Islamophobia: The Price of Fear in the US

The United States has been in a state of hysteria over the last few days; days in which a fear toward foreigners has prevailed and panic, due to a traitor capable of inciting terror from within its own borders, has gripped the nation. The facts matter little, if at all, including those which state that out of the 750,000 refugees who have been resettled in America since 9/11, not a single one has been arrested on domestic terrorism charges, as California Representative Xavier Becerra said this week, quoting The Economist.

But the attacks in Paris have aroused fear and ignorance. On Wednesday, the mayor of Roanoke, a small town in the state of Virginia, suggested that Syrian refugees should be placed in internment camps like the Japanese-Americans were following the attack on Pearl Harbor. David Bowers must have thought that turning to history and mentioning Franklin D. Roosevelt would constitute a sufficient guarantee of legitimacy for his proposal. Driven by the strong current of ideas being put forward to bring an end to the barbarity, Bowers spoke without the benefit of prior research, which resulted in an apology for his comments.

“I’m reminded that President Franklin D. Roosevelt felt compelled to sequester Japanese foreign nationals after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and it appears that the threat of harm to America from Isis now is just as real and serious as that from our enemies then,” said the mayor. Apart from the fact that those who Roosevelt sent to internment camps were American citizens whose crime was having had Japanese ancestry, the U.S. government apologized in 1988 for what took place, saying that it had been the result of “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”

And yet, those who aspire to become president are seemingly eager to repeat the same mistakes of the past. Marco Rubio has compared Muslims to Nazis. Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush want to deny Syrian refugees entry into the country, but only those who are Muslim. Christians, on the other hand, are welcome. Ben Carson, who is leading in the polls, has compared Syrian refugees to “rabid dogs,” and everyone knows what fate awaits them. To cite another example of the American hysteria, Chris Christie went as far as to say that not even “orphans under five should be admitted into the United States.”

Then there’s Donald Trump, who deserves his own review because his proposal is an outright call to re-establish the sort of fascism that once swept across Europe. The billionaire tycoon, who claims to have express solutions for almost any issue on the agenda, said last Thursday that there is a real need to create a Muslim database – something not too dissimilar to the yellow Star of David that the Nazis forced Jews to wear.

As an object lesson of the emergency response to the panic caused by terrorist attacks like those in Paris, the House of Representatives passed a bill this week to halt Obama’s refugee plan of welcoming 10,000 Syrian refugees. “We should not bring Syrian refugees into this country unless we can be 100 percent confident that they are not here to do us harm,” said Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.

A week after Islamic State terrorists killed 130 people in several attacks across Paris, the Muslim population in the U.S. has been forced to go on the defensive, as happened following 9/11. Not only are they defending their faith, pointing out that Islam is a religion of peace, but they are also under attack. Following the desecration of a mosque in Texas with feces and torn pages of the Quran, another mosque being vandalized in Nebraska, and threats being made on social media against religious sites in Tampa and Houston, Ibrahim Hooper, the National Communications Director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations stated, “I think, unfortunately, that we’ve seen the gradual mainstreaming of Islamophobia.”

In his book “American Hysteria,” the journalist and visiting fellow at Yale Law School, Andrew Burt, argues that this political hysteria arises in periods of profound uncertainty about American identity. In the prologue to a volume examining the crucial moments of political extremism in the U.S., such as McCarthyism during the ‘50s, Burt writes, “when Americans lose their sense of who they are, they lash out against perceived threats with blacklists, scapegoating, conspiracies, cover-ups and more.”

Burt concludes his book by quoting the third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson. “The best way to protect the freedoms we cherish is to leave them untouched – not just in times of normalcy, but in periods of crisis as well.” Otherwise, if we don’t, we’ll ultimately pay the price of fear, whose currency the United States has known all too well over the last decade – whether it was invading Iraq under false pretenses or violating the rights of hundreds of prisoners by hiding them away on Cuban soil.