I've avoided it so far because it seemed like a non-issue. The plans to build it were approved a long time ago and it's privately-owned property. The folks who own it should be able to build whatever they like, as long as it meets zoning regulations. Nobody said much about it at the time New York City officials approved the plan. It's only been since Fox News picked up on the blog rants of a professional Muslim-hater named Pamela Geller that any large amount of opposition erupted. It's a phony issue, based on bigoitry, and talking about it feeds the trolls who want to stir up hatred against Muslim Americans.
This week, the discussion crossed the line. Michael Enright, an alcoholic 21-year-old with mental problems, responded to the increasingly loud and hate-filled public discussion, by getting into a New York City cab and suddenly stabbing the driver, a Muslim American named Ahmed Sharif. Enright, who was drunk at the time of the incident, is now charged with committing a hate crime, and justly so.
Here in East Tennessee, near the Kentucky-Virginia border, we don't have many opportunities to meet Muslims. I do have one friend, Ismail, who is a naturalized American from Egypt. He and his wife Cathy, a Southern Baptist by birth, have three college age children --- Karima, Adam and Khaled, all of whom are dark-skinned, very beautiful, physically and intellectually, and have accents that sound like they stepped out of an episode of "The Dukes of Hazzard." They're American as apple pie.
Ismail teaches mathematics at a local community college. He is a short, stocky man who was as handsome as a movie star in his youth before he immigrated to America. Today he is gentle, very soft-spoken, and very devout in his religious beliefs. I became acquainted with him and Cathy while partnered with another gay man. I was amazed that they invited us into their home, considering their distinctly conservative religious backgrounds. But they are both committed to diversity in society, something they've obviously had to learn the hard way in a community dominated by Pentecostal and other fundamentalist religions.
When I see the Fox News-fueled protests against the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque" --- it's not a mosque, it's an Islamic Cultural Center, and it's actually three blocks away from the "hallowed" ground of the former World Trade Center at the site of a somewhat-less-hallowed Burlington Coat Factory --- I think of Ismail and his family and how singularly unthreatening they are to the world around them, except to people who object to anyone whose skin is darker than theirs and whose religion is anything other than fundamentalist Christian.
And when I heard about the unprovoked attack on Ahmed Sharif, I immediately ictured Mr. Sharif as looking like my friend Ismail or one of his sons. And I thought, how could someone hate them enough to hurt them?
I've been posting about this on Huffington Post today and have exchanged banter with people who share my views and those who obviously don't. One person said, "Do you believe the (Muslim) person who shot up Fort Hood was inspired by Fox News?" Meaning, of course, that he assumed I did not show sympathy for the victims of that crime, which resulted in multiple deaths at the hands of a disturbed Muslim-American military psychiatrist. It was a stupid argyment, one easily refuted by saying that all crimes of violence are heinous, the degree of which is determined by the results, in terms of victims. The other argument is, "No, the psychiatrist/shooter wasn't inspired by Fox News. Fox News only encourages hatred AGAINST Muslims, not BY Muslims.
Of course, Ahmed Sharif is nothing like my friend Ismail. He is a distinct individual with his own life struggles and dreams and political beliefs, none of which I am familiar with. But he has now become the symbol of what happens when bigotry erupts against minorities, much as the four little girls in Birmingham, Alabama's 16th Street Baptist Church symbolized the racial wars of the 1960s, and Matthew Shepard's death became a rallying cry against homophobic violence.
"When will we ever learn?" goes the line from "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" an antiwar song of the 1960s. When will we ever learn?
No comments:
Post a Comment