Don’t blame Muslims for the sins of two shooters

James Zogby reflects on the latest wave of gun violence in the United States.

The Imam Al Khoei Foundation in New York that was hit with a firebomb in anti-Muslim attack in 2012. Shannon Stapleton / Reuters

Just as there are so many unanswered questions about why Syed Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, massacred 14 people at an office party in San Bernardino, California, so much is tragically clear.

In the first place, 14 innocents are dead, with another 17 wounded and hundreds of family members and friends have had their lives cruelly upended by a heinous crime. They will, of course, feel the magnitude of this horror for a lifetime.

Americans followed this nightmare in real time and while those who sat glued to their televisions may not have known the victims, they felt the pain and experienced, from afar, the loss and sense of insecurity that accompanied the seeming randomness of the crime.

The president, Barack Obama, struck the right note when he commented on the frequency with which Americans have had to endure these acts of terror and the fact that we simply cannot allow these mass murders to become “normal”.

All too often these horrific acts are committed by mentally disturbed individuals with access to weapons of unconscionable lethality. Some are crimes of passion, while others have political intent.

Whether at a church in South Carolina, a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado, or an office party in California, there have been too many instances where insane people armed with sophisticated weapons have acted out their ideological fantasies, taking the lives of ordinary folks who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Whether motivated by delusions of white supremacy, or lies about the content of a video purporting to sell foetal body parts, or gross distortions of religion, these crimes are the same, the victims are the same and the shock and loss of security experienced by other Americans are the same.

There is one important difference, and that is when the perpetrator is a Muslim, the crime spills over to inflict damage on an entire community. After the Charleston incident, there were efforts to have the Confederate flag removed from the South Carolina State Capitol. But white southerners, who claim that flag is their heritage, were not victimised by hate crimes. After the attack on Planned Parenthood, anti-abortion activists and their organisations did not receive a wave of death threats nor were their offices vandalised.

But after San Bernardino, innocent American Muslims once again were forced to endure taunts and hate. Mosques have been vandalised since Farook and Malik committed their acts of terror and innocent Muslims have experienced scores of terrifying hate crimes.

The pain of this hit my office in a personal way. One young woman who works for me came to work with a cap on her head because her mother was afraid to have her leave the house with her hijab. The 16-year-old sister of another woman in my office received death threats at her high school. Their co-workers have been supportive, but they are bewildered and in shock at these displays of intolerance.

I am no stranger to death threats and hate, so I understand what they are going through. After the events of September 11, 2001, three men threatened my life, one even threatening to murder my children. My daughter, then a freshman in college, received a death threat on the phone in her dorm room.

I recall that what bothered me most during this frightening period was that like the rest of my fellow Americans, I was angry at the murderers who abused the hospitality of my country to kill my countrymen. And I, too, was mourning at the loss of life and the unspeakable sadness of so many whose loved ones had been taken from them. What the hate crimes did was to deny me and my family our mourning and our shared sense of grief, as Americans, because we were forced to look over our shoulders in fear of those whose misdirected hate had targeted us.

Thankfully the story didn’t end there. The Washington, DC police provided us protection and the FBI caught, charged and convicted the culprits. And there were countless acts of kindness from individuals I knew and those I did not know who called or wrote and offered support. It was truly marvellous and it was America at its best. But it should not have been necessary, if haters hadn’t taken our attention away from crime of September 11 and the 19 terrorists who committed those heinous acts.

Law enforcement officers have determined that the San Bernardino murders were an act of terror and are now trying to answer the “why” questions. They will, no doubt before long, learn what factors set Farook and Malik on their murderous path. Their investigation may provide answers, but it will not give closure to the families of those who died.

There are those who will focus exclusively on this act and these actors, who it now appears may have attempted to justify their murders with religion. But this should not distract us from the larger problems of guns, mental health and mass violence.

Certainly we must address the lure of violent extremist ideologies (whether based on religion or anti-government or race hatred) and what draws sick individuals to embrace them. But there are other issues we must address: the accessibility to powerful weapons that make these mass shootings possible, the failure of the mental health system that allows so many to fall through the cracks, and the culture of violence that has fostered the epidemic of mass shootings.

At the same time, we must tone down the rhetoric of hate and intolerance and not allow the haters to make new victims of this horror by indiscriminately targeting innocent American Muslims.

Dr James Zogby is the president of the Arab American Institute

On Twitter: @aaiusa