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03 April 2011 By Michael Shammas
American Muslims are facing
increasing amounts of public distrust and hate speech,
said Andrea Elliott, a Pulitzer Prize-winning
investigative reporter for The New York Times.
Elliott gave a lecture
titled "Islam in a Post-9/11 America" in the Sanford
School of Public Policy Wednesday afternoon to discuss
the challenges Muslims face assimilating into American
society. She stressed that some Americans are starting
to believe that terrorism and Islam are synonymous,
even though Muslims have fought for, and even died in
the service of, the United States.
"The perpetrators of [the
9/11] attacks were of course not Muslim-American," she
said. "And even though some of their victims were, and
even though thousands of American Muslims later served
in the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan, this
episode left many Muslims feeling they have lost their
face in America to… fear and suspicion."
The event was sponsored by
the Duke Islamic Studies Center, the Duke University
Middle East Studies Center and the Sanford Institute's
DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy. After
lecturing for nearly an hour, Elliott spent
approximately 15 minutes taking questions from
students and faculty in attendance.
Although 10 years have
passed since the Sept. 11 attacks, Elliott said the
amount of anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States
has actually increased in the past few years. In
August, a poll conducted by the Pew Research Center
found that only 30 percent of Americans held a
favorable view of Islam. Five years earlier, the
statistic was 41 percent. The poll's results are
reflective of recent events, Elliot noted.
"Just last year we've seen
the fight over the Islamic center near ground zero,
the spread of grass-roots opposition to the use of
Shariah [Islamic law] and the buildings of mosques
elsewhere in the country and the recent congressional
hearings focused on Muslims," Elliott said.
The media has largely been
blamed for this resurgence in negative sentiment, with
critics asserting that too much of the media's
coverage has focused on terrorism, she said. But
people who solely blame the media are ignoring other
factors at work such as "the tone set by the Bush
administration" and the immediate reaction to the 9/11
attacks, which gave Americans a "frenzied crash
course" on the religion, Elliot added.
"[After 9/11], the press
was scrambling to make sense of the attacks and a
fringe interpretation of Islam [held by the hijackers]
was at the center of the story," she said. "[But]
Islam in most of its vast complexity was a subject
that most journalists, like most Americans, knew
almost nothing about."
Elliott spent the rest of
her lecture discussing what she has learned about
Islam from her own work. She described her experience
reporting on the life of an imam in New York City—a
three-part series called "An Imam in America" for
which she won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize—and the forced
resignation of Debbie Almontaser. Almontaser was a
Muslim who created the Khalil Gibran International
Academy, the first English-Arabic public school
focusing on the study of Arabic language and culture,
only to be accused of radicalizing her students by a
recently-formed group called "Stop the Madrassa." The
accusations were baseless, Elliott said, but
Almontaser was forced out and replaced by a "Jewish
principal who spoke no Arabic." Robert Mueller: Somali-Americans "Very Cooperative"
Contrary to the "testimony" of one witness at the
Peter King Hearings and Islamophobes who continuously
bash Muslims and the Somali community as
uncooperative, FBI director Mueller states that they
have been "very cooperative." Mueller said members of the Minnesota
Somali-American community have been "very
cooperative" with the FBI in its efforts to root out
terrorism. He also said that we have a "very good
relationship" with the Muslim community. That's
interesting isn't it? Especially considering that the
FBI is being sued by the ACLU and CAIR for its
entrapment and agent provocateur methods. Read more at MainJustice. |
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