IF the history of religious or racial violence teaches us anything, it is that such attacks against helpless minorities don't happen all of a sudden. They are always preceded by persistent media campaigns or unfavorable views expressed by those who shape public opinion — views that, if they don't incite violence, makes them at least justifiable. This is what makes some outrageously prejudiced remarks made by the Republican presidential candidates Ben Carson and Donald Trump all the more reprehensible. “I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation,” Carson said last week appearing on NBC's “Meet the Press.” Trump got his opportunity at a recent town hall meeting where a man began his question: “We got a problem in this country. It's called Muslims. We know our current president is one.” Instead of chiding the questioner, the man who is a White House aspirant, left no one in doubt that he shared such racist nonsense. “A lot of people are saying that bad things are happening out there. We're going to be looking into that and plenty of other things,” he said. Not that anti-Muslim paranoia is a product of this year's presidential campaign. In fact, the “strategic” variant of such a hysteria, according to some experts, originated in US in 1970s caused primarily by the OPEC oil price rises, ouster of the Shah and subsequent seizure of the US Embassy in Tehran leading to the hostage crisis. The Sept. 11 attacks aggravated the situation, giving rise to the popular variant of Islamophobia. The language spouted by people like Carson, Trump and Bill Maher, a comedian and TV host, takes an altogether different form in parking lots, shopping malls or streets where ordinary people mingle with each other. We saw it in North Carolina in February this year when three Muslim students including two sisters were killed by a white male in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Although the police tried to attribute the slayings to a dispute over parking space, the girls' father Abu-Salha knew what motivated Craig Stephen Hicks' actions. He said his daughter had complained of her neighbor, Hicks who wore a gun on his hip when he confronted her and her husband more than once over a parking space. “‘Honest to God,' she said, ‘He hates us for what we are and how we look,'” Abu-Salha told a local newspaper. Though President George W. Bush said again and again that his war on terror in the wake of Sept. 11 attacks was not against Islam, people like Hicks knew the enemy the president had in mind. That is why some Sikhs and a section of the US media lost no time in sending the message to the American public that Sikhs are not Muslims after Wade Michael Page, a white male, attacked a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin on Aug. 5, 2012, killing seven people. They were, in fact, saying that Page had targeted the wrong people. There were anti-Muslim hate crimes in US even before 9/11 — between 20 and 30 per year. But, according to the FBI's “Uniform Crime Reports” program, that number rose more than tenfold to nearly 500 in 2001. In the years since, annual hate crimes against Muslims have consistently hovered in the 100-150 range, roughly five times higher than the pre-9/11 rate. This is likely to rise unless more and more public figures follow the example set by Colin Powell and defy the post-Sept 11 narrative about Islam in US. For example, when there was an inaccurate but surprisingly persistent assertion that President Barack Obama was a Muslim, the former secretary of state didn't try to prove, as did so many others, that Obama was a Christian. Instead, he challenges the darker assumptions behind such a campaign posing the right question: “What if he is (a Muslim)”?
