LAST week an Indian died in the US in tragic circumstances. Sunando Sen, 46, met his end under an oncoming train at a New York City subway station. No, he did not jump onto the tracks as the train entered the station with the intention of killing himself. He was pushed to death while waiting for a train at the 40th Street-Lowery Street station in Sunnyside. The woman who shoved Sen to his death did not know him personally. Neither did they meet at the subway station nor had an interaction with each other. Erika Menendez, 31, told police she did it because she hates Muslims and thought Sen was one. According to witnesses, the woman rose from her seat on a platform bench and pushed Sen onto the tracks and ran off. Now, an attempt is being made to depict Menendez as a mental patient who was treated by psychiatric staffs of at least two city hospitals. She had a “troubled” past, we are told. The fact is Menendez is a byproduct of a wave of Islamophobia that is sweeping across the United States ever since President George W. Bush launched a “war on terror” in the wake of Sept. 11 attacks. A vicious campaign against Islam is an integral part of this war without end. Muslims are portrayed as a radicalized, alien “other” in the US — an imagined fifth column as menacing as the Japanese-Americans were after the Pearl Harbor attack. We all know about the hysteria created in America over the planned construction of an Islamic cultural center and mosque two blocks away from New York's Ground Zero. There have been demonstrations and acts of violence against existing and proposed mosques from coast to coast. Unprovoked attacks against individual Muslims have also risen sharply. Tea Party members even brought dogs to picket Friday prayers at a mosque in Temecula, California. There was one incident in which members of a right-wing Christian-supremacist group staged an angry protest outside a local mosque during Friday prayers, hurling abuses at the worshippers and accusing their children of being “murderers.” Much of the anti-Muslim venom is being spread by conservative politicians and right-wing Christian evangelicals. The media which after 9/11 have been acting as echo chambers of the White House play their part as well. The only difference is some sections of the mainstream print media do it subtly. When there was a horrific and deadly shooting at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin on Aug. 5, 2012, killing six people and wounding four others, some sections of the news media went out of their way to tell the American public that “Sikhs are not Muslims.” They were, in effect, saying that the gunman responsible for the temple attack chose the wrong target. While Barack Obama was running for president in 2008, some said he was a Muslim. Instead of asking whether there is something wrong with being a Muslim in America, the candidate Obama said: “The facts are I am Christian. I have been sworn in (as a US senator) with a Bible.” If even a liberal like Obama is afraid to confront the anti-Muslim paranoia head on, it is obvious that what we are up against is a nation with a troubled present, not a woman with a “troubled past.”
