(Thane)
A few weeks ago, two Indian guys, just a few years younger than me, approached me in a restaurant to ask me about what life was like in the USA. As we conversed—in their halting English and my even more halting Hindi—I realized that they were particularly interested in one particular issue.
“Is it true that Muslims are discriminated against in America?” one asked.
“Not just Muslims, but everyone with Muslim names,” his friend added.
Now, this question wasn’t too surprising. The media in India often depict the United States as a place of intolerance bordering on hatred toward Muslims.
Sadly, these impressions of America have a fairly substantial grain of truth in them. For example, many Muslims who travel in the United States are detained and questioned at airports. In an irony that almost sounds like it was intentionally engineered to generate publicity for his film, Indian actor Shah Rukh Khan was held for questioning at Newark International Airport just after he finished filming “My Name is Khan”, which is about an innocent Muslim man being aggressively interrogated at an American airport.
Far more troubling, of course, is the fact that hundreds of Muslims were rounded up and imprisoned for years in areas specifically designed to be out of the reach of political or judicial oversight, and many of these people were subjected to an organized program of torture that was officially approved at the very highest levels of the United States government. We now know that a large number, perhaps the majority, of those people had no connections to any militant groups.
So it makes sense that people around the world would have the impression of the United States as a terrible place for Muslims. Of course, the impression is largely false: the United States is actually still a very welcoming place, a place where the average Muslim is far wealthier and has far more political and civil freedoms than the average Muslim in almost any Muslim-majority country in the world. But the global media is far more interested in reporting on the scandalous exceptions than the run-of-the-mill norm.
However, national security demands vigilance, which is where the problems come in. Assume that we could somehow identify whether a particular person is a terrorist with 99.5 percent accuracy. There are around one billion Muslims in the world, and maybe 500 of those are actively plotting to engage in acts of terror. So, if we could identify terrorists with 99.5 percent accuracy, then we would identify 5,000,497 people as terrorists. 497 of those people would be terrorists, and 5 million would be false positives.
That means a whole lot of innocent people being detained and harassed, and perhaps even imprisoned, as well as two or three actual terrorists sneaking through the cracks, maybe by boarding a flight to Detroit on Christmas Day. (This discussion is based in part on a similar discussion in the new book SuperFreakonomics, which is a really fantastic book, despite its silly title.)
Given that reality, it is far too easy to create a narrative of civilizational clash, where the West is seen by Muslims as ruthlessly rounding up innocent Muslims, and Muslims are seen by the West as nothing more than terrorists and terrorist sympathizers. But that narrative is toxic. In the end, it will only deepen tensions and breed the very problems that we are trying to avoid—suspicion, fear, and more acts of terror, rather than fewer.
Can we break this vicious cycle? I suggest that we can, but both sides need to make good-faith attempts to understand the legitimate concerns of the other. The American majority should deeply sympathize with stories of detention and abuse, and seek to limit these costs as much as possible. When it becomes clear that we have made a mistake, we should try to rectify it. For example, why isn’t there a popular political movement in America to offer compensation and an apology to those who were wrongly imprisoned, even if that imprisonment was done in good faith? On the other side, Muslims could try to understand that any attempt to screen out terrorists will be imperfect, and that mistakes are caused not by spite against their religion, but by human fallibility. (It would be easier for them to understand this if those of us from the West toned down our rhetoric and showed more sympathy with the innocent and more outrage at those who committed acts of torture and wrongful imprisonment in our names.)
Unfortunately, the trend toward deepening suspicion and widening the fault lines between cultures is strong. The responsibility is on each of us to break that pattern, to reach out to people who are different from us and do everything in our power to project good will, tolerance, and mutual understanding. There will always be wrongs done, on both sides, but we can choose whether to focus our outrage and energy only on the wrongs of the other side, or whether we should also pay a little attention to the planks in our own eyes as well. It is only through true compassion that the United States can triumph over extremism, by being seen as a city on a hill rather than an evil imperalist power.
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