By
Ahmed Tharwat
The Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump should be careful what he wishes for. Vitriolic Trump claimed that Muslims in America don’t just assimilate enough, almost none he claimed. “Assimilation has been very hard. It’s almost, I won’t say nonexistent, but it gets to be pretty close. And I’m talking about second and third generation — for some reason there’s no real assimilation,” Trump stated on Fox News.
Not only do Muslims not assimilate, according to Trump, they do not inform on those who won’t assimilate and they hide those who show a case of radical fever or temperament and may end up a fully fledged terrorist. The frat real state mogul believes that Muslims should act like airport dogs; sniffing radicalization in their communities and weed out those who may end up as a terrorist. Trump thinks Muslims should help out our law enforcement and the FBI who spend billions of dollars monitoring and protecting us from terrorists, actually they even manufacture them if there are none. The FBI is working hard here in Minnesota on trapping young Somalis who don’t have any capabilities or resources to harm anyone, leaving the real terrorists, who have the resources and capabilities, free. Trevor Aaronson, in his groundbreaking documentary book ‘The Terror Factory‘, exposes how the FBI use phony plots and informants to spy on Muslim communities to make its war on terrorism a success.
“The Muslims have to work with us,” Trump said in one of his speeches “They know what’s going on. They know that [Orlando gunman Omar Mateen] was bad. They knew the people in San Bernardino were bad. But you know what? They didn’t turn them in. And you know what? We had death and destruction.” According to Trump, every honorable good American should be informing on those bad Americans who may commit a crime in the future, or even in the past.
According to a Washington Post report, there is an average of one mass shooting everyday, that is involving four or more people dead. There is a lot of debate hammering this issue, trying to figure out the reason behind the increasing violence in America. Obama thinks it is terrorism meeting a promiscuous gun culture. The NRA thinks people kill, not guns, and Donald Trump thinks Muslims, for the most part, are either doing it or know who is going to do it, even twenty years from now.
Trump, who wants to ban Muslims from entering the country (lately however is retracting from the sweeping banning), thinks that the father of Omar Mateen, who emigrated from Afghanistan in the 80’s, should have done a better job of getting his son assimilated in this country. Omar Mateen was born in this country, he had been characterized as belligerent, racist, toxic who hated gays and women; he should have pledged his allegiance to Donald Trump, not to ISIS. The problem is not that the terrorists who committee such heinous crimes in Europe and the US are not assimilated, the problem is in fact that they are assimilated too much. They had adapted to the violent nature of our culture freight with alienation and guns. Believing that violence is the only way to solve our individual problem is not an Islamic thing, it is American thinking. Most violence committed by Muslims around the world is committed against other Muslims for political grievances and in places where there is a political conflict relating to oil, all places we invaded, bombed, destroyed and had terrorized for years.
According to Micah Zenko, of the Council on Foreign Relations, under the leadership of our Nobel peace prize-winning President Obama; the US dropped 23,144 bombs on Muslim-Majority countries last year alone. Those individuals who committee mass shootings against innocent civilians here or in France, Belgium or Turkey are not doing it because they are Muslim terrorists, they are doing so because they are terrorists. Most mass shootings in this country are felonies and crime related. According to the Harvard School of Public Health’s Injury Control “The US is an outlier on gun violence because it has way more guns than other developed nations.” America has 4.4 percent of the world’s population, but has half of the guns owned in the world. Mass shootings constitute a tiny portion (1-2%) of the total gun deaths in this country, which is more than 30,000 a year. Most violence committed in this country is not the killing of other people, but the killing of one’s own self, most gun deaths being suicide.
The notion that Muslims do not assimilate is an old coded racist view. The Amish community hasn’t assimilated for hundreds of years, African Americans and Latinos still have their distinctive cultures, diversity and multiculturalism, making this country stronger, and unlike Hitler’s Germany, immune from totalitarian and misogynic ideology as Trump and his supporters spew everyday. Muslims were the first to respond to support the LGBT community following the Orlando shooting. The executive director of CAIR, a Muslim civil rights advocate group, hours after the shooting announced that the Muslim community has always stood shoulder to shoulder with the LGBT community’s struggle for their civil rights.
Muslims, unlike Trump supporters, vote mostly on economic and political issues and not on cultural and religious ones. Muslims in America work on Fridays, their Sabbath, but take Christmas off, eat pork products at fast-food restaurants, graduate from colleges, drive cars, hold professional jobs, raise families, shave their beards, skip daily prayers and Ramadan Iftar for work, they shop at Walmart, support the Yankee and Cowboys teams, join the military, fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, and most of all, they know the difference between Hummus and Hamas.
Muslims do assimilate in America more rapidly than Donald Trump has so far. Trump, to a lot of Americans, is an outcast, a cartoonish TV character, a racist, ignorant bigot who wants to make America white racist again. Muslims, Mexicans, Latino, Blacks, and peace loving Americans will make sure that won’t happen this coming election; we need to make sure that this clown doesn’t end up running the circus.
Dear Mr. Tharwat: Thank you for your clear and well informed article. It's very helpful and encouraging to hear a rational voice. I would like to point out one important recommended change in thinking, i.e. the label of "terrorist" applied to criminals. By labeling these people "terrorists" we grant them credibility and we award their actions larger than life stature. But more importantly, we participate in the propaganda campaign initiated by the George Bush administration to justify passage of the Patriot Act and the tacit support of the UN for the invasion of Iraq. By now the effects amount to thorough indoctrination of large portions of the world's population who live and vote in fear of "terrorists." But those who perpetrate murder here in the states, in Europe, and recently in Bangladesh and Saudi Arabia are far more appropriately dealt with and understood as criminals. Every crime sows terror in the victims, murder, rape, theft, even identity theft. We are better off and far more free when we accept that we cannot prevent every crime and the sorrow and terror that it brings. This is the price of an open society. Let the police and the government do their jobs and let's remain free.