Moderates vs. Extremists

I was listening to NPR recently when I heard an essay by Rany Jazeverli. Jazerverli was writing in response to an article written about his friend Mazen Asbahi, whom the Obama campaign had appointed on July 26 to be their national coordinator for Muslim American affairs but was forced to resign after alleged connections were found between Asbahi and Muslim extremists. I think this is a very important issue facing the world today. For as long as there have been conflicting belief systems, there has been religious intolerance, but such widespread and blatant ignorance and prejudice is disheartening. In a country like the United States that so readily criticizes other nations for human rights violations, religious tolerance should be a far more sensitive issue (especially considering that the creation of the United States was in large part based upon pursuit of religious tolerance). Ever since the terrorist attacks in 2001, the word "Muslim" is to many Americans synonymous with the word "terrorist". And anyone who is Muslim is assumed to be sympathetic to the cause of fundamentalists Muslim terror organizations, which could hardly be farther from the truth. As Jazerverli puts it, the problem is that non-Muslims can not separate in their minds the stereotype of fundamentalist Muslims from the moderate Muslim-Americans living in the United States: "The same people who claim there is no such thing as a moderate Muslim will do everything in their power to slander people like Mazen Asbahi – the very epitome of a moderate, modern, integrated, tolerant, patriotic American Muslim – as an extremist. They will set their sights on any Muslim who seeks to be a part of the political process, and will pick them off, one by one, until there are no more targets left. The world is at war right now, but it’s not a war of Christian vs. Muslim. It’s a war of moderates vs. extremists, and the two groups are battling it out in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. But they’re also battling here in America. This week, the extremists won." I think that because Islam has very little history in the United States, many Americans don't know how to interpret and contextualize Muslims living here. And because, as humans, we so often choose to fear and discriminate against those who are different from us, many non-Muslims reach for stereotypes of Muslim extremists. Just as it is not fair to judge Christians and Jews for the acts of violence in their past, not all Muslims can be pigeon-holed into the extremists belief system. I can only hope that in the near future a wave of enlightenment hits the United States, leaving behind the realization that moderate Muslims do exists more or less putting an end to all the fear and bigotry. In the mean time, the war of extremists vs. moderates remains another one of the United States' great hypocrisies.
Full Essay "A Perspective on Mazen Asbahi"