After a tragic event, like the killing of 49 at a nightclub in Orlando, Florida, it is human nature to seek simple explanations, maybe even to point fingers of blame. It is easiest to point to those who are different from ourselves, as if to say “people like me don’t do things like that.”
Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican candidate for president, played on such emotions — and took them to his usual extreme — when he called for racial profiling to stop future attacks and then blamed Muslims for not turning in radicals, such as the Orlando shooter, Omar Mateen.
This “tough talk” may play well with the public, but it is unnecessary, dangerous and wrong.
“When you look at people within the Muslim community and where people are living, and they don’t report,” he said in an interview with Face the Nation on Sunday.
He was more direct and wrong in a speech last week. “Now, the Muslim community … they have to cooperate with law enforcement and turn in the people who they know are bad.”
“They know what’s going on,” he added. “They know that he was bad. They knew the people in San Bernardino were bad. But you know what? They didn’t turn them in. And you know what? We had death and destruction.”
There are many problems with the logic in this argument. The first is the insinuation that Muslims “know what is going on,” suggesting that somehow all Muslims know what all other Muslims are thinking and doing. No one, for good reason, makes such assertions about Christians, Jews, blacks, Native Americans or other groups.
It is also ridiculous to suggest that only Muslims have a responsibility to keep an eye on themselves. Many of the people quoted in news articles about Mateen said he was angry, violent and disconnected. Many of these people were not Muslim. Did they have a duty to share their concerns? What if they have concerns about students, neighbors and co-workers who aren’t Muslim? Should they share those as well?
Worst, the assertion that Muslims don’t report is patently false. A member of Mateen’s mosque contacted the FBI when he became concerned that Mateen was watching videos of an imam tied to radicalization and other shootings in the United States.
“I had told the FBI about Omar because my community and Muslims generally have nothing to hide. I love this country, like most Muslims that I know,” Mohammed Malik wrote in a Washington Post column.
Malik is not unusual. Twice in recent years, fathers have contacted Dearborn, Michigan, police Chief Ron Haddad to report concerns that their sons were being radicalized online, he told Politico earlier this year. They contacted Haddad’s department because his officers have built a rapport with community members, and the concerned parents knew whom to reach out to and trust. One third of Dearborn’s population is Arab-American or of Arab descent. In northern Virginia, police disrupted a plot to blow up a Metrorail station in 2010, after a member of a mosque there reported the plan to police, Politico reported.
There is a double standard at play here. Attacks perpetrated by American Muslims are quickly labeled as terrorist attacks. Those carried out by white men such as Dylann Roof, who killed nine people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and Christian zealots such as Robert Dear, who killed three and wounded nine at an abortion clinic in Colorado Springs, are late getting this label — if they get it at all.
There are commonalities among the male shooters in the long string of mass killings. They were disconnected from their communities and peers, showed disdain and often hatred for those who are different from them and had a hypersensitivity to any perceived slights that often turned to rage.
Radical Muslim groups prey on these feelings. So do white supremacist groups.
Dividing Americans and pitting them against those who follow a different religious faith or come from a different ethnic background won’t make us safer. It will only make us more fearful, angry and isolated.
