Do Muslims in America really want to decrease fear and mistrust directed toward them? Easy. Just follow these four simple steps:
1. Stop blaming violent acts committed by Muslims in the name of Islam on the various sins of unbelievers.
2. Establish nationwide, compulsory programs in American mosques to teach against the jihad ideology and Islamic supremacism, by means including an explicit and definitive rejection of the literal meaning of many passages of Qur'an and Hadith.
3. Stop saying violent or hateful things in private when you think no non-Muslims are around. For example, the imam Umar Abdul-Jalil, executive director of ministerial services for the New York City Department of Correction, was secretly recorded last year while speaking at an Islamic conference in Arizona. Muslims, he said, invoking Qur’an 48:29, must be "compassionate with each other" and "hard against the kufr [unbeliever]." In Britain, Hamid Ali, imam of the mosque frequented by the July 7 bombers, praised the bombers and called their terror attack "good" in a conversation secretly recorded by an undercover journalist. Publicly, he had condemned the attacks. In a mosque in the Czech Republic, a Muslim secretly filmed by a documentary filmmaker says Islamic Shari’a law, including the stoning of adulterers, should be adopted by the Czech Republic. Cleveland imam Fawaz Damra, who has since been deported for failing to disclose his ties to terror groups, signed the Fiqh Council of North America’s condemnation of terrorism, despite having declared at an Islamic conference that "terrorism, and terrorism alone, is the path to liberation."
Do such incidents mean that every Muslim who professes to have adopted Western notions of pluralism and the equality of dignity and rights of non-Muslims and Muslims is dissembling? Of course not. But they do mean that non-Muslims are perfectly justified in being suspicious even when Muslim profess moderation and opposition to terror. Consequently deeds, not just words, are needed. To conclude my four recommendations, genuinely anti-terror Muslims should:
4. Actively work with Western law enforcement officials to identify and apprehend jihadists within Western Muslim communities.
But it is unlikely that any of that will be done. Instead, these poor mistrusted, misunderstood folks will keep crying "Islamophobia" and trying to manipulate the American legal and political systems.
