Peace, brother. This is why I emigrated in 2003, and why I fully expect never to see the land of my birth in my lifetime (certainly not as a free man). Racism is evil, no matter what your professed (possibly lack of) faith. Carefully-stoked bigotry such as what’s been on display since September, 2001 takes on a different, arguably scarier tone when it’s deployed against a revert who “doesn’t look Muslim” to the yahoos whose attention starts and stops with skin coloration. Taunts of “race traitor”? Check. Literal, detailed, credible death threats? Been there. Lost jobs after people guessed my faith? To the point of one manager saying, word for word, that “we’re firing you because we don’t trust Muslims, and no, you have no way to prove that’s why we’re firing you”. On another occasion, working as a peon-level contractor, I was accused of sexual harassment of a senior HR person I had met exactly once, as part of an intake group. The accusation and my firing came the day after requesting emergency leave to go home because I was distraught after learning that one of my long-time closest friends and his family had been killed in an Israeli bombardment of their housing block in Gaza. Someone apparently put two and two together, and when I returned to work the next day, I was immediately escorted off the premises.
No, comparisons don’t mean anything. Injustice anywhere, to anyone, is injustice everywhere, to all of us. But…follow the money.
