When the Individual Is Stained by the Group

It makes my skin crawl to think I may find myself in agreement with anything Donald Trump has to say about Muslims or, for that matter, almost anything, but when he asks, "What is going on there?" I do have to admit, I share his puzzlement.

Samanth Subramanian, writing in the New Yorker (Dec 21, 28) tells the story of several Muslim bloggers in Bangladesh who found themselves on a "Hit List" because they had blogged about their "ardent rationalist"  ideas, one of whom had the temerity to say: "I don't care about whether God exists. Let him do his business and let me do my business."

 It is not clear whether this was the extent of his offense, which got him on the list; he may have been "guilty of using very  filthy language about the Prophet Muhammad;" he may not have. But what is clear is his name was placed on a list of roughly 50 names of "free thinkers" and he was hacked to death by men wielding machetes, as Bangladeshi police, seen on video in the background, did nothing. 

It may also be true the organization Hefazat-e-Islam may have given the Bangladeshi government a list of atheists they wanted executed.  The fact is, there are entire Islamic nations we find to be pretty terrible right now. There are nations like Jordan, which we can embrace, and there are Muslims in Palestine, for whom we can feel sympathy, but it's hard to think kind thoughts about Iran or Saudi Arabia, or Bangladesh or Pakistan.

Indonesia, home to what may be more Muslims than live in the Middle East seems too unconnected by culture and ethnicity to matter much when leaders point to those benign Muslims. Those aren't the Muslims we are thinking about much now. 

On the other hand, there have been prosecutions in Bangladesh for the murders of two of the bloggers.

At least some Muslims consider hacking a person to death for speaking insults or professing atheism to be justifiable, if not laudatory,  and they say they are motivated by what Islam teaches. How do we know, as non Muslims, what "Islam teaches" when we see the actions some Muslims take?

When the only narrative is a story told by Donald Trump about Muslims celebrating in New Jersey as the Twin Towers burned, Islam has, at the very least a problem with the brand.  There were well documented celebrations that day in Palestine.  Trump sites polls, likely bogus, which say American Muslims want to live under Shariah law and endorse violence against infidels. Where is the counter narrative going to come from?

One may ask if this extremism is peculiar to Islam, or is simply the logical outcome of any religion, of the conviction you are in possession of "God's will," where all others are violating God's will.

It can be argued Christians have been every bit as bloodthirsty, if you look back through history, but most of us are not really concerned about what happened 900 years ago. We care about where we have arrived now.

Are Christians now intolerant of those who attack  what they hold sacred?
Consider Bertrand Russell, who said, "There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ's moral character, and that is He believed in Hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment. Christ certainly as depicted in the Gospels did believe in everlasting punishment, and one does find repeatedly a vindictive fury against those people who would not listen to His preaching." Did the pope put him on a hit list for that?

Or listen to Christopher Hitchens: "Why, if god was the creator of all things were we supposed to "praise" him so incessantly for doing what came to him naturally?  This seemed servile, apart from anything else. If Jesus could heal a blind person he happened to meet, then why not heal blindness? What was so wonderful about his casting out devils, so that the devils would enter a herd of pigs instead? That seemed sinister: more like black magic."

Here we have two men, one an avowed atheist, attacking Christ and yet not even the Ku Klux Klan is calling for their names to be placed on a list to be hacked to death.


Is there any other significant segment of any religion today , other than Islam, calling for violence against infidels, unbelievers, non believers or those simply indifferent to the teachings of their faith?  

The big question, of course is: who placed the  men on the list to be hacked to death?  Can these men be seen as "representative" of other members of Islam or are they simply psychopaths using Islam as a cover for their murderous pathological inclinations? 

Cynics have claimed what draws some men to join the police is it allows them socially acceptable cover to exercise their sadistic pathology; can the same be said of those young men rushing to join ISIS, murdering, raping and pillaging their way across the fertile crescent invoking Islamic authority.

President Obama suggested, as a practical matter, American Muslims disavow the idea of killing people for voicing ideas which may insult or contradict Muslim beliefs. 

Some Muslims have taken offense to this: Why do I, as an American Muslim, have to declare my disagreement with these psychopathic fundamentalists? Do you suspect me of this psychopathology simply because my last name is Shah or Al-Azziz? Are you seeing me as an individual or placing me into a group?  Once, all that mattered was if a man was Black. That one characteristic was all you saw, all you needed to know about him. Are you not doing the same thing now to Muslims?

The problem is, you have enough Muslims, even if they are a small minority,shooting, throwing bombs and hacking in the name of Islam to confuse at least some Americans who are personally unfamiliar with Muslims.  After all, it was Muslims who murdered cartoonists in Paris, and Muslims to murdered theater goers and patrons of sidewalk cafe's there. A Muslim cleric, the leader of his Muslim nation,  put the author of "The Satanic Verses" on a hit list. Muslims who set off the bombs at the Boston marathon and Muslims who shot people in San Bernadino, not to mention Muslims who flew the planes into the World Trade Center.  And it is Muslims streaming through Turkey to fight in Syria to establish a caliphate. 

The assimilated, tolerant American Muslim must cringe whenever a new attack occurs, but the fact he does not need to apologize does not mean he does not need to react.

The fact that someone shares one characteristic with you does not mean you share anything else with that individual.  Not every German was a Nazi, nor every Italian a fascist, nor every Jew a member of the group that blew up the King David Hotel. American Jews shuddered when Ethel and Julius Rosenberg turned out to be the people who stole the secret to making an atomic bomb and gave it to the Russians. No widespread reprisals were visited upon American Jews for that, fortunately. But what if that had become part of a series of events to call into question the loyalty of "American Jews?"   

But, fact is, Germans knew how others perceived them after the crimes of the Holocaust were publicized and their government made substantial efforts to denounce the thinking which lead to that and individual Germans for decades understood they had to personally disavow that sort of thinking. Southern whites had to personally dispel any notion they harbored racist ideas, because they knew how Blacks and northern whites perceived them as soon as they opened their mouths and started talking in the accent others associated with George Wallace, Bull Connor and the Ku Klux Klan.

Sometimes, if you are a member of a group, you have to prove you are an individual and you understand how that group is perceived. Jewish boys have had to show they are not obsessed with money, that that prejudice does not apply to every individual of the group, and not to the group at all.

It sucks that individual Muslims might now have to feel they have to defend themselves against accusations they endorse violence and intolerance against those who do not believe what Islam teaches. But Muslims would not be the first and will not be the last to be put in this position by those who say they speak for their faith or their group. 

When, after the Paris shootings, a Muslim reporter asked the Iman of the main mosque of Paris why he had not organized a million Muslim march to oppose extremism in the name of Islam, he sheepishly replied he had tried but the reply from his assembly was that he did not represent the feelings of the members, especially the younger members. 

We are left asking: What does this mean? Is this an indicator that all Muslims agree with the attackers? Is this a case of Qui Tacit Consentit (He who remains silent, consents)? Or is this simply an index of how alienated Muslims in France feel, a feeling not shared by their more assimilated and successful Muslim cohort in the United States?

The fact is, I know and work with many physicians who are Muslim, although I have never thought of them as Muslim. They are simply doctors, fathers, mothers. It has only been recently, when I got Happy Holidays email cards from these people it struck me--Gee, he's a Muslim. I wonder how he feels about all this?

Probably, it's up to these citizens to tell me, not up to me to ask.