Let’s Prove Them Wrong: Intolerance in Post-9/11 America

The anniversary of the horrific September 11^th terrorist attacks will arrive and pass with waning fanfare each year.  The major network news channels will still broadcast their tributes with morose clips of dust, smoke, twisted steel, and brave heroes.  Suited politicians will pay their respects.  The names of the innocent victims of the truly barbaric act will be read aloud at the memorial erected in lower Manhattan, the nearly finished façade of the beautiful new mammoth tower glittering in the background.

But though lower Manhattan has sprung back to life -- a testament to the resilience of the American people – the attacks of September 11^th have nudged the US down a painful path of war and death, xenophobia, racial profiling, and violence.  While national security should be a priority of the federal government. So too should ensuring that any dark-skinned male with a beard, regardless of his religion, accent, or country of origin, doesn’t feel like a target of gun-toting psychopaths or law enforcement agencies entrusted to protect them.  In a country dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, tolerance is an oft-mentioned though too rarely practiced ideal.  We can and should do better. 

Once the dust settled on ground zero, the fire was lit under the Islamaphobic fringe, a slow simmer that occasionally boiled into public view.Remember Florida Pastor Terry Jones’s disgraceful publicity stunt – the “execution” burning of the Quran that incited riots in Afghanistan that killed 12 innocent U.N. workers?  Remember the protests over the planned Mosque in Manhattan?

Several of our elected officials have turned the heat up. Since 2011, two dozen states have proposed or passed laws banning Sharia law in the US court system, despite the fact that the “extent of its applicability is always dictated by American law.”  New York Representative Peter King has fueled Islamaphobia with Congressional hearings on the extent of radicalization in the American Muslim community.  The Tea-Party hero Michele Bachmann and her fear-mongering paranoid colleagues harked back to the golden days of McCarthy-style witchhunts with their baseless accusations earlier this year that the Muslim Brotherhood had infiltrated top levels of the US government. 

Rhetoric and political theatrics is never without consequence.  Thirty percent of the public now believes that Muslims want to establish Sharia Law in the US.  This Anti-Islamic fervor, fueled and legitimized by the very people enlisted with upholding our civil liberties, has led to vicious acts of violence on Muslims and non-Muslims alike.  Last year a New York City cab driver was repeatedly stabbed after disclosing his religion to his passenger.  Two elderly Sikh men were shot to death in California and six slain in Wisconsin after shooters perceived the victims in both cases to be Muslims.

As the Southern Poverty Law Center has so eloquently stated, “rarely has the United States seen a more reckless and bare-knuckled campaign to vilify a distinct class of people and compromise their fundamental civil and human rights than the recent rhetoric against Muslims.”  On this 11^th anniversary of September 11^th, let’s remember that there is no justification for the wholesale demonization of anyone  perceived to be Muslim.  Let’s remember that rhetoric has power that can lead to tragic action.  Let’s remember that we should strive towards respect and tolerance.  Hate and intolerance is what the 9/11 hijackers lived.  It’s what they wanted from us.  Let’s prove them wrong.