Unintended Consequences of Hate

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SAN JOSE, Calif. -- The pickup truck was following her. Dr. Sarah felt nervous but tried to convince herself it was just her imagination. He couldn’t possible know she was a Muslim, particularly since she was not wearing the optional hijab, the traditional Islamic head-cover to indicate modesty.

She pulled into the parking lot and got out of her car. The pickup slowed. As she crossed the street to get to her office, the driver, a middle-aged white man, rolled down the window and screamed at her: “Go back home!”

The heat of the man’s hate felt as if it were burning a hole in the back of her head. She ran to the safety of her hospital.

Dr. Sarah was born in Chicago to Muslim parents. After receiving a doctorate in psychology, she began working at a hospital in Silicon Valley in the pain management department as a psychologist, a job in which she has flourished for over a decade. When she reported the incident to her concerned supervisor, she advised her not to drive alone for a few weeks.

A week earlier, an engineer of Asian background, an American citizen, was confronted in the parking lot of a grocery store in San Jose by a driver who screamed: “Go back to where you came from.”

For many residents, the sprouting of bigotry in what is the heart of Silicon Valley, with a diversity of culture, religion and ethnicity rare in the world, is shocking.

“Before, I used to call my friends and relatives in India to ask if they were okay,” said Assemblyman Ash Kalra during a rally organized in response to the growing climate of fear following the election. “Now they call me to inquire if I am safe in Trump’s America!”

Trump has indeed loosened the shackles of bigotry among his supporters, emboldening them to threaten those who don’t look like them, and to hurl insults like, “Go back to where you came from!”

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has reported harassment and threats targeting Muslim women and children in Minnesota, North Carolina, New York and California in just the past two weeks alone. 

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, there were 867 hate incidents in the ten days after Trump’s win in November. The advocacy group South Asians Leading Together (SAALT) put out a report in January that documented 207 hate incidents targeting South Asians, Muslims and Middle Easterners in 2016. The report noted the climate resembled the months following the 9/11 attacks, and attributed the spike in hate to campaign rhetoric during the 2016 race.

Here in San Jose, police documented four cases of crimes targeting Muslims in 2016. There were no cases prior in the years going back to 2011. Experts say the numbers are misleading, and that because victims are often reluctant to come forward, due to cultural or linguistic barriers, or because they are scared, the figures could be higher. 

One of those cases involved the Evergreen Islamic Center, where a letter was received just prior to the Thanksgiving holiday that read, in part: “There’s a new sheriff in town – President Donald Trump. He is going to cleanse America and make it shine again. And he’s going to start with you Muslims.” The letter went on to make reference to Nazi Germany, saying Trump would “do to you Muslims what Hitler did to the Jews.”

Still, despite the rising tide of Islamophobia, something remarkable began to happen among members of the local Muslim community in the days and weeks following Trump’s win. Having learned in the aftermath of 9/11 that a culture of shame and silence only promoted the politics of fear, area Muslims instead started forging bonds with community residents at a grass-roots level.

Several members of Evergreen (myself included) joined Indivisible East San Jose, one of nearly 6,000 Indivisible Groups that sprang up across the nation as a response and resistance to Trump’s presidency.

Meeting once every month, members knock on doors in San Jose’s depressed areas, informing undocumented workers, for example, of their rights if ICE shows up and the availability of free legal help. A few families in dire straits have been escorted to sanctuaries in synagogues and churches. 

On a recent Sunday afternoon, Evergreen teamed up with local Christians and Jews as members of Abrahamic Alliance at a church to prepare meals for the homeless and serve them across town at City Team San Jose, an organization that helps people struggling with poverty, homelessness and addiction. For many of us, this was our first experience with a soup kitchen. We were shocked to find that in one of the most prosperous areas in the world, there were people for whom a decent meal and a bed to sleep on were luxuries often beyond reach. We realized that more than mosques, we needed to build more soup kitchens and shelters for abused women, including Muslim women.

As remarkable is the growing outreach and solidarity extended to area Muslims from other immigrant communities. There have been several marches staged to commemorate the Japanese internment and to draw connections between that dark period in U.S. history and its echo against Muslims in Trump’s time. Meetings were held with Internment survivors who spoke of the importance of resistance.

Then there are the acts of individual kindness.

“Just think about it,” said Peggy, who drove an hour from the city of Santa Cruz with several friends in a show of solidarity with Evergreen following the recent threats. “Would we have even met if it were not for Trump? No! This is the silver lining in the dark cloud that hangs over our nation now.”

For local Muslims, the bridges now being formed in the era of Trump are a case of serendipity, the unintended but cathartic consequences of hate.

Japanese-Americans Speak Up for Muslim-Americans

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SAN JOSE, Calif. - “A monetary sum and words alone cannot restore lost years or erase painful memories. Neither can they fully convey our nation’s resolve to rectify injustice and to uphold the rights of individuals.” Tom Oshidari, co-president of the Japanese-American Citizens League, San Jose Chapter, was reading from the letter he had received from President George Bush in October 1990. “We can never fully right the wrongs of the past. But we can take a clear stand for justice and recognize that serious injustices were done to Japanese Americans during World War II.”

His parents – American Citizens – were shipped off from California to the Jerome internment camp in rural Arkansas in 1942 under President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066. Tom was born in the camp. His parents died several years ago. An estimated 60,000 of the 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry interned during WWII are still alive and received redress payments of $20,000 and letters of apology from the 41st president.

About 200 of us gathered last weekend in front of City Hall for the solidarity day organized by the Nihonmachi Outreach Committee and the South Bay Islamic Association, with participation from Evergreen Islamic Center. Masao Suzuki, the architect of the rally, explained: “In the lessons learned from 75 years of resistance from 1942-2017, we say No to Concentration Camps and Islamophobia. President Trump’s Executive Order 13769, banning travel from 7 Muslim-majority countries, has brought back painful memories of internment, among the darkest chapters in American history. We will not let Muslim-Americans stand alone. We will stand by them. We will not allow history to repeat. Never again!”

City Hall is about a mile away from San Jose’s Japan Town but when we walked the distance on solidarity day, the weight of history was heavy upon us. The minutes spanned a lifetime of grief and sorrow.

Naoko Fujii, a lawyer in Silicon Valley, never misses such rallies. “It’s a matter of principle,” she said. Her father, only a high-school student in 1942, was moved between Internment camps in Arkansas, Utah and Wyoming, along with his three siblings and parents. To this day she has difficulty imagining the physical and the emotional trauma they suffered in the bitterly cold and unbearably hot camps.

Fumi Tosu, affiliated with Casa De Clara Catholic Worker of San Jose, exhorted the gathering not to repeat the mistakes of the past. “When Nazi Germany was sending Jews to the gas chamber, the supposedly ‘Good Germans’ looked the other way. When Japanese-Americans were being hustled off to camps, ‘good Americans’ looked the other way too. Americans right here in San Jose looked the other way. But not all Americans. Quakers protested the internment and helped the interned. Let’s be the Quakers of 2017. Let’s make sure Muslim-Americans don’t suffer the same injustice that our parents and grandparents suffered. Let’s fight for radical equality.”

I looked around: a sun-splashed Saturday afternoon, a perfect spring day for the outdoors, for picnic, for hiking, for taking in the beauty of wildflowers after the profusion of rain in the valley. Yet here they were, my fellow-Americans, sacrificing their time for a cause they believed in, whites, blacks, Latinos, African-Americans, families with infants in strollers, the kaleidoscope that’s America. An elderly white man next to me held up a poster that read “No to Religious or National Exclusion.” Another read “Steve Jobs Was Syrian.” The man in front of me wore a white T-shirt that listed all the 10 internment camps in America under bold red letters: “Never Again.”

But something was troubling me, although I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

The event was being co-emceed by Zahra Billoo, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), San Francisco Bay Area, and Lisa Washio-Collette, whose father, Kintaro Washio, and brother Zentaro, both spent years in internment camps at Tule Lake and Gila River. Zahra and Lisa reinforced the message of the solidarity day, that every act of injustice must be fought in the court of law as well as in the court of public opinion. A Civil Rights attorney, Zahra was among the first to sue Donald Trump over the “Muslim Exclusion Order” in January, following Trump’s infamous Executive Order 13769.

It was only when Billoo was thanking the rally on behalf of Muslims that I suddenly realized what was troubling me: There were a disappointingly few Muslims!

At a mosque later in the day, I lamented to a few of my fellow-Muslims how disappointed I was. So few of us showed up when other Americans had come together to voice their unconditional support for us. There were the usual excuses of “didn’t know about it,” “very busy” and “family obligations." But then one Muslim said: “Do you really think this rally changed anything?”

I could not let this go unanswered. “I don’t know whether this rally by itself changed anything or will change anything. But I know one thing for sure: It changed me. I met Japanese-Americans whose parents and grandparents were sent to Internment camps, concentration camps, really, even though they were loyal citizens. I no longer think of injustice and racism as abstract ideas. I see them with human faces, and I know that I am of them, and they are of me. If we can change this way, we are compelled to act. And when enough of us change and act, mountains move and tyrants fall.” 

From Nero to Trump: Evolution of Narcissists

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Although meant to convey cruelty, arrogance and a certain level of madness, the image of Nero fiddling with Rome burning (myth or not) is more pathetic than predatory. Surrounded by sycophants, this corrupt, incompetent, power-hungry Caesar ruled by whatever rose to the surface of his mind at any given moment. Congenitally delusional, Nero was the ultimate narcissist. And what’s a narcissist if not pathetic?

First forward a few thousand years.

On January 27, President Trump issued an executive order barring people from seven Muslim countries – Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen - from entering the United States.

A week later, James L. Robart, a Judge of the US District Court for the Western District of Washington, issued a temporary ban on the president’s order.

The President, easily the world’s most powerful 140-character tantrum transmitter, tweeted: “The opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned!”

Intrigued by the callous, caustic use of ‘so-called judge,’ I looked up James Robart on the Web. A Republican, he was nominated for the federal bench by President George Bush in 2003 and unanimously confirmed in a 99-0 vote by the Senate in June 2004. He was a distinguished corporate lawyer prior to his appointment, regarded by those who know him as a ‘judge’s judge,’ one driven by a profound respect for law and the constitution. A colleague’s summation: “The cream rises to the top.”

Judge Robart asked a simple question about the executive order: “How many arrests have been there of foreign nationals from those seven countries since 9/11”?

The answer: “None.”

Anyone crossing the path of America’s volatile president can expect to be predictably ridiculed or demonized. That’s what happened to the judge.

What was common in Nero’s Rome is becoming increasingly common in today’s America.

Omid Kordestani, Twitter’s Executive Chairman, who came to the U.S. in 1978 as an Iranian immigrant and settled in San Jose, responded to Trump with a tweet of his own: “Our democratic institutions will prevail and they are bigger than any one person in position of power, temporarily!”

The bite is in the word “temporarily” that has an echo in history. Returning victorious from a battle, a Roman conqueror would ride in a triumphal chariot through the city while a slave would whisper in the conqueror’s ear a warning: all glory is fleeting.

People like Judge Robart are fulfilling their obligations to uphold the constitution against executive orders that violate it, the first amendment in this case. This is particularly urgent since we are currently witnessing a partisan legislative branch turning into a rubber stamp for Trump’s executive branch. It’s by anticipating this danger that the founding fathers created the judicial branch as a safeguard to presidential excesses.

We haven’t heard the last word on the immigration ban. The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco rejected a request by the Justice Department to restore Trump’s targeted travel ban. There will undoubtedly be more back and forth over the travel ban, possibly reaching the Supreme Court even, and ultimately, over the soul of America.

On the same Friday that Judge Robart issued his restraining order, I found about fifty of my fellow-Americans assembled in front of the Evergreen Islamic Center in San Jose. They had come spontaneously to support us, holding signs that read, “Immigrants are Here to Stay,” “We Are All Americans,” “Stop Separating Families,” and “Japanese Americans Say No Muslim Registry, No Deportations.” Mosque-goers were treated to a rousing rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” by San Jose resident Angela.

I asked Peter, who is of the Jewish faith, why he had braved the weather to spend time in front of an Islamic Center on a Friday afternoon. “Because I feel strongly that there is no place for bigotry in our country,” re replied. He read from a flyer he was distributing that contained excerpts from a letter President George Washington had written in 1790 to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, RI: “Government of the United States gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance … May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of other inhabitants …”

Most Americans are outraged by the president’s overreach and are taking to the streets and sounding out to their representatives their concerns about the erosion of America’s founding values. It is critical that we continue working within the law to change the disastrous direction toward which our country is heading. There is no room for complacency. History may regard Nero as a zero but let’s not forget that he ruled for 14 long and painful years before the Romans finally woke up.

It's Going To Be Good

What a difference a hate mail can make!

On the day before Thanksgiving, Wednesday, November 23, the Evergreen Islamic Center (EIC) in San Jose, CA, received a hate mail that set off a chain of events that not only diminished the haters but in the most moving and celebratory way, reaffirmed our faith in America. I have written about the overwhelming support we received from our fellow-Americans from near and far in an article in the San Jose Mercury News, so I will not repeat the details here.

What I want to focus on is the gathering of over 400 Americans at EIC on Sunday, December 11 – Jews, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Jains, atheists and, of course, Muslims -  to denounce hate and Islamophobia and express solidarity with us.

Speaker after speaker invited the writer(s) of the hate letter to meet Muslims and overcome their prejudice against a minority of Americans (about 3 million in a population of about 330 million Americans). Rabbis, priests, reverends, clergies, young and old took to the stage to invite Americans to celebrate our common humanity. “There is enough love to go around,” declared the president of EIC, and so true it was!

Supervisor Dave Cortese reminded the gathering that San Jose was one of six metropolitan areas of the world lauded and emulated for its religious harmony. Mayor Sam Liccardo reiterated his vow to make San Jose a sanctuary city for undocumented workers and students if Donald Trump’s government attempted to deport them.

Symbol of support from Shira Goldman of Tarzana, CA

Imam Tahir Anwar quoted Martin Luther King, Jr: “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” 

That 400 people of different faiths had given up the leisurely pleasures of a Sunday afternoon to travel to EIC and spread the message of love was a testament to the greatness of ordinary Americans.

Perhaps the most moving remarks came from Reverend Kiley of the Silicon Valley Faith Group who said, “I see the tapestry of this community with deep belief in love.” He then quoted a poem by Edwin Markham:

He drew a circle that shut me out-
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle and took him in!

The year 2016 will go down as one of the most traumatic in history. The plight of refugees, the deaths of innocents, the accelerating pace of global warming, all capped by the election of an unexpected and unpredictable candidate to the highest office in America has put most of us on edge. 

But despair is the hallmark of the weak. It is in our power – ordinary Americans driven by a sense of duty, responsibility and love – to overcome policies that challenge our bedrock values. Things will not fall apart; the center will hold for it is the best among us who are full of passionate intensity while the worst lack all conviction.

Paraphrasing the Beatles: Take a sad year and make it better.

Generous Americans Teach Us the True Meaning of Thanksgiving

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On the day before Thanksgiving this year, the Evergreen Islamic Center in San Jose, CA, received a postal mail that contained these lines:

“There’s a new sheriff in town – President Donald Trump. He is going to cleanse America and make it shine again. And he’s going to start with you Muslims. He’s going to do to you Muslims what Hitler did to the Jews. You Muslims would be wise to pack your bags and get out of Dodge.”

After some deliberations, the EIC board contacted the police on Thursday, November 24, Thanksgiving Day. Within minutes, law enforcement officials rushed to the Center and offered to provide extra security for the community. Local Priests, Rabbis and elected officials condemned the bigotry and assured us of their support.

As word of the hate mail spread through TV, newspapers and social media, support poured in. Our initial emotions of shock and distress gave way to hope and courage, and we realized anew how fortunate we were to be living in a country where ordinary citizens were united by the common goal of justice and freedom for all.

There is clearly a strong correlation between the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States and the spike in hate crimes directed against Muslims and other minority groups. More than 100 anti-Muslim incidents have occurred across the country and more than 700 incidents targeting different minority groups have been documented by the Southern Poverty Law Center since November 8.

We are not afraid that bigots and hatemongers, emboldened by Donald Trump, are coming out of the woodwork to threaten us, although we remain cautious and vigilant. Ours is a land of law, and even though the law is sometimes bent by the wealthy and the powerful in their favor, we are confident that no one is above the law. Remember the case of the late President Richard Nixon, who had to resign in disgrace in 1974 to avoid certain impeachment.

Jews and Christians gather in front of Evergreen Islamic Center, San Jose, CA,
on Friday, December 2, 2016, to express their solidarity with Muslims.

Far from frightening us, this hate mail has, in fact, given us a renewed sense of mission when the ‘new sheriff’ begins his presidency. We are heartened that mayors and presidents of colleges and universities across the country have declared their cities and campuses ‘sanctuary spaces’ for undocumented workers, students and their families.

But ultimately, our faith in our country comes from the numerous messages, emails and cards we received from neighbors and strangers.

“As a Christian,” wrote Vance, “I am taught that above all else, ‘love thy neighbor.’ I want to extend my love to your community and want you to know that many Christians, like me, stand in solidarity with you.”

Miriam wrote that “not all Americans feel the way the hateful people do. I am a Jew and I support you, my cousins. Love and peace, we are all 1!”

Holly assured us that “I will do whatever it takes to help protect your first amendment rights.” Stacy reminded us that “there are many of us in San Jose who do not feel the way the haters do. We welcome you for the diversity and the rich culture you bring to our lovely city.”

Davida was sad because “here in Bay Area we think we live in a sanctuary of unity but unfortunately that is not the case. I pray for peace and understanding for all in this uncertain time.” And this from Marina: “I have heard some people talking about a ‘Muslim registry.’ Many Americans have said they will register as Muslims regardless of their faith, as many Danes under Nazi occupation wore yellow stars. I, too, will register as a Muslim if that time were to come.”

Muslim-Americans could not have learned more vividly the true meaning of Thanksgiving were it not for our generous fellow Americans. We are truly blessed.

Do We Know Our Children?

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Five days after the bodies of Golam Rabbi, 59, and Shamima Rabbi, 57, were discovered at their home in San Jose, California, about three hundred friends and relatives gathered at the Five Pillars cemetery in Livermore on a Friday to bury the couple. With the sun on our back and a brisk breeze blowing, we prayed for their forgiveness and salvation as the bodies were lowered into the grave next to one another while the Imam recited verses from the Quran.

Shamima Rabbi and Golam Rabbi

Police have charged the couple’s two sons, Hasib Golamrabbi, 22, and Omar Golamrabbi, 17, with homicide. “I want everyone to know what happened,” said Hasib in a jailhouse interview. Both brothers pleaded not guilty to the murders at their arraignment.

I knew the Rabbis for over two decades as Bangladeshi immigrants who worshiped at the same mosques. We were members of the Evergreen Islamic Center where Golam, an engineer, and Shamima, an accountant, volunteered their services. Soft-spoken, humble and generous, they radiated peace. Friends sought Golam’s advice on how to grow the perfect apple or the peach, drawing on his extensive knowledge of gardening. He often brought his two sons to the mosque to pray next to him. Although I found them rather reserved, nothing seemed amiss or foreboding.

Ever since 9/11, Muslim-Americans have been stereotyped as jihadists and extremists and found themselves in the cross-hairs of politicians and presidential candidates like Donald Trump who would stand to gain from such labeling. We had been under siege for home-grown terrorists like those responsible for the 2009 Ford Hood shooting, the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombings and the San Bernardino attacks in 2015.

But this macabre murder is a darker development in which young people have allegedly turned on their own family. Every parent’s nightmare is that their children will kill themselves due to depression, anxiety, stress, or emotional rage, or get killed in gang fights, or wind up in jail, or most frighteningly, run away to join ISIS, as did a teenager from Virginia last year.

Added to these fears now is the fear of violence being turned on the family itself, causing despair among us bordering on fatalism.

A week after the killings, a few Bangladeshi-American families in the Evergreen area met to try to make some sense of what had happened. After a lot of anguished back and forth, we concluded that we only had a superficial relationship with our children, other than constantly worrying about them. We led our lives and they led theirs, with the occasional intersection that didn’t mean much. We didn’t know what animated them, whether they felt alienated from us, or what they wanted to do with their lives. In the end, we resolved to be more involved in the lives of our children, not as parents but as friends. And not just with our kids, but with the kids of our community. What we realized is that it takes a community to raise a youth in these tough times.

It is impossible to fathom what Hasib and Omar had been thinking prior to their alleged roles in the killings. A recent Instagram posting by Omar offers a clue: “I always hated myself. Not sure what I am doing here.” No clue could, of course, be clearer or more chilling than what the brothers had scrawled on the wall and the floor of their home (police have matched the writings to the brothers): “Sorry my first kill was clumsy,” and “I can’t be like you telling a lie … I can’t love someone without telling them.”

While the Quran does not directly address the issue of patricide and matricide, it talks extensively about mercy and forgiveness. “My mercy encompasses all,” says a verse, complemented by a saying of the Prophet Muhammad: “My (that is, God’s) mercy takes precedence over My anger.” Another verse states: “If one is patient in adversity and forgives, this indeed is something to set one’s heart on.”

There is a most stirring example of the power and grace of forgiveness in recent times. In June of 2015, a 21-year-old white supremacist named Dylann Roof, embraced with open arms at a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, opened fire during a prayer meeting, killing nine people. Within a few days, however, relatives of the nine victims declared that they had forgiven Roof. “We have no room for hating, so we have to forgive,” said the sister of one. “I pray God on your soul.”

But while mercy and forgiveness are pertinent for the wider public, it should be remorse and repentance for the alleged perpetrators. The Quran says: “Those who committed evil deeds and then repented afterwards, surely your Lord is forgiving and merciful.”

Are the sons feeling any remorse? Are they repenting? Do thoughts of atonement even cross their minds?

We have no way of knowing, unless they themselves disclose what is in their hearts.

No matter how noble the instincts of mercy, forgiveness and repentance may be, however, they will not override the imperatives of justice. San Jose’s deputy district attorney Matt Braker has said that “there are some unanswered questions to this case. Police are working tirelessly to answer those questions and to ensure that both of these victims receive justice."

So what can we do as we await the trial that is likely to be as sensational and gripping as any in recent memory? Perhaps it is contained in one of the verses that the Imam recited after we had buried the Rabbis: “Our Lord! Lay not on us a burden greater than we have strength to bear.”

Muslim-Americans Need to Engage in Self-Analysis

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Muslim-Americans are reacting to the increasingly strident anti-Muslim rhetoric of Republican presidential candidates Donald Trump and Ted Cruz with emotions ranging from shock and disbelief to wariness and resignation. The latest came in the wake of the Brussels bombings when Mr. Cruz called “to empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized.”

The suggestion is absurd. Most of the 3 million American-Muslims of widely diverse backgrounds, about 1% of the population, live in integrated neighborhoods. A recent landmark study by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding reported that in the San Francisco Bay Area, there are about 250,000 Muslims living over six assimilated counties. South Asians comprise 30%, Arabs 23%, Afghans 17%, African Americans 9%, Asian/Pacific Islanders 7%, Whites 6%, and Iranians 2%. My neighbors in San Jose, for instance, include Christians, Jews, Chinese, Korean and Indian Americans, but not a single Muslim.

If Muslims do cluster in certain neighborhoods, as in Queens, New York, it is based more on ethnicity than on religion. When I visit friends in Jackson Heights, I see far more Bangladeshis spending long stretches of time in ethnic restaurants serving Samosas and Biryani than in mosques serving piety. There is no equivalent Molenbeek in America, the ghetto in Belgium that breeds petty thugs and criminals who, bereft of a future, real or imagined, become foot soldiers for ISIS.

So if Mr. Cruz can identify Muslim neighborhoods that require special patrolling, he will not only be helping law enforcement but, even more, Muslim-Americans. Whether the senator knows it or not, Muslims have been at the forefront in foiling terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. Of the 72 known terrorist plots since 9/11, 56 were detected by law enforcement, 44 of which happened with tips from Muslims. In the 15 years since 9/11, the number of Americans killed by Muslim terrorists in the U.S., including San Bernardino, is 45. That’s 45 too many, which is why we would like Mr. Cruz to tell us where to look, so we can help apprehend the radicalized without going through ‘needle in haystack’ hunts.

Here are the facts, however. N.Y.P.D. has almost 1000 Muslim officers, some of whom are also combat veterans. For the record, combat experience on behalf of the United States is something that is missing from Mr. Cruz’s resume. 

But while the threat of Islamophobia is real, it is not preventing Muslims from engaging in serious self-analyses. Because of our diversity, such analyses assume many forms but the basic goals are the same: Confront our internal problems honestly and work on solutions that will help us become more open and responsible.

Based on my years of observation and interaction with fellow Muslims, there are three areas we need to work on, even though we are making cautious progress on all three.

First, we must curb our excessive reverence for imams and scholars.

Enlightened Muslims who have earned their reputation deserve our respect but the attitude of some of us toward them verges on hero-worship. The infatuation with celebrity imams is fraught with peril for all. I have also seen highly-educated Muslims turn into toadies in blindly accepting the most banal, absurd, misogynistic, or downright stupid, religious statements made by some of our imams and scholars, often members of an old boys’ club trained in religious schools abroad without any exposure to modern subjects. At a Friday congregational prayers, for instance, I heard a ‘scholar’ claim in his sermon that if a Muslim woman walks by a group of men and the men experience lust because she is improperly dressed, it is the woman’s fault and she is the one who has sinned! The Quran mandates that each one of us use our faculties for critical thinking. Letting the clergy do our thinking for us is against the spirit of Islam. The way out is to revive the practice of Ijtihad, an Arabic word that means to think independently, and to reinterpret sacred text in the context of the times.

Second, we must shun religious chauvinism.

I come across Muslim-Americans who are condescending toward followers of other faiths and are eager to proselytize, convinced that those who are not like them are destined for hell. They are a minority but because of their strident nature, play a disproportionate role in shaping the Muslim discourse in America. The Quran insists on respect for people of all faiths. A verse states, “O mankind! We created you from a single pair of a male and a female, and made you into nations and tribes, so that you may know each other.” Diversity of faith, culture and language are a human condition. If we all followed the same faith, wore the same clothes and ate the same food, we would go mad with boredom. Religious chauvinism leads to arrogance and is at the root of terrorist organizations like the Taliban, al-Qaida and ISIS.

While many Muslim-Americans condemn religious chauvinism in the privacy of their homes, such condemnations are becoming more frequent in our places of worship as well. In mosques around the Bay Area, including the Evergreen Islamic Center that I attend, we are required to speak about other faiths with respect and humility. A contributing factor is our increasing alliances with interfaith groups that are guided by the principles of pluralism, democracy, freedom of religion and secular governance. Still, much remains to be done.

Finally, we must reject the culture of victimhood and embrace the culture of self-assurance.

In the past, particularly before 9/11, Muslim-Americans were focused mostly on rights and not much on responsibilities. Islamophobia is a serious, and sometimes deadly, threat for us. We have to speak out for our constitutional rights, as when Muslim passengers are forced to get off planes only because they happen to be Muslims.

Yet we cannot allow Islamophobia, and its attendant culture of victimhood, define us. As we demand our rights, so we must also act on our responsibilities, one of which is to engage with the broader community, particularly with our neighbors, in helping the needy, feeding the hungry and opposing injustice of any kind against any group. If victimhood is the foundation of our identity, we will remain weak, objects of pity and prone to conspiracy theories. We are mostly middle class, mainstream and moderate. It does not suit us to be grievance collectors. We must have the self-assurance to legally secure our rights while working with Americans from all walks of life to help ours become a just and generous nation.