VOICES-What happens when an Islamic student asks a question about peaceful Muslims at a conservative event?
It took one American Muslim law student, Saba Ahmed (photo), making one mild criticism during a conservative panel discussion of Benghazi, to get people foaming at the mouth at an event co-hosted by a conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation.
What could she have said to deserve an upbraiding from the stage? "We portray Islam and all Muslims as bad, but there’s 1.8 billion followers of Islam. We have 8 million-plus Muslim Americans in this country and I don’t see them represented here."
Watching the video of the panelists respond to Ahmed on Monday afternoon, you can almost hear the wheels turning in their heads: How dare this young American Muslim law student – in a hijab, no less – talk back to us? How out-of-line for her to assert that the majority of Muslims in the world are peaceful people and that society should not use a broad brush to demonize an entire faith based on the acts of a very tiny minority!
What came out of their mouths was worse. "Are you American?" asked panelist Brigitte Gabriel, after opining that the majority of peaceful Muslims was "irrelevant" because "Most Germans were peaceful, yet the Nazis drove the agenda and as a result, 6 million died."
Panel moderator and conservative radio host Chris Plante mocked Ahmed by asking, "Can you tell me who the head of the 'Muslim peace movement' is?" (You know it's got to be bad when a known Islamophobe, Frank Gaffney, seemed frighteningly like the voice of reason when he said that most Muslims "don’t speak Arabic, aren’t imbued with the traditions of the faith as out of Saudi Arabia, for example, and they are not necessarily the problem, at least not yet.")
I have been on the receiving end of attacks and vilification for being an outspoken critic of discriminatory law enforcement policies that target people based on race, religion and national origin – and for talking back to bigots – so I wasn't surprised at the response Ahmed received at Heritage.
But I am gratified that at least some in the media – starting with Dana Millibank at the Washington Post, and continuing with Brian Beutler at the New Republic – stood up and called out the panelists' and audience responses as "ugly", "vitrolic", "raucous" and "lopsided".
The problem, though, isn’t this one event by one conservative think tank, or a few stooges being paid by the conservative right to act as megaphones of mass hate.
The problem is that there is apparently a certain level of bigotry against an entire faith community that is acceptable.
The problem is that such bigotry continues to play out on major media outlets that give agency and platform to people like Florida Qur'an-burning Pastor Terry Jones, to zoning boards that refuse to allow our communities to build Islamic community or worship centers, to a Congressman who thinks that we have too many mosques in America (and who then conducts congressional hearings on alleged radicalization in Muslim communities).
Gaffney and Gabriel are among the ringleaders of the Islamophobia industry in the United States that both drives and benefits from this bigotry. Gaffney, for instance, calls Islam "communism with a God" and believes we must root out the Islamic operatives in our government who are well on their way to replacing American democracy with Sharia law .
Gabriel – who was named by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a member of the Anti-Muslim Inner Circle – claims that 25% of Muslims worldwide about 180 thousand to 300 thousand individual people) are "dedicated to the destruction of Western civilization".
And two reports (one by the Center for American Progress, titled Fear, Inc., one called Legislating Fear from the Council on American Islamic Relations) revealed that over $119 million has been used to fund organizations who help legitimize Islamophobes like Gaffney and Gabriel.
Spreading hate against Muslims is, apparently, a quite lucrative business in the United States.
Saba Ahmed’s experience demonstrates that there is a systematic demonization of Muslims worldwide – and particularly in the United States – that results from giving Islamophobia a prominent platform. Gabriel's decision to question whether Saba was an American or not is, in itself, indicative of the common misperception that one can’t be simultaneously Muslim and American – that somehow our Muslim-ness negates our American-ness.
I am Muslim, and I am American. I don't have to defend my faith – neither should Ahmed – and speaking out against the vilification of Islam or government policies that violate the rights of Americans, including Muslims Americans, is how I practice American patriotism.
I love my country enough to want it to do the right thing. My family came to the US, like so many other families before them. They came so that we could have the freedoms of which they would have only dreamed while living under military occupation in Palestine.
Questioning whether Muslims-Americans like Saba Ahmed and I actually love – or are even a part of – this country is the real un-American act, not questioning the fact-free hate spewed by (paycheck-collecting) hate-mongers.
(Linda Sarsour is the National Advocacy Director for the National Network for Arab American Communities (NNAAC), the Executive Director of the Arab American Association of New York and lead organizer for The Campaign to Take on Hate. Follow her on Twitter at @lsarsour. This column was posted first at theguardian.com)
-cw