Muslims are not the enemy; conformity is

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 downgraded the U.S. from a “full democracy” to a “flawed democracy.” Neither Muslims nor Islam played any role in that.

The size of the Chinese economy is soon to surpass that of the U.S., and the powerful East Asian country is already roaring, expanding its influence in the Pacific and beyond. Muslims are hardly the culprits there, either.

Nor are Arabs responsible for the death of the “American Dream,” if one truly existed in the first place; nor the election of Donald Trump; nor the utter corruption and mafia-like practices of the country’s ruling elites and political parties.

It was not the Arabs and Muslims who duped the U.S. into invading Iraq, where millions of Arabs and Muslims lost their lives as a result of the unchecked military adventurism.

In fact, Arabs and Muslims are by far the greatest victims of terrorism, whether state-sponsored terror or that of desperate, vile groups like ISIS and al-Qaida.

U.S. citizens should know that Muslims are not the enemy. They never have been. Conformity is.

“In this age, the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service,” wrote John Stuart Mill in On Liberty. The English philosopher had a tremendous impact on U.S. liberalism.

I read his famous book soon after I arrived in the U.S. It took me a while to realize that what we learn in books often sharply contradicts reality.

Instead, we now live in the “age of impunity,” according to Tom Engelhardt. In 2014, he wrote: “For America’s national security state, this is the age of impunity. Nothing it does – torture, kidnapping, assassination, illegal surveillance, you name it – will ever be brought to court.”

Those who are “held accountable” are whistleblowers and political dissidents who dare question the government and educate their fellow men and women on the undemocratic nature of such oppressive practices.

Staying silent is not an option. It is a form of defeatism that should be outed as equally destructive as the muzzling of democracy.

“One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws,” wrote Martin Luther King Jr. Barring citizens of Muslim countries from traveling to the U.S. is a great act of immorality and injustice. Sadly, many in the U.S. report that such discriminatory laws already make them feel safe, which itself is an indication of how the government and media manipulate consent in this country to produce the desirable results.

As a big fan of hating Edward Bernays’ work, yet appreciating his honesty, I realize the question is not that of Trump alone. Bernays, whose writing on propaganda influenced successive governments and inspired various military coups, was versed on manipulating popular consent of U.S. citizens nearly a century ago. He perceived the masses as unruly and a burden on democracy, which he believed could only be conducted by the intelligent few.

The outcome of his ideas, which influenced generations of conformist intellectuals, is on full display today.

The U.S. is changing fast, and is certainly not heading in the right direction. Shelving all pressing problems and putting the focus on chasing after, demonizing, and humiliating brown-skinned men and women is certainly not the way out of the economic, political, and foreign policy quagmires which U.S. ruling elites have invited upon their country.

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear,” wrote George Orwell.

No matter the cost, we must adhere to this Orwellian wisdom, even if the number of people who refuse to hear has grown exponentially and the margins for dissent have shrunk like never before.

Dr Ramzy Baroud has been writing about the Middle East for more than 20 years. He is author of several books and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com, where this article first appeared.