Muslims are not the enemy; conformity is
July 20, 2017 9:19 AM CDT BY RAMZY BAROUD

Two officers sought me from within a crowd at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. They seemed to know who I was. They asked me to follow them and I obliged. Being of Arab background often renders one’s citizenship almost irrelevant.
In a back room, where other foreigners — mainly Muslims — were holed for “added security,” I was asked numerous questions about my politics, ideas, writing, children, friends, and my late Palestinian parents.
Meanwhile, an officer took my bag and all of my papers, including receipts, business cards, and more. I did not protest. I am so used to this treatment and endless questioning that I simply go through the motions and answer the questions the best way I know how.
My first questioning commenced soon after September 11, 2001, when all Muslims and Arabs became, and remain, suspect. “Why do you hate our president?” I was asked then, in reference to George W. Bush.
On a different occasion, I was held in a room for hours at John F. Kennedy International Airport because I had a receipt that revealed the immortal sin of eating at a London restaurant that served Halal meat.
I was also interrogated at a U.S. border facility in Canada and was asked to fill several documents about my trip to Turkey, where I gave a talk at a conference and conducted several media interviews.
A question I am often asked is: “What is the purpose of your visit to this country?”
The fact that I am a U.S. citizen, who acquired higher education, bought a home, raised a family, paid my taxes, obeyed the law, and contributed to society in myriad ways is not an adequate answer.
I remain an Arab, a Muslim, and a dissident, all unforgivable sins in the new, rapidly changing United States.
Truthfully, I never had any illusions regarding the supposed moral superiority of my adopted country. I grew up in a Palestinian refugee camp in Gaza and have witnessed, first hand, the untold harm inflicted upon my people as a result of U.S. military and political support of Israel.
Within the larger Arab context, U.S. foreign policy was felt on a larger scale. The invasion and destruction of Iraq in 2003 was but the culmination of decades of corrupt, violent U.S. policies in the Arab world.
But when I arrived in the U.S. in 1994 I also found another country, far kinder and more accepting than the one represented — or misrepresented — in U.S. foreign policy. While constantly embracing my Palestinian Arab roots, I have lived and interacted with a fairly wide margin of like-minded people in my new home.
While I was greatly influenced by my Arab heritage, my current political thoughts and the very dialectics through which I understand and communicate with the world — and my understanding of it — are vastly shaped by U.S. scholars, intellectual dissidents, and political rebels. It is no exaggeration to say that I became part of the same cultural zeitgeist that many U.S. intellectuals subscribe to.
Certainly, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiments in the U.S. have been around for generations, but they have risen sharply in the last two decades. Arabs and Muslims have become an easy scapegoat for all of the country’s failed wars and counter-violence.
Terrorist threats have been exaggerated beyond belief to manipulate a frightened, but also a growingly impoverished population.
The threat level was assigned colors and each time the color vacillates towards the red, too much of the nation drops all of its grievances, all its fights for equality, jobs, and healthcare and unites in hating Muslims, people they never met.
“Terrorism” has morphed from being a violent phenomenon requiring national debate, and sensible policies to combat it, into a bogeyman that forces everyone into conformity and divides people between being docile and obedient on the one hand, and “radical” and suspect on the other.
But blaming Muslims for the decline of the U.S. empire is as ineffective as it is dishonest.
The Economist Intelligence Unit recently… READ THE REST AT PEOPLE’S WORLD

