Is America Unfair to Muslims?

Published on Sunday, 27 December 2015

Recently there has been a lot of media uproar on the claim that the United States of America was unfair to the Muslims and discriminated against them. It is also claimed that the USA hated Muslims.

This recent media uproar was caused primarily by the Republican Party presidential aspirant, Donald Trump, when he suggested that the USA should stop the entry of Muslims to this country, until the politicians figured out "what the hell is going on."

What prompted Mr. Trump to make the suggestion? A Muslim couple, a US citizen and his recently immigrated wife, had committed a mass shooting in San Bernardino, California. From even the very preliminary police investigations, it was clear that this mass shooting was well planned to terrorize the USA.

More recently a British Muslim family of nine was denied entry to the USA where they had planned a vacation with their US citizen family and a visit to a fun theme park. The media blamed Mr. Trump's strong position on stopping Muslims from entering the USA at least for a while.

Openly admitted or not, there is no doubt that Muslims are being more scrutinized while they try to enter the USA. It is also only natural that people who have no criminal intent, when denied entry, would be upset, feeling that they were unfairly treated.

I remember when I came to this country as a student more than 34 years back, I got the visa on the same day of the application, and did not even need to see a visa officer. All the visa office needed was an I-20 form, where it was documented that I had been admitted to a university and that the financing of my education and stay in the USA would be supported by a Graduate Teaching Assistantship that the university had offered me. No background check for US national security was needed.

But now there are serious background checks for getting visa and entering the USA; and the process can be called inconvenient and unfair to the vast majority of the travelers and immigrants that come to the USA. In fact, life is inconvenient to all travelers in the USA, from taking shoes off to body search, for no fault of even one in a hundred thousand of them. And most of the internal travelers are US citizens and are not Muslims.

What caused the USA to make life inconvenient and unfair to millions of its absolutely innocent citizens in their own homeland? Of course, the principal culprit was the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the USA that killed almost three thousand people. And who were the perpetrators of those attacks? They were all Muslims.

The world is not perfect, and the USA is not either. And there were some backlashes against innocent Muslims in the USA due to the terrorist attacks like 9/11 and San Bernardino. Even some Sikhs got that, because the ignorant people who did that found them looking like Muslims. But, obviously, the Sikhs were absolutely innocent of the reason for the backlash.

So, Islamic terrorism has brought quite a bit of suffering and unfairness to a lot of absolutely innocent people in the USA. Now, if you choose to be a Muslim, do you really think that you being scrutinized more would be unfair? I would suggest that if you found 9/11 or San Bernardino abhorrent, you probably would cut down on your Muslim showing off style.

However, the so-called moderates among the Muslims are doing the opposite. For example, when they got a chance, they started prayer calls from loudspeakers in the township of Hamtramck, Michigan, in the USA in 2015. You think the non-Muslims of Hamtramck are not disturbed by the noise pollution? You think they should not be annoyed and antagonized? Does this show unfairness or intolerance or hatred against Muslims? If you look at the Muslim standards of treating non-Muslims in most parts of the world, Hamtramck, Michigan, should humble you if you are a Muslim.

Aside from the annoyance and antagonism, there are increasing signs of home-grown Islamic terrorism. Clearly, the perpetrators of the San Bernardino mass shooting did not need international terrorist organizations like the Islamic State. All they needed was enough Islamic brainwash, along with easy availability of guns. Thus, it would be stupid of the USA, if the country were not being vigilant about denying entry to potential terrorists to the country. It would be irresponsible of the politicians and intellectuals of this country to not discourage Islamic brainwash in this country.

Some politicians and intellectuals of this country deny the fact that Muslims are creeping in Islam here. This dishonesty, possibly for personal gains or to show off extra tolerance and humanity, would not help the USA; nor would it help the world. The attempts to Islamize the USA/West should be tackled by genuine secular humanists, who have no hatred against any kind of people. It should be clear that not allowing people to practice nonsense, injustice, hatred and atrocities does not fall into the category of persecuting them.

The USA and the West are not perfect, but they are progressing toward honest, fact-based and rational looks at religions. That is why there are steady growths in the percentages of atheists and agnostics in the USA/West.

One thing that I object here is the so-called "freedom of religion." It should be replaced with "Freedom for Humanity." Religious innocent stupidity such as wasting too much time on praying should be discouraged. Religious injustice such as women wearing whole body covers should be banned, even if there are millions of brainwashed willing victims. Religious hatred such as persecuting people for different religious beliefs or for no religious belief should be trashed, no matter where in the world it is practiced. Religious atrocities such as killing and dying for any kind of God should get absolutely zero tolerance from the civilized world.

No human being is born with a religious brand on him/her. People get their religious identities mostly through childhood brainwash in the family and in the community. This is quite unlike skin colors, for example. You cannot shed your skin color, and you should not be faulted for your skin color. But you can certainly shed your religious stupidity, injustice, hatred and barbarity; the difficulty would depend upon how much brainwash you had gotten. But it is doable, and should be demanded by people who genuinely care about a just and peaceful world.

So, instead of falsely blaming the USA/West for being unfair, intolerant or hateful, Muslims all over the world need to retrospect and learn how to think, say and follow through doing the right things and not doing the wrong things, without caring about what their religious books say. The paradigm shift has to be from the uninformed and dishonest talk of blaming criminals for 'misinterpreting Islam' to caring about right and wrong without putting any burden on the religion.