Creating a Muslim Registry and Stereotyping Terror Is Dangerously Un-American | Amani Al-Khatahtbeh

To me, terrorist means a person who incites terror. It's very simple. I think that ISIS fighters are terrorists just as much as I believe that white mass shooters are terrorists. However, in the media's definition of terrorism, the word is only ever applied when it comes to a brown person or a person of Muslim faith. And a person is only ever identified for their religion when it comes to a terrorist attack if they happen to be Muslim.

And when we do that, inevitably we are linking terrorism with Islam and Islam with terrorism, and we make this common assumption that all Muslims are terrorists or that all terrorists are Muslim. And that, of course, is an impossible generalization to make. When you put into perspective that there are 1.8 billion Muslims on the planet, it is impossible to say that they're all terrorists, and it's actually a very dehumanizing thing to try to categorize them in that way.

To put that into context, there are 2.2 billion Christians in the world, so you have 2.2 billion Christians and 1.8 billion Muslims. So just as ridiculous as it would be to make one assumption or one generalization about the entire Christian population, that's just as ridiculous as it would be to make that assumption about the entire Muslim people. And yet, when you ask a common American on the street what they think of when they hear the word terrorist, of course, the first image that comes to mind will be of the stereotypical person of Muslim faith. And, of course, that is extremely dangerous.

Like there was a situation a couple of years ago that is still a tremendous source of anxiety for Muslim women today, and that was when a Hindu man was pushed off of the platform on the subway onto the tracks of an oncoming train and was killed. And the woman that did so said that she's hated Muslims ever since 9/11 happened. So let's think about that for a second. This woman hated all 1.8 billion Muslims in the world because 9/11 took place.

And then her stereotypical image of what Muslims look like, you know, having brown skin, being dark, ended up pushing a Hindu man, a man of a completely different faith, to his death. That's how bad racism is. That's how this surfaces in our everyday lives just through media representation alone. Through the way that we depict Muslims on TV or minorities in general, we're literally engineering a reality, and it's us that have to bear the burden of that. We're the ones that that directly impacts.

And it's very unfair for us to try to implicate an entire people for individual actions. I think it's crucial for us to talk about terrorism in all of its forms and not confine it to this frame of just being in the context of radical Islam or the war on terror. That's a huge disservice. Especially when you look at the statistics that many times more people have died on American soil since 2001 due to mass shootings than to terrorist attacks, it really makes you wonder where our attention is really being placed right now.

Especially because Donald Trump, for example, had no problem saying that we need to ban all Muslims from immigration because of terrorism, because of like this and that. Meanwhile, if we use the same logic, then we should be able to say that we want to ban all white men from the country because they make up the majority of mass shooters that are spilling all this blood on our soil, but no one ever talks about that. However, it seems like it's common sense when it's applied just to Muslims, but that's just how ridiculous it is.

This discussion about a registry for Muslims has been something that I've had tremendous difficulty wrapping my head around just because of how ludicrous it is and just how blatantly obvious it is that it's wrong that seems to just like fly over people's heads. And it has made me try to understand how people can think that this is okay. Historically, it's only ever been in moments of tremendous fear like this that we have allowed our government to oppress its own citizens or to rob people of their rights or to impose on their civil rights that they're entitled to constitutionally.

And that's always empowered by a social attitude of acceptance, not even just acceptance, but maybe even complete apathy of people not caring how that impacts not just our fellow Americans, other human beings, but also just what that means for us as a country of what we stand for. It's quite simple to understand why a Muslim registry is wrong. Any type of targeting of a person for their religion, for the color of their skin, for their sexual orientation, their gender, their background, is wrong.

And for us to create a registry of people solely because of their religion literally is exactly identical to Nazi Germany. That's exactly how the Holocaust started. And the thing is, ever since the Holocaust, we as humanity have constantly asked ourselves how could we have allowed something like that to happen? How did people in Europe allow millions of people to get burned to their death and not to say anything and just be completely okay with that taking place?

And now with what's taken place in America and seeing the attitudes that people have towards these terrifying policy suggestions just makes it very obvious how something like that could happen and how it could easily repeat itself in history. It's through complete apathy, through allowing, through empowering that type of ignorance, and yeah, knowing that we don't understand about other people and not caring about seeking that understanding or backing policies that impact them or target them specifically without having any information about them or any type of awareness of what that policy means to us on a national level.

I think that that's kind of a reality that has been exploited by our politicians today. They have ridden on this misunderstanding and this ignorance in order to empower their own platforms, and those platforms have come on the backs of people that are already marginalized and that are already bearing the brunt of all this hateful discrimination and stereotyping that's been taking place. And I think that we have to put a stop to it.

If we don't stand up and recognize what's taking place right now, then it's a slippery slope, and it honestly is very terrifying to imagine where else it could lead. Because a year ago, I never imagined that we would even be entertaining a conversation about a Muslim registry, and now it's actually something that's being considered as a real policy, and that to me is just obscene.