Imagine going out for your birthday. Excitement is in the air, cheesy Hallmark cards are coming through the mail, and you look like you’ve just emerged from a professional stylist’s studio. The cake is ordered and loved ones anxiously await the arrival of the special guest.
For Resham Khan and her cousin Jameel Muhktar in Beckton, East London, the celebrations halted when they were attacked with acid while sitting in their car on June 21st. A 21st birthday celebration turned into a fight for their lives. Acid attacks like these, and a multitude of hate crimes targeting Muslims, have escalated in the U.K. and the U.S. as well as other parts of the world. What makes terrorism even scarier is its ability to justify the actions of already malicious and corrupt individuals.
Terrorists do not just exist in the Middle East and they do not just originate from the Middle East. Terrorists can be white, they can be Christian and they can be born and bred in the free world.
The FBI reports that ninety-five percent of extremist attacks are Non-Muslim, but the public is less likely to know this because the media seems to only focus on the five percent. Focusing on the five percent creates an atmosphere harmful to Muslim-Americans and blinds the public from other dangers. Discrimination not only induces violence, it allows certain atrocities to be swept under the rug in favor of a juicier, more problematic headline. These headlines feed the frenzy and rationalize bigotry. Any individual can be a fanatic: radicalism is not limited to race, gender, nationality, religion or any other identity.
When an act is not criminalized or classified similarly across the board, it leaves room for discrimination, error and a miscarriage of justice. Where do we draw the line between an extremist and a mentally ill mass shooter? Mental illness clearly should not and cannot keep being a defense. Someone who can shoot up a Sikh temple or murder nine people in a church clearly is mentally unhinged.
How many of these crimes are we going to sugarcoat?
Bigotry plays a scary part in terrorism- on one hand it makes every Middle Eastern Muslim look like a hazard while the other protects every white supremacist from looking like a terrorist. This simple fact is seen in the necessary war against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) but the failed dismantling of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). Both groups are insurgent organizations but bigotry turns the KKK and its members into a social given while inducting every Muslim into ISIS without any evidence. The same way that the KKK hijacked Christianity, ISIS hijacked Islam. They are not Muslims, they are terrorists; and the two words are not and should not be synonymous.
The discrepancies in the way that these events are reported feeds the tunnel vision when it comes to terrorism. The fight against radicalism should be a fight against bigotry. Fearmongering and instilling hostility only exacerbates the danger. Bigotry threatens safety, domestically and globally, because it rationalizes the hateful actions of one side as a defense against the other.
Whether it’s ISIS’s disgust towards the Western way of life or the KKK’s animosity towards anything they deem immoral to their supposedly Christian doctrines, misconstruing hatred as a protection harbors more dangers. These extremists are mentally unhinged, but that instability stems from their indoctrinated fear of anything that contradicts their way of life.
They learn how to fight for ignorance rather than work to demolish ignorance.
A Christian radical is just as dangerous as a Muslim extremist, and according to the CATO institute, statistically, more likely. However, the actions of these individuals cannot speak for the entire community and the same way that the KKK’s actions do not define the entire Christian community, domestic or otherwise, ISIS’s actions should not define and color the character of the 3 million Muslims in America, or the 1.8 billion Muslims in the world.
