Khizir Khan, father of Captain Humayun Khan who was killed in Iraq trying to fight a suicide bomber, asked Donald Trump quite earnestly in a recent TV advertisement, “Would there be a place for my son in your America?” According to the 2010 census, there are about 3.3 million Muslims in the US. They make up roughly 1% of the population of America. In the wake of Trump’s electoral victory, most Muslims are asking some variation of this question. In our social media there is angst, frustration, fear, and loathing. Many are hoping that Trump will moderate his views once he is in office. Some are just praying for a miracle, yet others are protesting on the streets. The reality is that self-identified Muslims are in for a long uncertain period in the US. It is aided by Trump’s stated agenda and fuelled by the atrocities of the Jihadists worldwide. Such realities are aggravated by the platitudes from Muslim leaders in the US (CAIR comes to mind), who just say all is well behind the veil, nothing to see here. Those morons have brought on a huge burden of distrust on the average Muslim by denying the facts on the ground and trying to obfuscate it all. America has always had a xenophobic side and a history to go with it. At the very beginning of the Republic, Thomas Jefferson wanted to exclude all Germanic people from America. This is in spite of the fact that he published a number of books and magazine articles in German. He believed that the Anglo-Saxon worldview was transcendent. Then there was the ultra-racist and xenophobic Chinese Exclusion Act which was signed into law by President Chester A. Arthur on May 6, 1882. The CEA basically stopped all Chinese migration into the US and sent the folks already here into a huge tumult. This miserable piece of legislation stayed on the books and was enforced by a form of vigilantism and official abuse of Chinese immigrants for years. We get a glimpse of this in many Western spaghetti movies. The Chinese in-migration into the US started with the California Gold Rush 1848/1849 and surged during the building of the First Transcontinental Railway. The Chinese migrants were tolerated when gold was on the surface and easy to mine. However, as gold became harder to access, resentment against all foreigners escalated. The Chinese took the brunt. They were pushed out of gold mining towns and forced to work in gritty cities like, ahem, San Francisco. The Chinese Exclusion Act was finally repealed by the Magnuson Act on December 17, 1943. The other horrific xenophobic and shameful action by the US is, of course, Executive Order 9066 promulgated on February 19, 1942. This was issued by that icon of liberal democracy, the father of many a social progress, President Franklin D. Roosevelt. His Executive Order authorized the government to go for an internment of Japanese Americans and also Italian Americans. In practice it was only the Japanese Americans who got rounded up and put into these hot and unsanitary camps throughout the country. The parents of one my closest friends, Gayle Yanagi, were imprisoned for the four years of World War Two even though they were second generation Americans at the time. They were given a token compensation in the 1990s. There is a dark heart in every country and every people. History is replete with instances of violence against one group by another. The Mayans wiped out their whole population because of fear, superstition and ignorance. Populist movements often forget history and go on repeating the same horrendous mistakes over and over. Now is the turn for the Muslims in the barrel. The fearful xenophobes have their license to attack the Muslims because the President-elect is a bigot. How the 3.3 million Muslims act during the next four years will determine their overall wellbeing and place in US society. I am not sure if I can self-identify myself as a Muslim. I am as Muslim as a box of Kosher Salt is Jewish. Every morning when I brush my teeth I know that first I am an American, then I am a Bangladeshi and finally I am more spiritually aligned with my dogs than anyone else. However, I know whatever my faith and spiritual position may be, I will be branded as Kuffar by the Jihadists and Muslim by the Trumpians. The common theme will be that both groups will want to chop my head off. Well, I say bring it on! Whether I like it or not, my name, my heritage, and some of my outlook put me squarely in the crosshairs of the bigots from all over. So, how should a Muslim live in Trump’s America? Accept the Reality The first thing to do would be to accept reality. Take the man at his word. He says he wants to ban Muslims from the US, so assume that he will look to do so. Magical thinking will not change that reality. Early actions should give us a clue. Trump has just appointed Kris Kobach, the architect of the most racist US law, to his transition team. Kris Kobach is the Secretary of State of Kansas, but he leads a group called ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council). This organization brought us the Arizona S.B. 1070 (derided as Papers Please Law), which basically mandates people of color or speaking with an accent to prove their citizenship. Mr. Kobach has a long history of being with Hate groups. Other bigots such as Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama surround the President-elect. Sessions is a tier one anti-immigration Senator and a vocal opponent of resettling the Syrian refugees in the US. So, the odds are that there will be things like Executive Orders and maybe even legislation that will be anti-Muslim. Early signs show that Arab countries (Saudi Arabia, the Gulf countries and Jordan) like the concept of a President Trump. They are looking through purely a sectarian set of glasses and their antipathy to Iran. These Wahhabi countries are not allies of me and you. They want to perpetuate the myth of statehoods that British civil servants drew out from musty little offices on the banks of the Thames in 1922. Let us not look there for help. Resist Bullying In today’s world it is quite possible to mobilize against bullying. Never, never, never accept any verbal or physical bullying by the bigots. Resist even if it causes you pain. Remember what Martin Niemöller said all those years ago: “First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me” There is no there, there. It is my country, your country as well as it is the country of the bigots. Coexist but do not be cowed. I understand a bigot’s perspective. It is the fear and loathing. You cannot reason with fear and loathing. Let fear and loathing live out its days but let it not change who we are as a people. Download the ACLU APP Mobile Justice. You can press a button and everything will be recorded and uploaded to the ACLU cloud. Use technology, social media to build the core of resistance. Oppose the Jihadi Violence Effectively One of the reasons that Muslims face such animosity and loathing has to do with the barbaric violence perpetrated by ISIS, Al Qaeda, and their cohorts – the beheadings, the mass scale rapes, the blowing up of historical sites to name a few. Muslims have not effectively spoken out against these atrocities both in the US and abroad. Every time something terrible happens CAIR trots out the same old guys in bad suits and terrible English to say “Islam is a religion of peace”. The Jihadists are not a deviant group, they are following the scriptures literally. So, stop obfuscating and let us call a spade a spade. That will go a long way towards getting rid some of the suspicions. Embrace Second Amendment The Second Amendment was adopted on December 15, 1791. This is one of the core ten amendments that form the Bill of Rights. This amendment to the US Constitution protects the people’s right to keep and bear arms. I am not suggesting that we will go out, get armed to the teeth and start a war. Far from it. It is our right to keep and bear arms and under the possibility of actual violence it is our duty to bear arms for extreme cases of self-defense. I remember the movie ‘Last Man Standing’. When the main character goes to the sheriff’s office about an attack by the hoodlums, the sheriff says, “I see it, am not gonna do a thing. The first thing a man should do when coming into this town is to arm himself”. So, the character did arm himself. In any other country this will not be an option but in the US we can form a militia and keep and bear arms. I suggest every single Muslim man and woman get themselves an AR-15. The tools of freedom, as lovers of The Second Amendment would say. I do not think America will descend into chaos and open warfare. However, half the country has willingly voted for a bigot out of fear. We know that fear is a powerful motivator for violence and civil unrest. There will be signs if America is going the way of Hitler’s Germany. They are as follows: • There will be large protests by the Trump supporters to get rid of the Muslims or contain them somehow. Remember the protests before Kristallnacht? Those protests got more and more vehement and aggressive until there was a wholesale attack on Jews all over Germany and Kristallnacht was seared into the collective memory of humanity. • There will be an identifiable foreign enemy. Currently Iran is playing the role. Iran will be vilified and the populace will be riled up to attack Iran. It will serve two purposes — an external enemy will allow a large military buildup and it will provide the cover for Draconian Laws. • There will some effort to create identify and quantify Muslims. In Germany they used the Yellow Star of David. In 2017 it will most like be an identifier in your Social Security Record. Yes, these sound dark and ominous. However, these are dark and ominous times. Trumpian economic policies will tank the economy and radically increase the suffering of poor people. Combine the frustration of that group with a little of White Nationalism and escalating trade wars with China and Mexico. What can go wrong, really? Source: bdnews24
