It’s all over the news and all over social media. Two men entered the office of Parisian publication “Charlie Hebdo” and murdered 12 journalists in response to several Islamophobic cartoons the satire magazine published. This heinous act of terror was a vicious attempt to strip journalists and cartoonists away from their right to freely express their opinions: a right that is near and dear to our American hearts.
A terrorist attack that limits a person’s right to free speech will always feel personal to Americans, whether the crime occurred here or abroad. However, regardless of how passionately one despises terrorism or supports the right to freedom of speech, blaming innocent Islamic communities for the tragedy that occurred last week is completely unwarranted.
After news of the attack broke, the hashtag #KillAllMuslims began trending on Twitter, promoting hatred and violence against Islamic people. The common misconception that all Muslims are dangerous terrorists working together to conspire against America to destroy everyone else’s freedom is illogical and racist. Yet, thousands of people had no issue broadcasting their violent and Islamophobic opinions in 140 characters or less.
Islam is a peaceful religion, but like every other religion, a handful of extremists use their beliefs to justify violence. Just look at Christianity. Southern plantation owners in antebellum America used the Bible to defend slavery. Puritans labeled women accused of sin as witches possessed by the devil and executed them. The earliest settlers of what was then thought to be “the new world” were missionaries who forced religion upon Native Americans, enslaved them and slaughtered them. The KKK uses the Bible to justify their racist motives. Yet, these horrifying violations of human rights do not taint Christianity’s pious, innocent image in our society to the same degree as Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and ISIS characterize Islam.
Rather, Muslims are forced to apologize for violent actions of radical Muslims — crimes that they do not condone and motives that they don’t agree with. Unfortunately, whenever an extremist or a crazy person from any minority commits a crime, it characterizes the entire race and everyone else in that minority is blamed for that individual’s actions. For example, after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government established Japanese internment camps, labeling every Japanese and Japanese-American person as a threat and enemy to the state. Most of the people imprisoned in these camps were innocent, average civilians who were punished solely on the basis of their ethnicity.
This phenomenon transcends terrorism. Whenever the person committing a crime, like shoplifting or possession of drugs, happens to be African American, it perpetuates the racist notion that all African Americans are “hoodlums” and “thugs,” justifying unfair treatment and unreasonable accusations toward innocent African Americans by police officers. For minorities, crimes never represent just the individual. They represent the minority as a whole.
In reality, not every Muslim is a terrorist, nor is every terrorist Muslim. In fact, most of the mass murderers in the U.S. within the past decade have been white. Just last week, a member of the KKK attempted to bomb an NAACP building in Colorado — an act of domestic terrorism that would have flooded the media if the perpetrator were Muslim. Yet, we don’t have the same queasy feeling when we enter a cafeteria full of white Americans as we do when we see a bearded man with a turban at an airport. The difference is that a white criminal is labeled as a mentally-disturbed exception to the innocent, conforming, peaceful majority.
We need to hold Muslims to the same standard and recognize that all acts of terrorism committed by Muslim extremists do not represent the entire Muslim community.
