Concerns over backlash are hogwash
BY MONA CHAREN
Comments 
39
Published: November 10, 2009
"U.S. Homeland Security officials are working with groups around the United States to head off any possible anti-Muslim backlash following the shootings at Fort Hood in Texas.”
The Department of Homeland Security is in good company in its confusion.
Gen. George Casey, the Army’s top general, also worried that "this increased speculation could cause a backlash against some of our Muslim soldiers. And I’ve asked our Army leaders to be on the lookout for that.” And
President Obama cautioned against "jumping to conclusions.”
The backlash trope is trotted out after every episode of terrorist violence. But it is as false as it is dangerous. This image of a nation on a hair trigger for violence against Muslims is a calumny.
The repeated invocation of this libel has had an effect, though. It has succeeded in intimidating many Americans about the proper bounds of discussion. Casey reinforces this timidity when he frets that "our diversity” may be a casualty of the attack at Fort Hood. He and the Obama administration are obscuring the real challenge Americans face.
Our challenge is not to transcend the demons of vengeance clawing at our souls. Our challenge is to deal intelligently with a threat that arises from religious convictions. Non-bigoted observers can see that while the vast majority of the world’s Muslims are not extremists, a significant minority are. And it matters what people believe.
We don’t like to pass judgment on others’ religious convictions. That’s fine. But when a religious belief spurs violence and mass murder, it becomes political, and it becomes a proper concern of the military and security services. Worldwide, Muslims believing themselves to be advancing the faith have committed more than 14,000 acts of violence just since 9/11. The list is long and bloody — and it includes many innocent Muslims.
Many hit home. In 2003,
Hasan Akbar, a Muslim convert, rolled a grenade into the tent of his fellow soldiers in the
101st Airborne Division on the eve of the invasion of
Iraq. In June,
Abdulhakim Muhammad, another convert, killed one Army recruiter and wounded another in
Little Rock, Ark.
Naveed Haq shot six women at the
Seattle Jewish Federation office in 2006.
Federal agents have thwarted planned terror attacks on
Fort Dix,
N.J., folded up a terror ring in
Lackawanna, N.Y., and uncovered plots against the nation’s financial centers, the
New York subway system, 10 airliners landing in the U.S. (the liquid bomb plot),
JFK airport, the
Brooklyn Bridge, and the Prudential Building in
Newark, N.J., among others.
Do we arrest all Muslims in America?
So shall we arrest all the Muslims in America? That’s the caricature that is encouraged by the "backlash” peddlers. Obviously not. But what we must do is to discriminate — that is, to make distinctions based on what kind of Islam Muslims embrace. We have created a climate in which members of the military were afraid to raise questions about the bald and blatant Islamist comments
Major Nidal Hasan expressed over many years. He was overheard saying, "maybe people should strap bombs on themselves and go to
Times Square.” He was caught proselytizing his patients. He argued frequently to colleagues that the U.S. was engaged in a "war against Islam.”
Yet no one raised a red flag. Might be interpreted as anti-Muslim bigotry. And so the military took no action. Thirteen Americans paid for that with their lives.
If any good were to come out of the Fort Hood massacre, it would be a new clarity about what we are fighting. Islamism is the enemy. Moderate Muslims are allies in the cause. We should no more shrink from confronting and battling Islamism than we would from any of the "isms” we destroyed in the 20th century. Muddled thinking and misplaced delicacy have proved deadly.
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But I ran my stories together. I am in Oklahoma because when my brother was put in "Sunny Side" in Wisconsin with Japanese, my dad secretly bought a farm in Oklahoma and we sneaked out with arrest warrants issued on mom and dad. After the war ended the center was investigated and shut down and the charges dropped on my parents.
I was only 3 years old when my brother who was 3 years older than me to the same birthday was taken. A neighbor boy and I was throwing one of dad's hammers and my brother walked up, I handed him the hammer, he threw it and it hit another boy. My dad had a good paying job and we left to live in squalor where our first year in Okla. dad only took in $400 for the 6(with one onthe way) to live on. I carried this guilt until about 8 years ago when a Highway Patrollman thanked me for his 2nd degree black belt in karate as I had got his instructor interested and he opened a dojo. I then started putting my guilt behind me and realized what I took for being a curse was a blessing with the wonderful things that have happened to me and my family that may not have turned out so good had we stayed.
Read the story of Joeseph being sold into slavery and you'll see some curses turn out for the best. I've had a very fulfilling but perhaps boring life.
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