Fighting the Wrong Enemy: Why Americans Hate Muslims

Baroud, Ramzy
http://dissidentvoice.org/2017/07/fighting-the-wrong-enemy-why-americans-hate-muslims/
Date Written:  2017-07-12
Publisher:  Dissident Voice
Year Published:  2017
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX21058

Certainly, anti-Arab and Muslim sentiments in the US have been around for generations, but it has risen sharply in the last two decades. Arabs and Muslims have become an easy scapegoat for all of America's failed wars and counter-violence.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

Terrorist threats have been exaggerated beyond belief to manipulate a frightened, but also a growing impoverished population. The threat level was assigned colors, and each time the color vacillated towards the red, the nation drops all of its grievances, fights for equality, jobs and health care and unites in hating Muslims, people they never met.

It mattered little that, since September 11, the odds of being killed by terrorism are 1 in 110,000,000, an extremely negligible number compared to the millions who die as a result of diabetes, for example, or shark attacks, for that matter.

'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 American empire is as ineffective as it is dishonest.

The Economic Intelligence Unit had recently downgraded the US from a "full democracy" to a "flawed democracy". Neither Muslims nor Islam played any role in that.
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