Powell: Right and Wrong on Fear of Muslims

Colin Powell made news Sunday on Meet the Press, not only because he spoke about his endorsement of Barack Obama for President, but because of how he addressed the issue of whether or not Obama is a Muslim and whether or not it should even matter. Powell’s response was both entirely right and dangerously incomplete. He was correct and actually quite moving when he said: Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no, that’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president?

The fact is that people in this country are afraid of Muslims as a group and that is wrong. The fact is that Muslims are more likely to encounter racial/ethnic hatred in this county than Jews, Buddhists or Hindus, let alone Christians. That too is wrong. And so is the idea that the American Dream should belong more to any one faith or ethnicity.
Hatred of all Muslims is also based on a false premise i.e. that the world’s 1.3 billion Muslim community is monolithic in its hatred of America, Christians, Jews, etc. Not only is the notion of that kind of uniformity in any group inane, polling of Muslims around the world indicates that it is not true. So for all of these, and many other reasons, Collin Powell’s remarks were dead on. His answer was also dangerously incomplete.

The fact is that many Americans are scared because more than three thousand Americans were murdered for the “crime” of being in America. Many are scared because even as I write this, Christians are running for their lives from Mosul and much of the rest of Nineveh province in Iraq. They are scared because while 1.3 billion Muslims do not hate this country and that for which it stands, as many as 300 million report that they do. That’s a country’s worth, and that is scary.

General Powell failed to address this reality alongside the real and painful challenges faced by many Muslims in America and that was simply wrong. It was also dangerously blind to the work that must be done by both sides before things will improve.

Where are the Muslim voices of outrage speaking out against the ethnic cleansing of Mosul? Where are the leaders who address the real fears that are born of the fact that more people have died in recent years in the name of Islam than any other faith? Where is the public demonstration, in numbers that rival the dead, which declares that this is not the only way to live a full Muslim life?

And before one person writes asking me “how much do you want us to apologize” or “why do I have to prove anything to you”, let me tell you something: you don’t. The reason for such public demonstrations is not for anyone but you. The reason for such demonstrations is because you want to take back your own culture.

When hundreds of thousands took to the streets following the religiously motivated assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, it made a difference. And it would if the world saw tens of millions of Muslims (the proportional equivalent) do the same thing now. The moral authority to take hateful and fearful Americans to task rests with the ability to create mass awareness of the decency of most Muslims with acts as big as those that generate the fear and hatred.

People will only give up their hate when they can put down their fear and putting down fear requires an admission of its partial truth. When that partial truth is acknowledged then we can demand that the other partial truth, that we having nothing to fear from most of our Muslim brothers and sisters, makes it totally irrelevant whether or not Barack Obama is a Muslim.

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Posted by Brad Hirschfield on October 23, 2008

That’s what we call difference.

http://xrl.us/ouqbp

I’m not sure how you read a message that I wanted either candidate “to sound alarms and get people scared at the debates” in what I wrote, or that I thought I could do better, but perhaps I expressed my actual message clumsily. My *intended* message: I am perfectly *thrilled* with Obama’s “no drama” temperament, and I *hugely* admire his self-restraint! I cannot think when I have seen a politician who expresses himself better than Obama, and who radiates more reasoned intelligence, and, no, I *certainly* don’t wish *anyone* else was on that stage, *least* of all me! If McCain showed more self-restraint, and stuck with his principles of years ago, when he showed commendable independence from the rest of his Party, I would admire him, too, though I would still enthusiastically favor Obama.