Two incredible wrongs were done, two crimes committed. Two men are in prison, charged with these crimes, but I am confident that not everyone who is guilty will be charged. Aiding and abetting takes many forms.
I am speaking of the murder of Khalid Jabara, a 37-year old man, on August 12 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on his own front porch by a belligerent white neighbor. And I am speaking of the murder of a Muslim imam and his close friend as they walked in their own neighborhood on August 13 in Queens, New York City, by a Hispanic man, born and raised in Brooklyn.
An American Tragedy
The connection between the two incidents is that both appear to be hate crimes against Muslims. The imam and his friend were originally from Bangladesh and served a Muslim community through the Al-Furqan Jame Mosque in N.Y. They had just left the mosque when they were shot. In Tulsa Jabara’s neighbor had called the family “dirty Arabs” and “Mooslims,” though they were not Muslims but Lebanese Christians.
The headline in the Huffington Post about the killing in Tulsa got it right. This is “an American Tragedy.” Whatever the author meant by that, I feel that a lot of us are responsible, some of us more than others, for what happened to Khalid Jabara, to Maulam Akonjee and Thara Uddin.
An American Story
Mounha and Haifa Jabara are Americans. They came to the U.S. from Lebanon thirty-three years ago, during the Lebanese Civil War, bringing two small children. I understand why. I was in Lebanon then, and it was not a safe place to raise a family. It was not safe because the numerous sects of Lebanon had gone from rivalry and hate and angry words to shooting and bombing. Two neighboring countries had taken advantage, and the small country was a battleground, torn into pieces, every piece wounded. The time comes when people have to think of their children. Many, not just the Jabaras, heard the land of opportunity and freedom beckoning and left their shattered homeland.
The Jabara’s settled in Tulsa, established a catering business, had another child and put their kids through high school and college. For a long time they were a normal, happy American family.
Misfortune appeared five years ago in the form of a new neighbor, who hated them from the start. He was Vernon Majors, an ignorant man who thought all Arabs were Muslims and all Muslims were bad. He left crude threatening notes on their property, cursed them in emails and voicemails, even said, “I want to kill you all.”
In September 2015, Majors hit Khalid’s mother, Haifa Jabara, with his car, nearly killing the 65-year-old woman while she was jogging. He confessed to hitting her deliberately and was charged with assault and battery with a deadly weapon, among other offenses. He was jailed pending a trial ― but in May, he was released on a $60,000 bond.
Unanswered Questions
According to the Tulsa World, the Jabara family is at a loss to understand why he was permitted to come back and live a few feet from a family he had already assaulted, a family that had filed for a restraining order against him, and why there was no monitoring of his movements. I wonder also why a man already accused of assault with a deadly weapon was able to have a gun.
Two grieving families in New York are at a loss to understand why men who have preached peace and lived peacefully would be targeted for violence, why the accused Oscar Morel would even bother to come to their quiet neighborhood. Numerous people in the community are now afraid to go to the mosque for prayers.
The Developing Pattern
These two events are part of a pattern. HuffPost has recorded more than 230 acts of anti-Muslim violence and discrimination this year. During the month of Ramadan, there were at least 20 anti-Muslim crimes. A report released earlier this year by Georgetown’s Bridge Initiative found that there were more acts of anti-Muslim violence and vandalism in 2015 than in any year since the Sept. 11 attacks. And the Council on American-Islamic Relations found 78 instances in 2015 where mosques were targeted for vandalism, arson and other types of destruction ― an increase of nearly 400 percent from the year before.
If it takes a village to raise a child, (and it does) what does the village (in this case a country) have to do to produce people who hate others because of their identity and are ready to kill because of this hate?
Of course I ask because I observe that this hate does not exist in a vacuum but in a climate of fear and belligerence. That’s what the statistics above say to us.
We must acknowledge, of course, the attacks against us in which 95 people have died, according to Wikipedia, in terrorist attacks on our soil since 2010 and recognize that all of this violence is rooted in international relationships in which the Muslims have felt both disrespected and robbed. We pay a price for being the biggest and strongest and for the death and destruction inflicted on the Middle East in the name of “liberating” some from tyrants.
Now our country has gone to war against Islamist terrorism and focused the battle on ISIS, a brutal extremist group whose first victims are Muslims. What always happens when we go to war is that fervor against the enemy becomes proof of our patriotism. Hatred of the enemy is mistaken for love of country. In our zeal we lose our focus, we fight against shadows. Right now some of us are not thinking well; we seem to believe that a war against Islamic extremists is a war against Islam, or against Muslims.
War Against Ourselves
But this is not an ordinary country. The whole world lives here. We can declare war against another country or against an ideology or a particular entity, but we cannot declare war against a religion or a whole people group, because then we will fight against ourselves and our own values.
Some of our citizens, a mere one per cent, are Muslim. Logically, a small percentage of those could be dangerous people. Shall we then permit all of them to become endangered?
We have been in a similar place before. In 1941 we were attacked by Japan and declared war against that nation. Then we turned in distrust against American citizens who had come here from Japan. I don’t need to tell you that we then committed a grave injustice against loyal Americans of Japanese origin.
Fear is contagious and fear will make us do silly and wicked things. There are writers who, knowing this, have apparently dedicated themselves to scaring us. Fear sells; if we are in danger, we want to be warned, so we listen to panicky messages. There are politicians who are using our insecurity to achieve their own agendas.
The Guilty Who Walk Free
This is why I say, not everyone who is guilty will be charged. People who know how to spook us are creating an atmosphere that makes it okay to fear and hate. Some of us repeat anything we hear without checking it out. Some of us listen to only one side of a story. Not knowing any Muslims, we cannot contradict rumors. Some of us don’t see Middle Easterners as real people. It all adds up to an atmosphere that encourages violence.
Those who commit murder will be charged and punished. Those who preach hate, those who pass on fear, those of us who merely discriminate, those who want the country to themselves, those who hesitate to speak an unpopular message—all of us are guilty of preparing the way for violence. We are the aiders and abetters, the guilty who will not be charged.
(I hope to follow this article with another on Learning to Discern)