By Luma Simms
Monday, July 10, 2017
Islamic activist Linda Sarsour, co-chair of the 2017
women’s march, says she is “outraged” every single morning when she wakes up
and remembers who is in the White House, referring to the president of the
United States, Donald Trump. Speaking to the Islamic Society of North America,
she recently made several astonishing statements, the totality of which can
leave a person with the impression that Sarsour is inciting sedition from
Muslims in America.
Time magazine
came to her defense, accusing conservatives of misquoting her and making too
much out of her speech. Sorry, Time,
I’m not buying your excuses. I am a Christian immigrant from Iraq. We know what
Muslim agitation and radicalization looks like and where it leads. Sarsour knew
full well how what she said would affect the particular community she was
speaking to. This was no women’s march, this is a talk to the Muslim community,
in which she chastises those who would accept our government peacefully.
Sarsour has likened herself to Martin Luther King Jr.,
but she has used demagoguery—you can watch the entire speech as an example—in
her “activism,” and has split the Jewish community because of her support of
the boycott, divest, sanctions against Israel movement and her anti-Semitic
stances.
Three Tactics to
Incite Muslim Americans
What Sarsour said, whom she spoke to to, and how she
spoke should alert us to the three tactics radicalizers like Sarsour want to
use to incite the Muslim community. One, keeping Muslim communities isolated
and unassimilated: “Our number one and top priority is to protect and defend
our community, it is not to assimilate
and please any other people and authority” (emphasis mine).
Two, by stoking outrage within the Muslim community, and
using the progressive Left’s rhetoric: “We are struggling against tyrants and
rulers…here in these United States of America where you have fascists and white
supremacists and Islamophobes reigning in the White House… We as a Muslim community in these Unites States of America have to be
perpetually outraged” (emphasis mine).
Third, alluding to the garden-variety terrorist acts that
we have witnessed around the world: “Our top priority and even higher than all
those other priorities is to please Allah
and only Allah” (emphasis mine). This tactic may not be as obvious to
Western viewers, but if you are a faithful Muslim who is being chastised for
assimilating, then told:
Dissent is the highest form of
patriotism…If you, as a Muslim, are standing on the sidelines, if you are
neutral in the face of oppression in this country, you are not a patriot… When
we stand up to those who oppress our communities, that Allah accepts from us
that as a form of jihad… We have to stay united, we have to stay organizing, we
have to stay outraged.
Then if you are reminded that your highest priority is to
please Allah, it is easy to see how someone can walk away from that message
radicalized and believe that to please Allah he or she must account out in
violence against the “fascists and white supremacists and Islamophobes reigning
in the White House.”
Underlying this entire speech is a fundamental
assumption: The American government is oppressive and it is our duty to resist
and fight against it. Anyone inside and outside the Muslim community who assimilates,
who sides with American government, is an oppressor and should be resisted.
This is warfare mentality; it is agitation and incitement. But will the Muslim
community heed Sarsour?
More About
Sarsour’s American Muslim Audience
According to the Pew
Research Center’s best estimates, as of 2015 there were 3.3 million Muslims
in the United States. That is the total for all ages. This is roughly 1 percent
of the population of the United States. Pew projects that Muslims will increase
to 2.1 percent of the American population by the year 2050. They also found
that 63 percent of Muslims were immigrants.
In a 2011 survey, 69 percent said religion is important
in their lives, 48 percent said men and women should be separated when praying
at a mosque, 70 percent lean toward the Democratic Party, and 48 percent
believe their leaders do not speak out enough against Islamic extremists. Of
foreign-born Muslims, 58 percent said Americans were friendly, but only 30
percent of Muslims born in America said American people are friendly toward
Muslim Americans.
From that same survey, 68 percent said they wanted a
bigger government and more services. Out of 1,033 Muslim Americans, Pew found
that 5 percent have a somewhat favorable view of al-Qaeda. Of those surveyed,
20 percent said Muslim Americans want to be distinct from the larger American
society, and 56 percent of those surveyed said Muslim Americans wanted to
assimilate.
Muslim Americans seem likely to be financially secure. In
that same 2011 survey by Pew, 74 percent said hard work leads to success, and
46 percent said they were in excellent or good financial condition. The survey
also showed that American Muslims were just as likely as other Americans to
have a $100,000 or more annual household income. Finally, 49 percent of those
surveyed said they would identify as Muslim first. Pew even took the time to
ask questions about recycling, using Facebook, watching television, and playing
video games, but what I didn’t see are questions about how American Muslims
view the rule of law and equality under the law.
We Need to Know
What American Muslims Think
The research done so far on this community has not been
much. That survey of 1,033 Muslim American adults in 2011, when the total adult
population of the Muslims in the United States at that time was 1.8 million
(2.75 million including children), only
surveyed 0.057 percent of the entire American Muslim population.
We don’t seem to know much about what U.S. Muslims think
about fundamental American commitments such as equality before the law and
engaging in violence to achieve political ends, but the international numbers
on that even in “moderate” Muslim countries is frightening. In Malaysia
and Indonesia, for example, large majorities of Muslims support
establishing sharia law. Even in Muslim-minority countries such as Russia and
the United
Kingdom, approximately 40 percent of Muslims support sharia.
This is the context into which Sarsour was knowingly
making her comments, as well as a global context of poor Muslim assimilation
into Western countries, as evidenced by the rate of European terrorism. Their
relatively high education levels and financial stability does not necessarily
mean American Muslims may not be open to radicalization techniques like that of
Sarsour’s, either, because the buttons she’s pushing are Muslim identity and
religion.
Pew reports that Muslim Americans consider themselves
religious but not dogmatic. That’s optimistic, but again, given the global data
on what Muslims think about politics and religion, and surveys suggesting a
quarter of American Muslims think terrorism is a legitimate response to people
who draw pictures of Mohammed, we need more and better information, and for
American Muslim leaders to speak with tact, not calls to violence. That’s
especially crucial given that a number of domestic terrorist attacks have been
committed by Muslim U.S. citizens neighbors thought were well-assimilated. American
ISIS sympathizers have been also found to listen to inciters of violence such
as the well-known American Muslim cleric Ahmad Musa Jibril in Dearborn,
Michigan.
Will the Muslim community turn away from their
assimilation trajectory and follow Sarsour’s plan to isolate themselves, stay
perpetually outraged, and organize against the U.S. government? One of Pew’s
headings is “Middle Class and Mainstream.” I pray they are right. But let’s not
hide our heads in the samd, either, or excuse those whose speeches would
ominously alter that heading.
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