Being an American citizen in the modern age is a precarious business. Between glaring headlines showing ISIS constantly on the move, beheading Christians, bombing buildings–and banning satellite TV while they’re at it–what is one to do? Just recently, a 26-year-old Palestinian man by the name of Mohamad Jamal Khweis faced federal charges for teaming up with ISIS, with intelligence reports suggesting that Americans make up more than 250 ISIS fighters in Syria. Meanwhile, when Syrian refugees start flooding in by the thousands, you start to wonder….
What if the Muslim family who moved into that vacant house down the street are poring over a blueprint of your neighborhood right now, and they're just waiting for the right moment to strike? Or that the offer you put up for 4.2 acres has been taken up by a Muslim cleric who wants to build a mosque on that land so that he has a palatable platform to denounce America? Or that your university's “Hijab Day” event is really a code name for "Jihad Day"? What if yesterday’s moderates really are today's radicals?
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How are we supposed to tell the difference?
Well, today I'm going to give you readers a handy-dandy guide on how to spot the extraordinary extremist in your daily life.
You can't.
You can speculate about your Muslim acquaintance no more than you can speculate about your beloved teacher Mr. Smith, who, while he surprises his class with extra recess, secretly spends his evenings at home watching child pornography. How were you supposed to know that Mrs. Jones, that sweet elderly lady who tends her flower beds so meticulously, has been tampering with the candy she passes out to each unsuspecting child on Halloween each year?
For Pete's sake, we've just had our dashboards explode with news reports of 20-year-old rapist Brock Turner, who received a slap on the wrist for a crime for which those who aren't white and/or don't suffer from affluenza might have received 20 years. A little over a year ago, Dylan Roof, a self-proclaimed white supremacist, Nazi sympathizer, and flag-burning extraordinaire shot and killed nine black people in an admittedly politically motivated act–the textbook definition of terrorism.
Yet we haven't seen anyone flagging down the NSA to batten down the hatches for or torture all white American males "even if it doesn't work."
My point is that if history has taught us anything, we must be very mindful in how we go about administering measures aimed to protect Americans. In hindsight we wag our fingers at the government for sending Japanese-Americans to internment camps following Pearl Harbor, but in the same breath resort to that knee-jerk profile-first-ask-questions-later response for Muslim-Americans. In a wave of anti-German sentiment during World War II, Americans once recoiled at the term hamburger, insisting instead on calling the beloved American delicacy "liberty steaks" or "freedom sandwiches" for a brief stint.
This is the level of absurdity we are dealing with here.
I don't offer these words from the perspective of a bleeding-heart liberal. Terrorism, whether homegrown or abroad, is a very real threat not only to Christians and Westerners, but also to other Muslims. We could go into the ethics of Western interventionism, but that is a whole other article for another day.
The best thing we can do as Americans is to live up to our values. This means granting Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists–and yes, Muslims too–their right to practice their religion, provided that the state does not establish a religion or favor one religion over another (or religion over non-religion). This also means being the bigger person in matters of prosecution. Even regular serial killers hold the constitutional rights of due process and protection from various cruel and unusual punishments. Why can't we do the same for suspected terrorists? Furthermore, civilian casualties are often unfortunate products of warfare, but when you purposefully call for the elimination of entire families–including women and children–you have become the enemy you are trying to avoid.
It's not about political correctness. It's about human decency.
