities that law and religion have respectively. Park51 is not new to the local Muslims of New York, they have been offering prayers in that place for quite sometime. It is not a Mosque though, but a place where they gather to offer prayers. The furore is created on the proposal of building a mosque there - an official, designated place, approved by the municipal authorities of New York. If nothing else, it does bring out the planned approach that the law follows when it comes even to religion and its practice. Consider a similar situation in India. Any controversy would revolve around the 'discovery' of such a controversial temple or mosque! The municipal corporation has little control over a temple or a mosque springing up in a locality. In fact, these places of worship are one of the finest ways to gobble up state land and encroach the area, even if it happens to be in the middle of the street! The Indian state machinery has often failed in handling religious outbursts and clashes - a fact that remains true since before independence during 'direct action day' or even much before that during the times of the Mughals, the formation of Khalsa, etc. The big question is about prioritising these two important issues - religion and state! I have always believed that religion is a personal affair and the moment it clashes with the functioning of the state, a check should be imposed. But, this is not entirely true. There are many states which follow, largely, a common religion and it helps to unite their nation. But, again, the reality of the day is that countries like India, US, Malaysia and parts of Europe are multicultural, multiracial and multi-religion. And it is important that a common thread is found to unite the nation and a dividing theme like that of religion can never be it.  In such cases, religion has to take a backseat. The state must come before the personal choices - that of religion, faith, caste and creed. Any instance of the state taking a hit due to religion will result in a potboiler created by a selfish few and that is what has been happening in India for quite sometime. What we may need is a strict policy on religion and its practice. Why should loudspeakers be allowed on top of makeshift temples and mosques? Why should highways be blocked for religious processions? Why should the industry, education and lives be kept at stake due to the outbreak of religious hatred? The answer is simple. In India, religion votes and when every vote counts, religion is simply the most important factor for a win!

Visit http://cheapnchalu.com

[hatebook]

I hate pandering Political Correctness ass kissing idiots! Those who are terrified to speak freely, while telling other people who dare to that they can't say that! I hate that we can no longer OFFEND Terrorist Muslims,because it's not politically correct or tolerant! Here's news! Tolerance is something exercised to put up with the intolerable! It's not a positive attribute. One doesn't tolerate something they're in accord with. They agree with it. To tolerate something is to make exception to what is intolerable, for whatever reason. So when people say we should tolerate Park51 Mosque, which is what it is! While PC ass kissers will object and say; "It's not a Mosque, it's a Muslim Community Center!" They fail to realize that ALL MOSQUES ARE MUSLIM COMMUNITY CENTERS! I hate people that say we have to tolerate that monstrosity, that tomb stone planned to gloat over Muslim terrorists destroying thousands of lives on 911. If all things were going as planned, Park51 expected to open it's doors on the 10th anniversary of 911! A smack in your face attack yet again, by Muslims, on the anniversary day of horrific suffering for all of America! While advocates for that building will say, it's their religious freedom to build that Mosque! And to object is bigotry! No, it's common sense! Over 300 Mosques in NYC prove Muslims enjoy freedom of religion in NYC. Their terrorists that speak hate against America on New York streets, do to! So let's make "Tolerance" work both ways, shall we? Dare to say, Park51 Mosque, sponsored by a radical Imam who talks out of both sides of his face between when he's here in America and in Muslim Countries abroad and refuses to condemn Muslim terrorist groups and even says America earned September 11th, let's make a proposition for that sick bastard and his planned Mosque two blocks from Ground Zero. We the people of the United States of America will "Tolerate" Ground Zero Mosque/Park51, just as soon as a Christian church and/or Synagogue is tolerated in Mecca and Saudi Arabia! I fucking hate PC bullshit. And I hate Islamic Terrorists.I also hate ass kissing simpering gutless American's who are too fucking scared to say that.

[rajaaelidrissi]

[csunj250viscom-blog]

Resolution: In The Know: Park 51- The 'Ground Zero' Mosque YouTube video is the truth behind what has been said about Park 51. Park 51 isn't in actuality build on “Ground Zero” its location is about one block away. The resource it provides to the general public is like any recreation center (ex. YMCA) but, with also the desire to practice any Muslim custom. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoiPuy8p5CA&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DuoiPuy8p5CA&nomobile=1

[justinspoliticalcorner]

In August 2007 the New York Police Department released a report called “Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat,” claiming that the looming danger to the United States was from “unremarkable” Muslim men under 35 who visit “extremist incubators.” The language sounds ominous, conjuring up Clockwork Orange–style laboratories of human reprogramming, twisting average Muslims into instruments of evil. And yet what are these “incubators”? The report states that they are mosques, “cafes, cab driver hangouts, flophouses, prisons, student associations, non-governmental organizations, hookah (water pipe) bars, butcher shops and book stores”—in other words, precisely the places where ordinary life happens.

But the report wasn’t based on any independent social science research, and actual studies clearly refuted the very claims made by the NYPD. The Rand Corporation found that the number of homegrown radicals here is “tiny.” “There are more than 3 million Muslims in the United States, and few more than 100 have joined jihad—about one out of every 30,000—suggesting an American Muslim population that remains hostile to jihadist ideology and its exhortations to violence,” Rand’s 2010 report found. “A mistrust of American Muslims by other Americans seems misplaced,” it concluded. This year, an analysis by the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security also described the number of American Muslims involved in domestic terrorism since 2001 as “tiny.” “This study’s findings challenge Americans to be vigilant against the threat of homegrown terrorism while maintaining a responsible sense of proportion,” it said. And a 2011 Gallup survey found that American Muslims were the least likely of any major US religious group to consider attacks on civilians justified.

Every group has its loonies. And yet the idea that American Muslim communities are foul nests of hatred, where dark-skinned men plot Arabic violence while combing one another’s beards, persists. In fact, it’s worse than that. In the past few years, another narrative about American Muslims has come along, which sows a different kind of paranoia. While the old story revolves around security, portraying American Muslims as potential terrorists or terrorist sympathizers, 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. Building a mosque in Lower Manhattan or in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, or in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, becomes an act of “stealth jihad.” Muslims filing for divorce invokes the bizarre charge of “creeping Sharia.” A dual-language Arabic-English high school in New York is demonized as a “madrassa.” The State Board of Education in Texas determines that reading about Islam is not education but indoctrination. Changing your Muslim-sounding name to one with a more Anglophone tenor triggers an NYPD investigation, according to the Associated Press. Even the fact that some Butterball turkeys are “halal” was enough to fire up the bigotry last Thanksgiving, the most American of holidays.

A Washington Post/ABC News poll taken in October 2001 found that 39 percent of Americans held unfavorable opinions of Islam. After dipping for a few years, the number rose to 46 percent in 2006 and reached 49 percent—basically half the population—in 2010, the last year the question was asked. (Other recent polls show similar results.) Such 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 United States is being actively promoted.

This past September, Wired broke the story that the FBI tells its counterterrorism agents in training that mainstream American Muslims are probably terrorist sympathizers, that the Prophet Muhammad was a “cult leader” and that the religiously mandated practice of giving charity in Islam is no more than a “funding mechanism for combat.” The training materials, which stated that FBI agents had the “ability to bend or suspend the law and impinge on freedoms of others,” identify other insidious techniques Muslims use for promoting jihad, including “immigration” and “law suits”—in other words, the ordinary uses of the American political system. The revelations forced the FBI to remove 876 pages from its manuals.

Another egregious example that recently came to light is that the NYPD, as part of its training, screened The Third Jihad, a film that claims “the true agenda of much of Islam in America” is “a strategy to infiltrate and dominate” the country. The film ran on a continuous loop for somewhere between three months and a year of training and was viewed by at least 1,489 officers. Yet another example involved Army Lt. Col. Matthew Dooley, who taught a course at the Pentagon’s Joint Forces Staff College that informed senior officers that the United States would have to fight a “total war” against the world’s Muslims, including abandoning the international laws of war that protect civilians (deemed “no longer relevant”), and possibly applying “the historical precedents of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki” to destroy Islam’s holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Claiming “Islam is an ideology rather than solely a religion,” the class taught that the United States was “culturally vulnerable” to this threat because of its “‘judeo-christian’ [sic] ethic of reason and tolerance.” The Pentagon canceled the course in the wake of the revelations, and Dooley maintains a nonteaching position, pending an investigation.

The consequences of these efforts to promote anti-Muslim beliefs and sentiments influence how American Muslims practice their faith, engage with their neighbors, cooperate with law enforcement, work at their jobs and study at school. Anti-mosque activity, according to the ACLU, has taken place in more than half the states in the country. And American Muslims, who make up 1–2 percent of the population, account for more than 20 percent of religion-based filings with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Republican politicians, meanwhile, have been falling all over themselves to vilify Muslims, especially during the presidential primary. Herman Cain proclaimed that “a majority of Muslims share the extremist views,” initially vowing not to appoint any Muslims to his cabinet. Rick Santorum endorsed religious profiling, saying that “obviously Muslims would be someone [sic] you’d look at.” Newt Gingrich compared Muslims to Nazis in 2010, when he opposed building an Islamic center in Lower Manhattan. “Nazis don’t have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust museum in Washington,” he said. And, in 2007, Mitt Romney said, “Based on the numbers of American Muslims [as a percentage] in our population, I cannot see that a cabinet position would be justified. But of course, I would imagine that Muslims could serve at lower levels of my administration.” Whatever happened to the matter of qualifications? But hey, if you’re a Muslim, that’s all you’ll ever be. Romney has hired Walid Phares, part of the active anti-Muslim network, as a foreign policy adviser, and GOP voters continue to consider that President Obama is a Muslim in large numbers (52 percent of Mississippi GOP members thought so in March).

It gets stranger still. When media portrayals of everyday American Muslim life are produced, the very ordinariness is attacked as a lie. TLC’s show All-American Muslim premiered in November to favorable reviews. The show, which focused on five Lebanese-American Shiite Muslim families in the Dearborn, Michigan, area, was a bit of a yawner for racy reality TV, but it was a useful kind of ethnography for Americans unfamiliar with the stuff of daily American Muslim life. Immediately, the organized anti-Muslim network kicked into gear. The Florida Family Association, basically a one-man show run by David Caton, led a boycott of the show via e-mail that was quickly picked up by the extreme right-wing anti-Islamic blogosphere, and led to Lowe’s and Kayak.com pulling their ads. Caton’s e-mail read, “The show profiles only Muslims that appear to be ordinary folks while excluding many Islamic believers whose agenda poses a clear and present danger to liberties and traditional values that the majority of Americans cherish.”

Follow the logic. The only thing accepted as “normal” for a Muslim is to act like an extremist. Ordinary Muslim folk appearing to live ordinary Muslim lives? That’s just plain suspicious.

Does this mean that the United States is an Islamophobic country? Of course not. Large support for American Muslims exists in many quarters [see Laila Al-Arian’s essay in this issue, page 31]. Polls may suggest that about half the population is anti-Muslim, but that leaves half that isn’t. In many quarters of the country, there is genuine, not suspicious, interest in American Muslims and the realities they face, as evidenced by the fact that TLC produced All-American Muslim. Aasif Mandvi’s contributions to The Daily Show routinely deflate the power of this contemporary prejudice, and libraries, museums, classrooms and houses of worship across the country now regularly include Muslims and Islam in their programming in an attempt to further understanding and combat bigotry.

American Muslims have responded to events over the past decade and the expansion of an anti-Muslim network largely by being more, not less, visible. The number of mosques grew 74 percent over the past decade, despite the opposition Muslims sometimes confront in their construction. Even if a 2011 poll found that 48 percent of American Muslims reported experiencing discrimination in the previous twelve months, they also showed more optimism than other Americans in the poll that their lives would be better in five years (perhaps, in part, because of today’s discrimination). The guiding belief in the American Muslim community today is that the country will recognize that Muslims have always been and will continue to be a part of America.

h/t: http://www.thenation.com/article/168383/fear-and-loathing-islam

See Also:

Jack Shaheen, “How the Media Created the Muslim Monster Myth” Petra Bartosiewicz, “Deploying Informants, the FBI Stings Muslims” Laila Lalami, “Islamophobia and Its Discontents” Abed Awad, “The True Story of Sharia in American Courts” Ramzi Kassem, “The Long Roots of the NYPD Spying Program” Max Blumenthal, “The Sugar Mama of Anti-Muslim Hate” Laila Al-Arian, “When Your Father Is Accused of Terrorism”

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Thirty years ago, no one outside the halls of academe had heard of Islamophobia. Yet today it is virtually impossible to open a newspaper without encountering either the term or an argument against its use. The word began to appear in print in the late 1980s, when Muslims in Western countries—people of starkly different racial and ethnic backgrounds—began to notice similarities among their experiences with hate, intimidation or discrimination. But almost from the start, there was a parallel effort to discredit this neologism: it was assailed as a fiction, at best the product of a culture of victimhood and at worst a very dangerous myth. Thus we have Islamophobia and “Islamophobia,” one with currency on the left side of the political spectrum and the other a common target of the right.

People who believe that Islamophobia is a fiction are fond of pointing out that Islam is neither a race nor an ethnicity. Islam is a set of beliefs and customs. And in a free society, one ought to be able to criticize all kinds of ideas without fear of being labeled hateful toward Muslims. The late Christopher Hitchens declared that “Islamophobia” was a “stupid neologism” because it “aims to promote criticism of Islam to the gallery of special offenses associated with racism.” Sam Harris, the bestselling author of The End of Faith and The Moral Landscape, wrote that “apologists for Islam have even sought to defend their faith from criticism by inventing a psychological disorder known as ‘Islamophobia.’” He continued, “There is no such thing as Islamophobia…. It is not a form of bigotry or racism to observe that the specific tenets of the faith pose a special threat to civil society. Nor is it a sign of intolerance to notice when people are simply not being honest about what they and their co-religionists believe.”

The fact that Islamophobia is a recently coined term—or an “invention,” to use Harris’s language—should not be taken as evidence that it refers to a nonexistent pathology. The word “homophobia” was coined in the 1950s, but I doubt anyone would seriously claim that antipathy toward—and discrimination against—gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people did not exist before then. It seems to me that as Muslims have become more visible in American society, the fear and contempt for them, which used to be expressed in private, are now being promoted on the front pages of newspapers and on cable news talk-shows. Perhaps that was why a neologism was needed.

But I suspect that Harris and others would still insist that what is often called “Islamophobia” is nothing more than a vigorous intellectual debate about the merits of Islamic beliefs or practices and denotes neither hatred of Muslims nor any kind of discrimination against them. And I might be inclined to believe in this neatly theoretical distinction if I had not had experiences that contradicted it.

Although the anti-Muslim backlash is frequently called a myth, the numbers tell a different story. Muslims in the United States make up less than 1 percent of the population, but they were nearly 13 percent of victims of religious-based hate crimes in 2010. It is true that this number is down from the historic high of 27 percent in 2001, the year of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but almost double what it was in 2008, the year Barack Obama was elected president. These crimes include intimidation, burglary, arson, vandalism and aggravated assault. And they target not just Muslims but also people who are mistaken for Muslims—Sikh men, for instance.

Furthermore, this rise in hate crimes is taking place in the context of a highly virulent debate about the visibility of Muslims in America. Two years ago, a huge controversy broke out about building Park51, an interfaith community center and mosque planned to be two blocks from Ground Zero in Manhattan. Nearly everyone with political ambitions jumped into the fray. Mitt Romney declared that Park51 had “the potential for extremists to use the mosque for global recruiting and propaganda.” Rudy Giuliani called it “a desecration.” And Sarah Palin famously tweeted, “Ground Zero Mosque supporters: doesn’t it stab you in the heart, as it does ours throughout the heartland? Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate [sic].” A month later, a cabdriver in New York was asked, “Are you Muslim?” When he said yes, he was stabbed in the neck.

Despite the accusations and the calls for investigations, no one turned up any evidence that Park51 was a recruiting center for terrorists. But the tone was set. Campaigns against the building of mosques erupted in several cities around the country, many of them premised on unproven claims that the mosques would serve a terrorist agenda. In Temecula, California, protest organizers urged demonstrators to bring dogs to the Friday prayers at the Islamic Center, which was in the process of getting permits for a mosque. One woman who opposed the mosque said, “Right now we’re at war with the Taliban and the Muslims, and our boys are over there fighting and dying for our freedom. What would it be like if they come home and found out we just let them in the front door?” Thus the mosque was seen as a temple for foreign terrorists and not for Americans with the same freedom of worship as everyone else.

Likewise, protests were organized against building a mosque in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Signs on the mosque were vandalized and construction equipment set on fire. Herman Cain, the pizza magnate running for the GOP nomination, bluntly declared that communities should have the right to ban mosques—in direct violation of the First Amendment. His reasoning? “Our Constitution guarantees separation of church and state. Islam combines church and state. They’re using the church part of our First Amendment to infuse their morals into that community.”

Last year, Peter King, chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, held a hearing to determine whether American Muslims are law-abiding people and whether they ignored radicals among them. (Replace the word “Muslims” with “Jews” or “Hindus” or “blacks” or “gays” in that sentence and see how that hearing sounds to you.) King once declared, without evidence, that more than 80 percent of mosques in America are run by extremists. He has also consistently maintained that American Muslims ignore radicals among them, when in fact studies have shown they are the single largest source of tips on terrorist suspects.

What this means is that even though American Muslims are reporting suspicious activity to the police, they are being spied on by law enforcement agencies and subjected to hearings questioning their loyalty. When a Muslim runs the CIA Counterterrorism Center, he is not immune to accusations of being an infiltrator. When a Muslim starts an Arabic language academy, as Debbie Almontaser did in Brooklyn, she must be prepared for accusations that she is running a “madrassa” and expect to be fired from her job. When a Muslim is elected to Congress, he is not above being asked, as Keith Ellison was by Glenn Beck, “Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.” When a Muslim beauty queen walks down the catwalk in a tiny bikini, she risks being labeled, as Rima Fakih was by talk-show host Debbie Schlussel, “Miss Hezbollah.”

So it’s fair to say that we have in America today two systems of citizenship: one for Muslims and one for non-Muslims. Muslim citizens live under a cloud of suspicion, no matter what they do and no matter what they say. Imagine for a moment what this must do to a high school senior in Dallas, a researcher in Durham, a schoolchild in Portland, a social worker in Dearborn. The biggest mistake they can make is to believe the stories that are being told about them in the media—to believe that they are the Other, that they are dangerous or suspicious or different or strange, rather than what they really are, which is ordinary human beings.

See Also:

Moustafa Bayoumi, “Fear and Loathing of Islam” Jack Shaheen, “How the Media Created the Muslim Monster Myth” Petra Bartosiewicz, “Deploying Informants, the FBI Stings Muslims” Abed Awad, “The True Story of Sharia in American Courts” Ramzi Kassem, “The Long Roots of the NYPD Spying Program” Max Blumenthal, “The Sugar Mama of Anti-Muslim Hate” Laila Al-Arian, “When Your Father Is Accused of Terrorism”

h/t: Laila Lalami at The Nation