Trump and an Irrational Fear of Muslims

With the “Bowling Green Massacre” apparently in mind, carried out by Muslim immigrants from Yemen or Westeros or Munchkin Land, President Trump has implemented a ban on travelers from seven Muslim nations.

A logical question: “Why?”

“Fear of Muslims is rational,” General Michael Flynn, a top adviser in the administration once explained. Only it’s not. No one who has ever watched an ISIS beheading has any doubt that fear of ISIS killers and thugs is rational. No one who remembers watching the Trade Towers crumble would argue we don’t need to be vigilant. 

To fear all Muslims? That’s nuts.

Consider the good citizens of New York City. How do they function? There are an estimated 80,000 Yemeni-American citizens and green card holders living in the five boroughs today. Yemen is one of seven countries to make the Trump list. There are 36,000 taxi drivers in the city who are native to Bangladesh, 15,000 from Pakistan, both Muslim nations, neither on the list. 

Are all these people threats? 

Rationally speaking you might argue it makes more sense to worry about cows and dogs and bees and never visit a farm, pet a pet, or smell a flower in a garden. Cows kill 20 Americans ever year, dogs 28. Bees, wasps and hornet kill 58. Does fear of bees keep Kellyanne Conway up late at night?

There are 38,000 individuals of Somali descent now living in the Columbus, Ohio area. One Somali-American did attack a group of Ohio State students in November, an assault inspired by ISIS. So we need to guard against such attacks. Still, one need not fear all Muslims, just as we need not fear all young white men simply because Dylan Roof, 22, walked into a South Carolina church and gunned down nine black parishioners. One may fear white supremacists and with real cause.

Consider Iran, also on the list. At least 500,000 people of Iranian descent live in the United States. Did you know 9,000 are doctors? Canada is home to another 163,000 individuals from Iran. So, if we really want to be safe, we’re going to need another wall along our northern border.

Setting bees and cows and Iranian doctors aside, it might help if we had a clear view of reality. There are 1.6 billion Muslims round the world and most have no more interest in killing you than you do in killing them. Most Americans probably don’t even know what nation has the largest Muslim population. That would be Indonesia—which is not on the list. What nation has the second largest Muslim population? India. 

India is not on the list.

The Indian census in 2011 found that the Muslim population of that nation totaled 172,000,000, or 1/7th of the population. An estimated 133,000 students from India currently attend U.S. institutions of higher learning. Roughly speaking, that would mean 19,000 are Muslim. They are interested in books, not bombs.

What about Saudi Arabia, an ally (but not always a good one) of the United States? Saudi Arabia is not on the list. In fact, the U.S supports ongoing Saudi attacks on Iranian-backed rebels in Yemen. 

A large number of Saudis practice the most extreme form of Islam, Wahhabism, and use oil wealth to spread the most radical tenets of the faith. In Saudi Arabia drug dealers can have their hands chopped off. Women cannot vote or drive or go out in public without male escort. Beheading is still practiced. Stoning of adulterers can be ordered by courts. Osama bin Laden and fifteen of nineteen hijackers who struck on 9/11 were Saudi. In other words, some Saudis should scare us.

Then again, there are 61,000 Saudi students studying at colleges and universities in the United States.

The Kurds are Muslim. Their population spreads across large areas of four countries, Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria. If the Kurds had their way there would already be a Kurdish state. Kurdish troops, the Peshmerga, have been doing some of the best fighting against ISIS in Syria and Iraq, so our servicemen and women don’t have too. In the battle to recapture Mosul, an effort Mr. Trump calls “a total disaster,” the Peshmerga are dying every day.

Every day...

We can try to ban all immigrants from Libya, Sudan and Iraq. That won’t necessarily make us safer. Since 9/11, 151 Americans have died in terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. None have been killed by immigrants from the seven banned nations. Meanwhile, accidental shootings kill 3-4 American children every week. That means an additional 3,000 dead since 9/11, a tragedy of a different sort.

(Insert typical NRA claim: “Guns don’t kill people; toddlers kill people.”)

You can focus on the Muslim threat. Or you can add up the red, white and blue carnage caused by Americans of other faiths or no faith at all. A list of bloody incidents since 9/11 would include:

Massacre at Virginia Tech, 32 dead

Sandy Hook Elementary School, 27

Binghamton, N.Y., 13

Aurora, Colorado, 13 (and because the shooter had a 100-round magazine, another 58 injured)

Washington Navy Yard shooting, 12

Dylan Roof (mentioned above), 9

School shootings: Red Lake High School, 9; Umpqua College, 9; Oikos College, 7; NIU, 5 killed, 16 wounded; Amish school in Pennsylvania, 5 killed, 5 wounded

Workplace slaughter: 8 in Manchester, Connecticut; 6 in Goleta, California; 6 in Minneapolis; 5 in Meridian, Mississippi
Seal Beach, California, 8

Killing of 8 family members in Pike County, Ohio

Shopping mall attacks, Omaha, 8; Salt Lake City, 5
Tucson, Arizona, 6

Isla Vista, California, 6

Attack on Sikh temple in Wisconsin, 6

_________

216 killed

You could focus on gun-related suicides, which totaled 19,392 in 2010 and 21,344 the next year. 

It seems likely, in fact, that 300,000 gun-related suicides have occurred in the U.S. in the last fifteen years.

We need to follow a rational course if we want to protect our people from grievous harm. Are there evil followers of Islam in our midst? Yes. There are evil Catholic priests, public school teachers, police and plumbers.

There are 3.3 million Muslims living in the U.S.  Almost all are law-abiding citizens. Mohamed Sanu, a wide receiver for the Atlanta Falcons, is Muslim. His dream was to win a Super Bowl. Several of my former students at Loveland Middle School were followers of Islam, great young people. Hakeem Olajuwon, a member of the Basketball Hall of Fame, is Muslim. He won an Olympic gold medal as a member of the U. S. men’s basketball team.

At least 5,000 Muslims serve in the U. S. military. One right-wing website calls this number “insignificant” and rattles off a bit of math to explain why. But if Muslims are underrepresented in the military, as the right-wingers like to say, they still serve in greater numbers than members of President Trump’s direct line.

The total number of Trump heroes serving over the last three generations: 0.

Those who serve or have served include Captain Humayan S. M. Khan, killed in action in 2004, whose family Mr. Trump vilified. They include Captain Mohsin Naqvi, who joined the U.S. Army four days after 9/11 and was killed during a combat tour in 2008. Finally, when I think of Muslim Americans, I think of my daughter’s old boyfriend. He was not Muslim; but his mother was. Born in Pakistan, she came to this country decades ago. I remember the day she sat in my kitchen and asked if there was any way I could convince her son not to join the U.S. Army. As a veteran, she thought I might be able to offer my advice. I told her that I was almost sure her son’s mind was made up; and it was. So he enlisted. Mom had to worry her way through her beloved son’s three combat tours in Afghanistan, where he served on the front lines as a U.S. Army medic.

Think of people like her when you think about Muslims. Those who lump all members of a faith into one category are fools.

They’re not even good Americans.