COMMENT Muslim blowback?
By M Junaid Levesque-Alam
It is hard to overstate just how deeply unpopular the United States is in the
Muslim world.
A 2008 poll of six majority Muslim countries found that overwhelmingly large
portions of the population, ranging from 71% in Morocco to 87% in Egypt, held
unfavorable opinions of the United States. A 2009 poll in Pakistan revealed
that 64% of the public views the United States as an outright enemy.
So it is a curious paradox that, despite the antagonistic and sometimes violent
relationship between the United States and the Muslim world, Muslims in America
have fared relatively well. According to a 2009 Gallup poll, 41% of Muslims in
the United States describe themselves as "thriving" - only five percentage
points below the national average, and higher than the percentage reported in
any Muslim country aside from Saudi Arabia. A full 40% say they have at least a
college degree, making them the second-most educated religious group after Jews
(at 61%).
Further, US Muslim women, after their Jewish counterparts, are the most highly
educated female religious group in the country, and Muslim economic gender
parity is the nation's most egalitarian at both the low and high ends of the
spectrum.
An earlier 2007 Pew study painted a similar picture. Titled Muslim Americans:
Middle Class and Mostly Mainstream, it described the Muslim minority in
the United States as "largely assimilated, happy with their lives, and moderate
with respect to many of the issues that have divided Muslims and Westerners
around the world". (The Muslim population in the US is estimated at about 2.4
million.)
Events of the past few months, however, have called into question the
pertinence, if not the validity, of that rosy general assessment. Though
terrorist suspects had in the past almost always been foreigners, several of
those implicated in more recent plots against American soldiers and civilians
were Muslims born or raised in the United States.
US Muslims as a domestic threat
The November 2009 incident at Fort Hood, the Texas Army base where Major Nidal
Hasan is suspected of gunning down 10 fellow soldiers, presents the most
striking case. A steady stream of unsuccessful plots has also garnered
attention: the 25-year-old Queens coffee vendor who pleaded guilty to a
conspiracy to destroy the New York City subway system in September 2009; the
five youths who left Washington, DC in December 2009 - allegedly to join a
Pakistani militant group; the middle-aged, self-proclaimed convert from
Philadelphia who reportedly planned to kill a Swedish cartoonist last month;
the 25-year-old New Jersey man who was caught in Yemen a week later purportedly
trying to join al-Qaeda.
And just this Monday, one day after the most recent terror scare, police
arrested a 30-year-old naturalized US citizen from Pakistan, Faisal Shahzad;
they suspect him of having loaded a sport utility vehicle with the bomb-making
materials that were designed to explode in the most iconic part of our
country's most celebrated metropolis: Times Square, New York City.
Although attention lavished on individual cases should not obscure the broader
picture - of the 14,000 homicides committed in the United States last year,
only 14 are attributable to Muslim militancy - the sudden swell of homegrown
Muslim extremism is significant. Most acutely, it has thrust into the
foreground questions that have lingered in the minds of many Americans since
September 11, 2001: Does Islam cause terrorism? Are all Muslims potential
terrorists?
For conservatives, the latest string of incidents will only harden their
conviction that the answer is a resolute "yes". They have long insisted that
Islamist terror isn't fueled by policy or circumstance but is instead an
article of the Islamic faith. And where no trace of terror can be found,
conservatives have gleefully cooked up charges against Muslims, as illustrated
by the smear campaigns directed at Swiss academic Tariq Ramadan, former Barack
Obama adviser Mazen Asbahi, Organization of Islamic Conference envoy Rashad
Hussain and the original principal of New York City's first Arabic-language
school, Debbie Almontasser.
For some liberals, too, the recent developments will cause unease. It was one
thing to face attacks from abroad, but the presence of a homegrown Muslim
threat seems to shatter the old shibboleths about multiculturalism and
diversity. Some on the left had neatly apportioned Muslims into categories of
"good" and "bad", and the old paradigm that accepted only "assimilated" and
"modernized" Muslims as safe is now under threat.
This liberal unease has already reached an advanced stage in Britain, typified
by the writer Martin Amis, who insists that he despises "Islamism" but not
Islam. This qualification notwithstanding, Amis regularly lets his mask slip
with puffed-up declamations such as this one: "[N]o doubt the impulse toward
rational inquiry is by now very weak in the rank and file of the Muslim male."
In fact, there is a shared element between conservative and liberal views on
Islamist extremism: certainty that the main problem lies with Muslims
themselves.
Their violence, our violence
The palatable and politically safe answers - for conservatives, that Muslims
are inherently violent, and for left-liberals, that only a small minority is
violent - have always skirted around one important detail: our own violence.
This is no surprise. The notion that our violence motivates terrorism has
always lost out to the notion that terror is absent from our violence. It was
George Orwell who observed in 1945 that "the nationalist not only does not
disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable
capacity for not even hearing about them".
But this "remarkable capacity" is not shared by everyone. Civilian deaths and
accounts of torture from Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine have fueled the
radicalization of a minority of Muslims abroad, and it was only a matter of
time before it produced the same effect on a minority of Muslims here, too.
It is only now, amid this growing domestic radicalization, that we are seeing
some willingness to cure the deafness Orwell once wrote about.
Hope for the future?
In a December 2009 New York Times article, top US terrorism experts spoke
bluntly about what motivates these attacks. Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism
researcher at Georgetown University, noted that American military
interventionism was the only logical reason for the spike in homegrown terror
cases. "The longer we've been in Iraq and Afghanistan, the more some
susceptible young men are coming to believe that it's their duty to take up
arms to defend their fellow Muslims," he said. Robert Liken, from the Nixon
Center in Washington DC, echoed that theme: "Just the length of US involvement
in these countries is provoking more Muslim Americans to react."
In March, the Center for Strategic and International Studies went a step
farther. In its 22-page report on homegrown terrorism, it not only recognized
the motives of homegrown terrorist suspects but advised the government to shift
its policy accordingly:
[S]everal of those arrested last fall seemed to
harbor the belief that the United States is at war with Islam ...The United
States must continue to work to puncture this narrative. White House officials
already have discarded phrases like 'war on radical Islam.' But ultimately, the
United States needs to go further than this, because al-Qaeda seizes on more
than just US rhetoric to galvanize support for its agenda; the group also
points to America's military presence in Muslim countries as evidence for its
preferred narrative. The United States, then, should consider how to balance
the need to combat global terrorism with the drawbacks of large-scale, direct
military intervention.
That study, along with a January report
co-issued by Duke University and the University of North Carolina, also urged
the government to open more lines of communication with the Muslim community.
The Obama administration at least appears to be listening on both counts.
In an April 14 speech, the president broke with a long tradition of enforced
silence by asserting that the Israeli-Palestinian crisis has ended up "costing
us significantly in terms of both blood and treasure". Ignoring the cacophony
of neo-conservative complaints, the administration has also allowed Tariq
Ramadan back into the United States and defended its choice of Rashad Hussain
as special envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference.
Moreover, Arab and Muslim community leaders feel they are finally being heard.
"For the first time in eight years, we have the opportunity to meet, engage,
discuss, disagree, but have an impact on policy," said James Zogby, president
of the Arab American Institute in Washington. "We're being made to feel a part
of that process and that there is somebody listening."
These moves are encouraging. That some Muslim extremists now hail from our own
country has, paradoxically, brought us closer to curbing terrorism. It is
doubtless more difficult to conjure fantastic and absurd explanations for
suicide attacks - endless virgins, inexplicable evil, exotic culture - when
those carrying out such attacks are integrated and functioning members of our
society rather than easily caricatured foreigners.
If the Obama administration follows through on its hesitant first steps,
scaling down its military interventions, tempering its support for Israeli
colonialism, and increasing engagement efforts with Muslims here and elsewhere,
it will lay down a solid framework for building trust and respect.
As Audrey Kurth Cronin of the National War College observed, those assets are
valuable in combating militancy: "To me, the most interesting thing about the
five guys is that it was their parents that went immediately to the FBI
[Federal Bureau of Investigation]. It was members of the American Muslim
community that put a stop to whatever those men may have been planning."
For 10 years, America has hitched its foreign policy train to an engine of war
and occupation. As a result, America's standing in the Muslim world has
declined disastrously. It's long past time to switch tracks.
M Junaid Levesque-Alam, a regular Foreign Policy In Focus contributor,
lives in New York. He has been published in several outlets, including
Altmuslim.com, CounterPunch, WireTap Magazine, and ZNet. His website is
Crossing the Crescent.
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