Typically I avoid listening to the news but this past week I caught a piece on the radio that really caught my attention.
Linda Sarsour was interviewed by Robin Young on WBUR’s (Boston’s NPR news station) segment Here and Now on September 5th this year, previous to the 15th anniversary of 9/11. They discussed not only the events of that day, but the backlash of the public’s response to Muslims after the events that occurred.
Sarsour was a college student at Kingsborough Community College in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, during the tragedies of 9/11. She was in class when her professor got a call and suddenly left. Outside, there were showers of burned paper and she didn’t know why- she didn’t find out anything until she got home to her mother. Her mother was going out to get her younger brother from school, but without her hijab.
Sarsour was shocked! Why would her mother go out without her hijab?
“We can’t wear it right now,” was her mother’s only response.
So soon after the attack and her mother was already so aware of the bias that would surround her community because of how the people responsible for the deaths were identified.
The majority of Muslims were doomed to be judged because of the minority within their faith’s actions. This handful of people changed how our entire society views people who study Islam. People fear what they don’t know and because all they know of Islam are the terrorists who kill in the name of their religion, they fear every other Muslim they encounter.
Yet Sansour states, “Muslims deserve to be unapologetically Muslim.” Just as people of any faith or creed with no intentions to harm others deserve to be who they are, shamelessly and without inhibition.
As a New Yorker, Sarsour was distressed for the people in her city and the destruction of lives and buildings so close to her own home. Then, hearing on the television the labeling and repetition of the incident being the fault of Islam, Muslims, terrorists, Muslims, Islamic terrorists… it brought her faith to the forefront of her own identity, in her community’s eyes. What a way to make an entire faith feel ashamed of each other.
Sansour tells the story of Salman Hamdani. He was a young man who chose to become a rescuer in the NYPD, but as a Muslim he was not initially categorized as a hero after sacrificing his life to save people from the area of the Twin Towers on 9/11. He was suspected of being connected to the terrorist attack, not because of his actions but because of his identity. Later he would be recognized as the hero he was, but the first response to him- the one to worry that he might have been a dangerous man because of his religion- is a wake-up call.
Hence, Sarsour is justified in saying: “Muslims are the largest victims of ISIS… I have chosen to be unapologetically Muslim… I have personally received death threats… fifteen years after 9/11 is way worse than even weeks and months and even the first few years after 9/11… we have not healed as a nation.”
Wake up, America! The enemy is not the entirety of the Muslim population, it is only those with the intention of killing.
“I want to condemn violence because I’m a human being, not because I’m a Muslim.”
I want to condemn violence because I’m a human being, not because I’m Jewish.
We should want to condemn violence because we are human beings.
Do we need more reasons to want to condemn violence?
