(Dobbs) America. You’ve got to want it bad.One hero from the Sydney massacre is named Ahmed al-Ahmed. A Muslim.
On the face of it, two stories that landed yesterday morning in my inbox were unrelated. One was a story from The Washington Post about two members of Congress who, in the aftermath of Sunday’s massacre in Australia of Jews celebrating Hanukkah, are calling for the expulsion of Muslims from the U.S. The other was a report from historian Heather Cox Richardson here on Substack about the murder of Rob Reiner, and the dramatic dialogue at the end of his movie “The American President.” As it turns out, they weren’t unrelated at all. They were cut from the same story: the long-running story of myopic fear of people different from us, and the narrow-minded inclination to paint all of them with the same broad brush. First, Congress. Florida Republican Representative Randy Fine put up a post on X on Monday that left no room for nuance: “It is time for a Muslim travel ban, radical deportations of all mainstream Muslim legal and illegal immigrants, and citizenship revocations wherever possible. Mainstream Muslims have declared war on us. The least we can do is kick them the hell out of America.” This next post came from Alabama Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville: “Islam is not a religion. It’s a cult. Islamists aren’t here to assimilate. They’re here to conquer. … We’ve got to SEND THEM HOME NOW or we’ll become the United Caliphate of America.” You could argue that Donald Trump made this mainstream. When he took office the first time, he imposed a travel ban on Muslims from seven Middle Eastern nations. Then of course there’s his incessant string of insults about the most prominent Muslim member of Congress, Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar, who he recently said, with TV cameras rolling, is “garbage.” I would remind Trump, and Tuberville and Fine and the mega-conservative House Freedom Caucus, which has approved of these kinds of comments in the past, of five things. First, Islam is a religion. It is a religion peacefully observed by roughly two billion Muslims around the world, but perverted and abused by a minority who believe in radical interpretations of Islamic law. They are the cult. Second, the word for viewpoints like Trump’s and Tuberville’s and Fine’s and others is Islamophobia. But that’s misleading. A phobia is an irrational fear of something. It’s not irrational to be frightened, as they are, by Muslim terrorists. It is irrational to be frightened by Muslims. Third, when far-right-radicals in this country, like these members of Congress, call for all Muslims, including bonafide American citizens, to be deported, are they any different than members of Hamas and other violent Islamic groups that call for all Jews to be pushed into the sea? Fourth, have they read any American (or Canadian) history about calls to deport the Irish who came to America to seek a better life, or the Italians, the Poles, the Mexicans, and of course the African-Americans who suffered the pain of bigotry worse than anyone else? Fifth, there were some heroes in Sydney on Sunday who tried to stop the two ISIS sympathizers who staged the attack. One of them was a man who rushed one of the gunmen from behind, fought him to the ground, and disarmed him. The man’s name is Ahmed al-Ahmed. A Muslim. Now, the movie, “The American President,” which Rob Reiner directed. It’s about a fictional president, played by Michael Douglas who, at risk of his re-election, stands up for the left-leaning views of a woman he is dating, and for his own. What Heather Cox Richardson wrote about yesterday was the final scene in the film, where he has a news conference and confronts his opponent, who has been attacking him for his beliefs: “For the record, yes, I am a card-carrying member of the ACLU. But the more important question is, why aren’t you, Bob? Now, this is an organization whose sole purpose is to defend the Bill of Rights, so it naturally begs the question, why would a senator, his party’s most powerful spokesman, and a candidate for president choose to reject upholding the Constitution?” That alone points to what’s wrong with the Islamophobic political leaders who would corrupt the Constitution and eject everyone who observes a religion they don’t understand. But it’s the next piece of dialogue that underscores everything that’s wrong with people like that. “America isn’t easy. America is advanced citizenship. You’ve got to want it bad, ‘cause it’s gonna put up a fight. It’s gonna say: You want free speech? Let’s see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who’s standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours. You want to claim this land as a land of the free? Then the symbol of your country cannot just be a flag. The symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest. Now, show me that. Defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then you can stand up and sing about the land of the free.” Congressman Fine, who has problems with “the land of the free,” followed his first screed with a second on Instagram, citing the Afghani who shot two National Guardsmen in Washington late last month and declaring, “Islam is not compatible with the West.” No, Congressman, Islamic terrorism is not compatible with the West. No terrorism is compatible with the West, or with any other part of the world. But the world’s two billion Muslims are not responsible for it. That lays on the radicals within their religion. Just like most Jews are not responsible for the terrorism against Palestinians by Israeli settlers on the West Bank. Right-wing Old Testament fanatics are. Just like most Christians are not responsible for the history of sins against minorities in this country since its founding. America? You’ve got to want it bad. Because if you shape it only to your likes, it won’t be America anymore. What’s more, what if next time, someone else is in charge and it’s people like you they want to throw out? |