The new anti-Semitism
Hate towards Islam is a growing force in the US.
U.S. Christians in those years tormented Muslims as assiduously as reporters and politicians slandered them. Arab-Americans were profiled and harassed by customs inspectors and police. A Palestinian was in a federal jail in Florida for years without being charged with anything. Disney used nasty anti-Arab song lyrics. Christians from Oral Roberts University intruded on a Tulsa mosque during Ramadan to put their hands on the doors and walls and pray for the conversion of the worshipers inside. Two Denver DJs burst into a mosque to play the “Star Spangled Banner” on a bugle and trumpet in a live broadcast. Hillary Clinton accepted campaign money from all kinds of sleazy sources but rejected it from Muslim leaders. We can be sure that incidents like these received full attention in the news columns of newspapers in Islamic nations.
Imagine that anti-Jewish lyrics, the invasion of synagogues, Jews being profiled and harassed, a Jew being locked up and the key thrown away had been at issue.
Politicians were no help, of course. In 1995, the Oklahoma City federal building was bombed. Within minutes, the Clinton administration sent Arab translators there, a gesture which, when publicized, made targets of people like the pregnant refugee from Iraq who was terrorized that day at her Oklahoma City home. Projectiles crashed through her window. The woman rushed her children into the bathroom. While she hid there with them, she began bleeding and felt a terrific pain. She miscarried. There were similar incidents across the country. President Clinton never apologized, nor did any of the broadcast reporters who started using the terms Arab and bombing in the same conjectural sentences before the dust settled around the federal building.
In 1996, when—during a two-week period—both TWA Flight 800 went down and a bomb was planted and exploded at the Atlanta Olympics, the New York Times did a story calling attention to the fact that very few people blamed Muslims. Islam-bashing had become so common that a lack of it had become news!
All this was before September 11. For generations, Muslims in the United States had been disdained and abused, though Thomas Jefferson helped write a Virginia religious freedom law specifically designed to protect “Mahometans” (Muslims) and other faiths along with Christians.
By 2001, the problem was still very much with us, as Sparks learned. On March 16, after the Northern Nevada Muslim Community Center received two telephoned threats—one of which said the mosque teaches “filth”—two worshippers at the center were attacked by several assailants, one of them wielding a baseball bat. One man’s arm was broken, the other was so badly injured he had to stop practicing medicine. It was initially characterized as a hate crime by police, who made two arrests and then said it was not a hate crime.
Here is one of the things every Lizard should be aware of:
a 2010 Gallup poll shows that “the strongest predictor of prejudice against Muslims is whether the person holds similar feelings about Jews.”
