Fear of Muslim Americans hinders understanding

January 27, 2005

Times are tough these days for American Muslims.

Since last fall, a Muslim family in Arizona was shot at while sitting at home, an Islamic Center in Texas had firebombs lobbed at it, and vandals smeared feces on the walls of a mosque in Fargo, N.D., to mention just a few incidents.

And now a recent survey by Cornell University has revealed a chilling fact: Nearly half of all Americans support some sort of restriction on the civil rights of Muslim Americans.

According to the study, 27 percent of Americans believe that all Muslim Americans should be required to register their whereabouts with the federal government; 26 percent agree that mosques should undergo surveillance; 22 percent think the government should profile citizens as potential threats based on being Muslim or having Middle Eastern heritage; and 29 percent accept that Muslim organizations should be infiltrated by undercover law enforcement agents. Overall, 44 percent support curtailing one or more of the civil liberties of Muslim Americans.

Meanwhile, only about half of the respondents (54 percent) could correctly answer two simple questions about Islam: the name Muslims use to refer to God (Allah) and the name of Islam's holy book (the Quran).

This isn't only depressing. It is also painfully ironic. As President Bush proclaims that the nation is ready to fight for freedom in the rest of the world, almost half of the American public seems prepared to curtail the freedom of their neighbors here at home.

There is simply no foundation for this kind of thinking. Millions of American Muslims live, work and worship peacefully and productively in the United States. They are entitled to the same protections afforded every other American, without being subjected to religious or ethnic scapegoating.

The problem is that we are being repeatedly told by the government and the media to expect to find a terrorist almost every time we encounter a Muslim.

The reality, however, is entirely different. According to law professor David Cole, writing in The Nation magazine, from the mass arrests of 5,000 Muslim men made after Sept. 11, 2001, the government hasn't been able to produce a single terrorism conviction.

In fact, as Cole observes, many Americans appear too ready to trade away someone else's liberty for their own feelings of security. This is the Faustian bargain that has produced a dangerous climate for American Muslims, and it has led to the kind of ethnic or religious discrimination that has no place in the United States.

What the Cornell study also revealed is that our current climate of fear is inflamed and aggravated by television news.

According to the survey, those who pay a great deal of attention to T.V. news are twice as likely to feel personally in danger from a terrorist attack than those who pay only a little attention to the news.

Similarly disturbing is a Harris poll from October that showed that 38 percent of the American public continued to believe that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction when the United States invaded Iraq, even though this had already been widely acknowledged not to be true. There is simply too much falsehood and fear floating in the air today.

What we need is less spin and more truth. Maybe if we listened less to the pundits and demanded more honesty from our politicians, we would be living with less panic and more understanding of our world.

The first step could be as simple as turning off your television set and paying a friendly visit to your local Islamic center. This is especially recommended for those who would curtail the civil rights of Muslim Americans. If you go, I can tell you what you'll find: That Muslim Americans are a remarkably normal group of people, with families, mortgages and kids with homework.

It's a lot easier to fear a stranger than a neighbor.

Moustafa Bayoumi is a professor in the English department at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and co-editor of "The Edward Said Reader" (Vintage, 2000). He can be reached at pmproj [at] progressive [dot] org.