In the midst of an ever-escalating “war on terror,” raging Islamophobia, immigration bans, and reciprocal terror incidents that are tragically mindless in whom they victimize, dare we consider a vision of peaceful coexistence? A vision in which a Muslim doctor and a Wall Street banker pass each other on the busy New York streets and exchange a friendly greeting, each seeing only another man working hard to provide for his family? One in which two ladies walk together, chattering excitedly about their social lives and not even noticing that one of them is wearing a long black scarf and the other a delicate summer dress? A community where Muslims and non-Muslims carry on normal lives, barely noticing their differences?
This is an idealistic vision to be sure, but not one that requires miraculous intervention to realize. We can all take simple steps to begin reversing the ominous momentum of mistrust, hatred, and violence. Rebecca Cataldi, a conflict resolution specialist at the International Center for Religion and Diplomacy in Washington DC, in her insightful paper, Clash of Perceptions: Hostility Perception and the US-Muslim World Relationship, points out the importance of the bilateral perception of hostility between Muslims and Americans in the exacerbation of ongoing conflict.
In her description of “hostility perception theory,” Cataldi explains that if one person’s perception of another is that he is hostile and harbors ill will, that person’s interpretation of the words and actions of the other will automatically catapult off of this perception to some imagined evil intent. This almost inevitably results in creating “self-fulfilling prophecies where one expects the other to behave belligerently, takes defensive action and relates negatively to the other, and then ends up producing the very belligerent behavior in the other that one expected and sought to avoid.1 Without a change of perception, there is little hope of reversing this dynamic.
We can all take simple steps to begin
reversing the ominous momentum of mistrust,
hatred, and violence.
With this in mind, let us re-examine President Bush’s post-9/11 question and answer in his address to Congress. “Why do they hate us?’” The insidiousness of this question lies in the ambiguity of the pronoun “they.” Tragically, the president never clarified that “they” referred to a small band of Wahhabi radicals headed by Osama bin Laden. I believe our lack of awareness of the teachings of Islam, helped along by a steady stream of negative media images, produced an unconscious substitution of the word “Muslims” for the pronoun “they.” President Bush never said it, but what Americans heard was, “Why do Muslims hate us?”
With the awful images still replaying in our heads, Bush’s answer imprinted a powerful perception in our minds. And with that perception branded upon our collective psyche, America had no problem getting behind the invasions of two nations. There can be no doubt this perception of hostility continues to be in operation en masse in the United States today.
The media were not unaffected and continue to play a key role in reinforcing this perception. In the run-up to the US invasion of Iraq, news anchors were almost universally outspoken in their support of the impending invasion. With Fox News leading the way and across the full political spectrum to MSNBC News, untold hours of news programming created a virtual high school pep rally atmosphere in their coverage of America’s unjustified invasion and war of aggression. It seemed as if news producers, writers, and anchor people alike all believed what President Bush had implied—Muslims are attacking us because they hate our freedom.
Americans are still hard-pressed to find any news coverage about Muslims in a post-9/11 world that doesn’t also involve an act of terror. In news stories about various violent acts in the United States, if a person with an Islamic background is involved, it’s called an act of terror. This is never the case if the perpetrator is non-Muslim. The relentless association of Muslims with terror, along with the absence of any portrayal of Muslims in a context of normal life continues to reinforce the false perception of hostility.
And Donald Trump leaves no room for doubt about his perception in a 2015 CNN interview when he said: “I think…Islam hates us.”2
Even before 9/11, a deep foundation for a negative image of Muslims was already in place. It was laid almost imperceptibly over many decades by a force so pervasive it was virtually unnoticed. In his comprehensive work, Reel Bad Arabs, the late Jack Shaheen reviewed the more than 900 films featuring Arabs, produced primarily in the United States, between 1896 and 2001. He found that all but fifteen of the 900 films portrayed Arabs in a negative light. Four dominant categories of Arab characters were portrayed in his exhaustive review: sheikhs, maidens, Egyptians, and Palestinians—and almost always as villains. “We see them assaulting just about every imaginable foe—Americans, Europeans, Israelis, legionnaires, Africans, fellow Arabs, even—for heaven’s sake—Hercules and Samson.”3
Examples in Reel Bad Arabs are prolific. In 1951, Columbia Pictures released the first Hollywood feature film that portrayed Arabs as terrorists— Sirocco, starring Humphrey Bogart. Set during the Syrian struggle for independence from France after World War I, the film opens with a bomb exploding in a restaurant frequented by French officers. Syrians are portrayed by American actors wearing a ridiculous combination of costumes from Arabia, Cairo, and Africa. The French are portrayed as men of honor, while Syrian freedom fighters are depicted as treacherous and ruthless. All speak English with American accents. When a French emissary is sent to the Syrian insurgents, his throat is cut, and Humphrey Bogart shrugs and replies, “What did you expect?” The film closes with a black African Muslim throwing a grenade into Humphrey Bogart’s room, killing him.
In Captured by Bedouins (1912), a British officer rescues an American maiden who had been kidnapped in the desert by Bedouin thieves. US cavalry troops arrive on the scene, just in time to gun down the fair maiden’s Arab abductors. And speaking of gunning down Arab attackers, dozens of movies, made as early as the colonial era, depict British, French, American, and Israeli soldiers obliterating woefully overmatched Arab fighters. Shaheen found dozens of cases of anti-Christian Arabs, in one case referred to as “dirty, filthy swine.” Islamic women are portrayed as virtual slaves, either oppressively clothed in a full-body burqa and serving a cruel husband, or wearing see-through leggings as belly dancers, and doing service of another kind. Egyptians are portrayed as Nazi sympathizers, swindlers, or mummies, with plenty of begging children thrown in for good measure.
Perhaps hit hardest by stereotyping in the film industry are the Palestinians. In the forty-five action films reviewed, more than half filmed in Israel, not a single one shows Palestinian families struggling to survive in refugee camps or living under occupation. “No movie shows Israeli soldiers and settlers uprooting olive orchards, gunning down Palestinian civilians in Palestinian cities,” Shaheen wrote. Seven films involve Palestinian terrorists using nerve agents or threatening to detonate a nuclear warhead. Desperate Palestinians are depicted threatening and injuring Western women and children in eleven movies.
Black Sunday was telecast for several years on Super Bowl Sunday after it was released in 1977. I caught myself with my mouth hanging open several times as I watched it recently. In the opening scene, Israeli Mossad agents sneak into a house in Lebanon and wipe out a dozen or so Palestinians, apparently in the throes of plotting an attack on Israel. The female villain is spared. For unknown reasons, she makes her way to the United States and hooks up with a disillusioned Vietnam veteran serving as a pilot of the Goodyear blimp. Together they plot to blow up the blimp at field level at the Orange Bowl in Miami, where the Super Bowl is being hosted. The hero, a Mossad agent whose entire family had been murdered by Palestinians, works behind the backs of inept FBI agents to save the day. As the movie approaches the climax, the woman terrorist enters the blimp cockpit and shoots the pilot in cold blood. As the blimp lifts off, she sprays the ground with machine gun fire taking out the entire ground crew. She tosses bodies out of the blimp and shoots down a pursuing helicopter, but not before the heroic Mossad agent is dropped onto the top of the blimp. He manages to shoot both the pilot and the Palestinian woman, but not before they light the bomb fuse. Still on top of the blimp, he somehow attaches a cable from another helicopter to the blimp and rides it as it is towed out over the ocean. Not surprisingly, just after he leaps off the blimp clinging to the cable, the bomb explodes and no one is harmed. At no point was there any mention of why the Palestinians were resorting to terror, but there was a dramatic scene in the hospital highlighting the heartbreak of the Mossad agent. As they queried him about next of kin and went down the line from father to mother to children, he continued to repeat that each had been killed. It was impossible to miss the message.
I see the effect of this perception on social media all the time. In January 2018, a friend of mine living in Palestine posted pictures of three Palestinian boys she had run into on her morning walk to the language school where she taught English. The bespectacled boy and his two brothers looked to be laughing and giggling, while giving the thumbs-up signal to my friend as she passed by. The boys’ Bedouin grandmother invited her in for tea. The first comment under the post from an American friend was one of surprise, “They seem very friendly.” To which my friend replied, “The Arab people are exceptionally warm and hospitable… It breaks my heart that there is such a false negative perception about these lovely brothers and sisters.” The other friend then commented, “Because of extremists…I can’t fault any wariness unless you get to know some of them.” The perception of the person living among them was that they are “exceptionally warm and hospitable,” and the perception of one who lived far away and was only exposed to Hollywood movies was one of wariness, because you never know when one might be an extremist. Knowing many Arabs myself, my heart breaks with my friend’s heart.
It’s to be expected that Hollywood would produce over-dramatized action films energized by real terrorist incidents. The problem comes when there is no balancing representation, either in real life through travel or friendship, or on the screen. There is no shortage of action films, dramas, or even musicals depicting other cultures in a positive light. From Dr. Zhivago to Fiddler on the Roof, from Hawaii to The King and I, I’m sure we can all string together a long list of delightful productions featuring positive depictions of cultures around the world. But where are the fair representations of sheikhs as elderly men of wisdom? Where are the docudramas featuring Arab women such as the intriguing Ivonne Abdel-Baki, who is a graduate of Harvard University’s Kennedy school of Government, has served in multiple high-level diplomatic and political capacities in Ecuador, and is fluent in five languages? Where is the musical that features Arab life and culture in a positive light?
The stereotype of Arab as terrorist is one Hollywood just won’t let go of. In 2018, Amazon ran a high-octane Super Bowl ad promoting their new Jack Ryan series. Complete with voice clips from three presidents, rapid-fire building explosions, and close-ups of Muslims, the ad left no doubt about Amazon’s intent to cash in on the business of Islamophobia.
President Bush’s post-9/11 speech and more than one hundred years of negative screen images have had a profound impact on our perception of Muslims. And this image has been reinforced by yet another powerful group that has taken aim at the Arabs.
Modern Zionism emerged in the late 1800s in Europe. Zionism is a Jewish nationalist movement that, for obvious reasons, set its sights on Palestine as a homeland. In both ideology and in actual practice, Zionism extends the right of full citizenship to Jews only. Zionist leaders developed wealthy and powerful networks in both Britain and the United States. These networks put their wealth and power to bear on creating a pro-Zionist narrative in the news media. In her book, Against Our Better Judgment, journalist Alison Weir provides extensive data showing an almost universal pro-Zionist bias among American media outlets. This was evident as early as 1917, in a study of four leading newspapers.4
During the following thirty years leading up to Israel’s military takeover of Palestine in 1948–1949, Zionists became extremely proficient in their ability to control the narrative as portrayed in the US media. When Israeli forces took over Palestine, more than 700,000 indigenous Palestinians were expelled from their ancestral homelands and became refugees. But, as Weir points out, the pro-Zionist narrative in the United States was so pervasive that, in a State Department study in March 1949, they found that the American public was not even aware of the Palestinian refugee problem.5
The media blackout in the United States on news pertaining to the Palestinians is in full force today. Two generations of Palestinians have been born in refugee camps and their numbers have swollen to five million according to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). The remaining Palestinian territories, Gaza, and the West Bank, have been occupied or blockaded by the Israelis since 1967. But I have yet to meet a rank-and-file American who is not either shocked or outright disbelieving when I describe the plight of the Palestinians. One woman I recently spoke with simply said, “I don’t believe they would do that,” referring to the Israelis driving out the Palestinians from their homelands. The typical American doesn’t know what “the occupied territories” means, and I doubt whether many could explain the meaning of the term “Israeli settlers.”
Extensive studies of media coverage of
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have been
published by several groups and reveal an
unmistakable bias towards Israel.
Are Americans just hopelessly ignorant about the history and current events of the Middle East? Perhaps. But evidence shows that our ignorance is helped along by a well-orchestrated propaganda campaign by the Israel lobby. For some the ignorance is willful, as in the case of Christian Zionists, who believe that the Jewish takeover of Israel and Jerusalem is a divine inevitability and welcomed prophetic fulfillment signaling the second coming of Christ. For the rest of us, it would take a serious amount of digging to get to the truth. Extensive studies of media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have been published by several groups and reveal an unmistakable bias towards Israel. Exhaustive statistics have been collected on countless facets of media coverage of this issue. For brevity I randomly selected a single statistic: the evening news coverage by ABC, CBS, and NBC on child fatalities in a one-year period (September, 29 2000–September 28, 2001) during one of the Palestinian rebellions. On average, the deaths of children on either side were over ten times more likely to be covered if the child killed was an Israeli.6 For every Israeli child’s death reported on the news, it took ten Palestinian children to die before they could get the same coverage as the one Israeli child. A wealth of data confirms this pattern of reporting in every aspect and in every medium, whether television, newspapers, or Internet. An excellent source of this extensive data is IfAmericaKnew.org under their “media analysis” tab.
The American public has swallowed the Israel lobby’s version of the story hook line and sinker: Arabs have an inherent hatred for Jews, as taught by the Quran. Without any provocation, Palestinian terrorists launch a steady stream of deadly rockets and suicide attacks on peace-loving Israeli civilians. Palestinians are an ever-present existential threat to Israel and any violence on the part of the Israelis towards the Palestinians is wholly defensive in nature, and an important aspect of the “war on terror.” This narrative has become another key element supporting the false perception of Muslim hostility.
I recently had a brief conversation with a close friend about the topic of Israel and Palestine and the fact that I would be addressing it in my book. She is a well-educated, progressive thinker, who often accesses nontraditional media sources. Her immediate response in the discussion was, “That must be difficult for a researcher; how can you tell which stories to believe?” Given that she is well-informed and someone that I respect very much, it was a powerful illustration of the pervasiveness of the Zionist narrative. It seems that almost everyone I talk to, even though they might have a willingness to evaluate the conflict with fairness, is unaware of its one-sided history. They are unaware that more than 700,000 Palestinians have been dispossessed from their homelands and don’t know that there are now over five million Palestinian refugees living in fifty-eight UN-registered camps in the Middle East. They are ignorant of the fact that Israel has occupied or blockaded all remaining Palestinian land and continues to dispossess Palestinians to this day. They lack awareness that any slight attempt at resistance is met with crushing violence. And I can almost guarantee that the vast majority of the American populace is unaware that since September 2000, more than 2,000 Palestinian children have been killed by Israelis compared to 134 Israeli children who have lost their lives at the hands of the Palestinians.7
I point this out not to criticize my friend or anyone else for not knowing the facts, but to highlight the difficulty of simply getting our hands on them. A complete discussion of the influence of Zionist wealth and activism in the United States is beyond the scope of this book, but I refer the reader to the following sources: The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt (2007, Farrar, Straus and Giroux), the Washington report on Middle East affairs (www.wrmea.org), and Against Our Better Judgment, by Alison Weir.
The perception of Americans that Muslims are hostile toward us is only one side of the equation.
In her description of Hostility Perception Theory, Cataldi points out that very often in conflict, the perception of hostility is bidirectional. We’ve taken a hard look at our own side of the equation, but what about the other side? Do Muslims believe that Americans, in general, maintain an attitude of hostility towards them? Certainly, after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and considering the rhetoric coming from President Trump, and the rise of Islamophobic incidents in the United States, it would be reasonable to assume that many Muslims believe that Americans harbor hostility towards them. More recent survey data summarized by Cataldi confirms this assumption. But Cataldi highlights additional data from the previously cited Gallup survey not long after 9/11 that can give us more insight:
In precisely the same time period that George
W. Bush was convincing America that
Muslims hate our freedoms and justifying
invasions of two Muslim countries, Muslims
were responding to Gallup surveys with
answers stating that what they admired most
about the West was its freedom.
The Gallup surveys in which this data was collected took place between the years 2001 and 2006. George W. Bush made his infamous statement that “they hate our freedoms” on September 20, 2001. The invasion of Iraq commenced on March 19, 2003. In precisely the same time period that George W. Bush was convincing America that Muslims hate our freedoms and justifying invasions of two Muslim countries, Muslims were responding to Gallup surveys with answers stating that what they admired most about the West was its freedom. It is difficult to imagine a more profound illustration of the consequences of Bush’s false perception.
But, what about us? How can we do our part to reverse the momentum? It’s often said that the first step toward change is awareness. Knowledge can definitely prepare us to break down long-standing misperceptions. But what about the psychological effects, which affect us more subtly? Is it possible to modify our psyches, conditioned by a lifetime of programming? How can we address the thoughts and fears that creep into our minds?
In my own experience, psychological change requires firm intention motivated by an impossible-to-ignore hunger for things to be different. It requires action and the investment of energy. In order to diffuse our innate fears of Muslims, I know of no force more powerful than that of face-to-face interaction. When two good-hearted souls hold eye contact and hear one another’s stories, hearts soften. When each sees with compassion the tears of pain in the eyes of the other, imaginary walls crumble. And when they continue spending time together, the day arrives when they forget they are different.
For those who haven’t already, it’s time to consider befriending a Muslim.
For some of us that’s as easy as striking up a conversation with a coworker. For many others it can be as daunting as skydiving. One thing is certain, it isn’t going to happen without deeply motivated intention. For myself, even though I had lived in the Muslim world for five years, I was not immune to the programming. In my head I knew, but my subconscious produced the very fears that I’m writing about.
Ironically, I started the book project a year before I did anything about those deep-seated fears. I got my first opportunity to visit a mosque with a group of progressive thinkers and leaders in San Diego who are part of a church known as Sojourn Grace Collective. We attended a weekly open house called “Coffee, Cake, and True Islam,” hosted by our local Ahmadiyya Muslim community. We had a mutually supportive interchange of thoughts. I was caught off guard when someone from our group asked the imam, “How would you and your members feel about attending events with our gay community?” You could have heard a pin drop when the imam paused before answering. I think he surprised everyone with his answer: “Though we may not agree with homosexuality, we stand against discrimination against the LGBTQ community and understand that this is a personal decision between them and God.” Even with this tense moment, it was a good first visit.
Having broken the ice, I asked my friend, the software engineer named Mohammed, if I could attend Friday prayers with him at the mosque. He said I was welcome. After the sermon and the prayers, I stayed around for a few minutes and found a few friendly faces to introduce myself to. The broken ice was thawing. I went back alone several times, got to know some of the members, and organized several group visits to the mosque. I have visited other mosques and have come to feel very comfortable mixing with the Muslim community.
I didn’t know it yet, but I still had ground to cover. This would come to me in a moment of clarity while I was spending time with Maaz, the imam of the Ahmadiyya community that hosted my first visit to the mosque. I returned many times to their Tuesday night event, and often it was just Maaz and me. We drank tea, chatted, and gradually got to know each other. Often, we talked about unpleasant news surrounding things like Trump’s executive order banning citizens of certain Muslim countries from entering the United States. But we also talked about everyday things that friends talk about: family stuff, problems at work, or plans for the weekend. We met for a burger once after we hadn’t seen each other for a while. As we were catching up, I had the sudden realization that I looked at Maaz only as my friend. Nothing else about him entered into my consciousness as we chatted like a couple of old buddies. And in this moment I knew.
My ultimate goal in writing this book is for the information I share to become the catalyst for hundreds of thousands of relationships like the one I have with Maaz.
Several groups that facilitate Muslim/non-Muslim interaction have recently come onto the scene. For those who are a little shy about initiating on their own, it’s possible that an Ecosia search will turn up one of these groups in your area. If not, the month of Ramadan can be an excellent opportunity to meet Muslims. Many mosques host iftar gatherings in the evenings throughout the month and open these to the public. Generally, a nice meal is served, and an adventurous soul can find herself sitting at a table with a couple of Muslim families or a talkative group of ladies.
During the course of my networking activities with the Muslim community, I found myself consistently running into the same gentleman. He was a soft-spoken, elderly man named Mohammed, who goes by his middle name, Aziz. I asked him to meet me for coffee. As he started to tell me his story, I found myself captivated. He had been serving as a finance minister in the government in Kabul during the communist takeover in the early ‘70s. One night, during the Soviet-style purge of the former government, he got a call from a friend warning him, “They are coming for you tonight.” He fled with his family, taking only what they could carry, and walked for twelve days before reaching safety in Pakistan. After some time, Aziz and his family were allowed into the United States as refugees and have become US citizens.
In 2016 Aziz started an organization called We Love Our Neighbors. He is quietly passionate about working for peace. He explained that Christians and Muslims make up over half of the population of the world, so he focuses on promoting love and unity between these two groups, one neighborhood at a time. Aziz humbly does this work on a volunteer basis while still providing for his family as a real estate agent.
We have become close friends and solid partners. He has been especially helpful in planning and facilitating events put on by the nonprofit I founded, Salaam. On one occasion I took a dozen or so non-Muslims to an iftar gathering at a local mosque during Ramadan. When we arrived it was packed with around 300 people. The easy solution would have been to put the new guests together at a new table, but I was hoping that my visitors could be dispersed at separate tables, full of Muslim guests. When I asked Mohammed about this, he immediately went into action, disappearing into the crowd and then coming back to escort each guest, one at a time, to the next open spot he had found (or created). My guests had a delightful evening and were among the last to leave.
The pinnacle of sweet friendship provides a new vantage point to enjoy the view. Having broken through the misconceptions, we see only fellow travelers on the journey. We learn to savor our common humanity and celebrate our differences. And from this vantage point it becomes impossible not to notice that our new friends are hurting. When we hear a group of our coworkers making disparaging remarks about the Muslim woman downstairs who comes to work in her hijab, it affects us differently. In the past we might not even have noticed this conversation. But now we do. When we hear our friend’s country listed on an executive order banning anyone from this country from entering the United States, we feel a part of their pain. And we feel differently now about the “war on terror.”
Under the leadership of Donald Trump, attitudes and policies toward Muslims have taken a turn for the worse. In Trump’s nationally televised speech at the CPAC conference in late February 2018, on the subject of immigration, he revived the well used poem from his campaign trail called, The Snake. In the story told in the poem, a woman is attacked and killed by a snake she had cared for after it had been wounded. Trump’s punch line—and the defining principle of his immigration policy—was, “You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in.”
In a time when government leaders are fanning the flames of Islamophobia, citizen diplomacy is called for. Rebecca Cataldi points out: The most powerful way to affect the national conscience is to change people’s perceptions at the grassroots level.9 Opportunities for activism and advocacy are abundant for those who want to go beyond changing their own perception. Equipped with a solid understanding of the teaching and practice of Islam, we can interject truth to that conversation about what the Quran teaches about women, for example. Or we can invite a mixed group of Muslims and non-Muslims over for dinner and facilitate a warm conversation.
The ultimate experience for exposure to
Muslim culture, and the most life-changing,
is traveling to a Muslim majority country and
spending at least a few weeks there.
Muslim advocacy groups such as CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) or the Muslim American Society’s (MAS) public affairs and civic engagement arm would be delighted to have your volunteer support. Getting involved with organizations that support war refugees, both locally and internationally, is a wonderful way to affect the Muslim side of the hostility perception equation.
The organization I created, Salaam, gives seminars and workshops, and facilitates interaction between Muslims and non-Muslims through friendship dinners and joint service activities. Based in San Diego, we provide training materials and on-site support to enable individuals and families to do citizen diplomacy in their own city.
The ultimate experience for exposure to Muslim culture, and the most life-changing, is traveling to a Muslim majority country and spending at least a few weeks there. I can promise you this will affect you profoundly, on the very deepest levels, and you will never see the world—or yourself—the same way again.
The list of destinations is virtually endless: the beach cities of Morocco, exotic Cairo, Istanbul or the Aegean coast of Turkey, the former Soviet republics of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kirghizstan, and Kazakhstan. Beirut, Amman, and Jerusalem are excellent options for seeing the Middle East. Of course, a thorough review of state department updates throughout the planning process is essential.
For the especially adventurous, I offer the following suggestions to maximize your experience:
From acquiring accurate information, to spending time with Muslims, to travel to the Muslim world—the journey out of fear and false perceptions is difficult but rewarding. Whether you find yourself sitting at a table with a refugee family at a friendship dinner in your home city, or cross-legged on the floor as guests of a family in Morocco, your experience will be satisfying. It’s my dream that as more and more choose friendship over fear, it will in time affect America’s national conscience and lead to a foreign policy based on respect.
I’m not a foreign policy expert, but I am a voter. As such, I speak to my current representatives, vote for candidates, and speak my voice into coalition platforms supporting the following principles:
Final Words
As we have seen, the world of Islam is an elaborate mosaic of geographical regions, exotic cultures, languages, ideas, and practices.
This book presents only a sketch of that mosaic. Two overarching ideas stand out as foundational to an accurate understanding of the 1.7 billion Muslims of today’s world.
The first is that mainstream Muslims are our allies against terror. They attend millions of mosques all over the world that teach tolerance and respect for human life and are often themselves the targets of extremists. Secondly, it is undeniable that acts of terror are incited by political acts and not by the teachings of Islam.
The combined misunderstanding of both of these concepts results in policies that double down on previous political acts that have provoked extremist terror. In contrast, actions that reflect an accurate understanding will go directly towards eliminating the political triggers of terror.
The road before us to higher places is steep and our destination is yet distant at the mountaintop. Without an unwavering commitment to the pursuit of understanding, reconciliation, and change, we won’t reach our goal. I hope this book will help us stay the course. It is my humble offering.
CHAPTER 5 NOTES
1. Rebecca Cataldi, “Clash of Perceptions: Hostility Perception and the US–Muslim World Relationship,” Journal of Peace, Conflict & Development, 18 (2011): 27–46.
2. Anderson Cooper. “Donald Trump: ‘I think Islam Hates us.’” Cnn: Anderson Cooper 360 (March 2016), https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2016/03/10/donald-trump-islam-intv-ac-cooper-sot.cnn.
3. Jack G. Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People (Brooklyn, NY: olive Branch Press, 2001), 14.
4. Alison Weir, Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel (Scotts Valley, CA: CreateSpace, 2014), 85.
5. Weir, 86.
6. “off the Charts: Accuracy in Reporting of Israel/Palestine,” If Americans Knew (December 2004), https://ifamericaknew.org/media/net-report.html#rt.
7. https://ifamericaknew.org/ (home page).
8. Cataldi.
9. Cataldi.