-By Warner Todd Huston
Before the dust has settled, before any idea of who perpetrated the Boston Marathon bombing and why is determined, the Boston Globe is fretting for the city’s Muslims claiming that there will surely be a “backlash” if the bombers are found to be Islamic extremists. This despite that even after 9/11 there was never any real backlash against Muslims in this country.
For the Boston Globe, columnist Yvonne Abraham opens her piece sonorously noting that Boston’s “Imams have been praying for Monday’s bombings” and fretfully claims they are also “praying” that the perpetrator isn’t a Muslim.
Abraham then goes on to claim that Boston’s Muslims experienced a “backlash” after the attacks by Islamic extremists on Sept. 11, 2001. She even outrageously evokes Japanese internment camps from WWII.
He recalls the backlash that followed the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. He remembers being afraid to send his children to school for a few days afterward, and the way some began to view all Muslims with suspicion, even hostility. A few fringe-dwellers even spoke of internment camps like those that held Japanese-Americans during the ≠Second World War.
This is all nonsense. No one talked of putting Muslims in concentration camps. Further, Muslims did not experience any backlash in the United States immediately after 9/11 or since.
A look at the FBI’s hate crime statistics shows such a tiny number of crimes against Muslims that they aren’t even worth mentioning. Out of a nation of over 300 million people, in the very year of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, there were only 481 incidents of anti-Muslim crimes reported (That year there were 1043 anti-Jewish crimes) and in the years after 2001 those incident fell precipitously.
More recently the 2011 hate crimes against Muslims totaled a mere 157 incidents. On the other hand, anti-Jewish incidents totaled a far higher 771 incidents. In 2010 it was a low 160 anti-Muslim hate crimes.
Certainly any attack on someone based solely on their religious preferences is disgusting, but in a nation of millions, these low numbers show no such thing as a “backlash” against Muslims in 2001 or since. The Boston Globe is just peddling a falsehood here.
Abraham goes on to say that only Muslims would be tarred en masse if the terrorists turn out to be one of them.
If the terrorist turns out to be a disaffected survivalist, a white supremacist, or some other flavor of domestic extremist, he will stand in a courtroom alone, with only infamy for company. If he is a Muslim, thousands will be called upon to answer, by association and stereotype, for his actions.
This is another falsehood. If the murdering terrorists that perpetrated this crime in Boston end up being white, or “survivalists,” or tax protesters, or anything of the kind the Old Media will tar every Republican and every Tea Party group as conspirators equally as guilty as the terrorists. They will hardly “stand alone” in the eyes of denizens of the media like Yvonne Abraham.
Abraham also gives a local Boston Imam a few lines to say that the attacks during the Marathon are “like something from overseas that might be affiliated to Islam.” Here Abraham is trying to paint such attacks as always foreign to our own homegrown Muslims. But the fact is, many of the bombings that the FBI and other authorities have thwarted over the last ten years were perpetrated by American bred Muslim converts, not “overseas” Muslims.
One last thing that Abraham writes actually refutes her entire woe-filled premise that Muslims are in danger here. Abraham notes that Massachusetts State Police had stationed cruisers outside her Imam’s Mosque proving that, far from finding Muslims left unprotected and oppressed, Americans are protecting Boston’s Muslims’ right to free religious expression by making sure nothing happens to them. Such careful protection of a minority religion would never happen to Christians in Muslim countries.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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