Don’t Be Weak
On
a cold night, in the wake of a blizzard,
there were two programs on American
TV simultaneously vying with each other
for viewership. On FOX-TV, was “24”,
depicting an American Muslim family
plotting an attack in the US. Another
program, “Dirty War”, aired on HBO,
showed Muslims planning a ‘dirty bomb’
strike within the UK. The two shows
apparently served the dual purpose of
depicting the West as both an incubator
of Muslim terrorists as well as a target
of Muslim terrorism.
The enemy is not shown as someone hiding
in a remote cave in a far-off land but
as a seemingly innocuous next-door neighbor.
Taken together, it imprints an image
of America under siege from an insidious
5th column threat within. It is McCarthyism
revisited. The cover of the January-February
issue of the Atlantic magazine shows
San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge in
ruins following an imagined sequel to
the 9/11 attack. The fictional story
accompanying inside, “America Attacked:
The Sequel”, is authored by no less
a personage than Richard A. Clarke,
former National Security Advisor for
Presidents Bill Clinton and George W.
Bush.
The message on Muslims conveyed to Americans
is simple but lethal: they may seem
friendly and harmless, but actually,
they hate us for who we are; they are
not like us; and they don’t belong amongst
us. They are the ‘Other’. It is meant
to sow the seeds of abiding distrust
and dislike. In effect, the mainstream
media is being used to isolate and target
Muslims, and keep them apart from the
mainstream. The American-Muslim community
is historically the most law abiding
and inoffensive segment among all the
immigrant communities.
It is also among the most under-achieving
and under-performing. Their current
approach, in effect, parallels the approach
adopted by the Jews of Germany in the
1930’s who failed to comprehend the
gathering storm of Nazism and who thought
that just being ‘nice’ and remaining
politically uninvolved would shelter
and immunize them from the vicissitudes
of hatred and bigotry.
It was a road which led to Auschwitz
– the 60th anniversary of its discovery
and liberation is being marked in 2005.
Whatever the reasons given, and the
theories presented – and plenty of them
may be perfectly plausible – the hard
core fact remains that, to date, the
Muslim immigrant experience and experiment
in the US, contrary to its size and
potential, has not been a sterling success.
The choice before the Muslims is simple
yet profound: continue as is, or try
to do something about it. The former
requires no work; the latter demands
homework and teamwork. The old Elvis
song was “Don’t Be Cruel”. The new song
needs to be “Don’t Be Weak.”
