Before I begin, I want you to look at this picture.
Remember these faces. Imagine the successful, vibrant, endearing qualities of these three young college students. They are not murderers. They are not our enemy. They are our neighbors, our co-workers, our friends, and family. They are the people that make a difference, for the better, in America.
Oh, yes, and they’re Muslims. Well, they were, before they were coldly murdered by Craig Stephen Hicks, in Chapel Hill, NC, yesterday. The jury is still out regarding his true motivation to kill the trio (an interaction supposedly deriving from a parking dispute), but his background and his known bias all point to one thing: a deep-seated hatred, and fear, of the followers of Islam – a hatred that has been perpetuated by the hands of the United States government, mass media, and social networking. Sorry to say, he’s far from the only one.
Years of the United States’ “war on terror” have eroded the public view of Islam. Numerous terroristic acts all over the globe have been carried out by Muslim extremists, which in part led to this “war”. As such, we’ve sent our soldiers to fight in regions of the world where Islam is the religion of the majority. Fuzzy logic and a clash of cultures turned Islam into the face of our enemies, and the two are no longer differentiated. Citizens cling to this, and blame these atrocities, and the subsequent loss of lives, not on the mad men who perpetrate them, but on the claimed religious core of their disjointed, bastardized beliefs.
Further exacerbating the situation are tactics used by governmental agencies to supposedly root out terrorism, such as the passage and abuse of the Patriot act, TSA discriminatory search practices, hundreds of cases of entrapment perpetuated by the FBI against Muslims, and even the mapping and tracking of Muslim communities by the NYPD. All these avenues, and many more, have been used to normalize the practice of Islamophobia.
The disease spreads like wildfire on social media, where tensions run high on a text-filled, soulless platform; trolls flourish, fear and misinformation prevail, bigotry knows no bounds, and sheep blindly follow the wolf. Sensational headlines, pushed by fear-mongering news anchors and publications, invoke irrational thoughts in their subscribers by emphasizing buzzwords. Muslim. Islam. Extremist. Jihad. The religion is gutted, and twisted. Its followers are demonized. Neilson ratings rise.
And so evolves the cycle of bigotry, and an escalation to the breaking point. Death threats and ill-wishes for Muslims in general abound. Incidents arise such as in Europe, where dozens of mosques have become the target of vandals using firebombs, guns, and even pig heads. Three innocent Muslim college students are murdered, seemingly for discriminatory reasons. Tensions run high. The media ignores the signs, underreports the facts, and perpetuates the propaganda. Government officials stand idly by, and say nothing. Thousands of innocent Muslims are oppressed by both government forces and non-Muslim citizens, all across the globe.
It’s a pattern of escalation we’ve seen once before in recent history that’s hard to ignore – the implications of which are frightening, to say the least. Much like anti-Semitism spread far and wide in the 1930’s, anti-Muslim sentiment has taken a stronghold in the 21st century. Sadly, it’s just a matter of time before we reach the tipping point: Islam’s Kristallnacht.
I don’t foresee a happy ending to this story, either.
Comatose Republic 