A demonstrator shouts and carries a 'Stop Islam' sign while another rips pages out of a Quran during a 'Freedom of Speech Rally Round II' outside the Islamic Community Center of Phoenix, Arizona. (photo: Nancy Wiechec/Reuters)
05 April 16
Washington DC woman was recently threatened with arrest
by a DC Public Library police officer (yes, the DC library system has
its own police force) because she was wearing a hijab, the head covering
worn by millions of Muslim women around the world.
An eyewitness and neighborhood activist told a local
listserve, “All I heard was he started asking her to take off her hijab.
The man next to her spoke up, but the officer continued to harass her.
Ultimately, he came toward her in an intimidating way, pulled out his
handcuffs, and said if she didn’t take off the hijab, she had to leave.”
She left.
DC Library officials apologized to the woman, who was
never identified, and transferred the officer, pending an investigation.
The officer later told the Huffington Post
that he didn’t know what a hijab was. He thought it was a hoodie. “It
was not a religious hat that I know [of]. I asked her to take her hoodie
off and told her, ‘if you’re not going to take it off, you have to
leave.’ So I pulled out my handcuffs and then she got up and she left.”
This untrained ignoramus has the power to arrest a person because she
wouldn’t take her “hat” off.
The incident comes on the heels of yet another
instance of a Muslim family being removed from a United Airlines flight
for, well, being Muslim. That happened on Sunday. Three weeks ago, two
other Muslim women were removed from a Jet Blue flight for speaking Arabic to each other. The flight attendant decided that she “wasn’t comfortable” with that. Two months earlier,
three Muslims and a Sikh – all American citizens, and one of whom was
sound asleep – were forced off an American Airlines flight from Toronto
to New York without explanation. After the flight departed, without
them, they were finally told that the captain “felt uneasy and
uncomfortable with their presence on the flight and as such, refused to
fly unless they were removed from the flight.” He just didn’t like their
“looks.”
These things seem to happen so routinely nowadays that
they barely command the mainstream media’s attention. And they almost
never warrant much more than a few paragraphs.
One on hand, the problem is obvious. The United States
is a country in which anti-Muslim prejudice is rampant. On the other
hand, it’s a much deeper problem than meets the eye. Americans as a
people are, by and large, inexcusably ignorant of other cultures.
I thought in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks, when a Sikh gas station owner, Balbir Singh Sodhi, was murdered
by a Boeing mechanic who had told friends that he was going to “go out
and shoot some towelheads,” that the attack was an anomaly. It wasn’t.
There have been dozens of attacks on mosques, Muslims, and people
confused for Muslims across the country since 2001.
This is a failure of the U.S. education system.
Americans, admittedly, are less worldly and less well-traveled than the
citizens of many of our European allies. That may be a function of the
fact that we’re separated from much of the rest of the world by two
oceans. But that’s no excuse for being ignorant, for being stupid. We
learn less about other cultures in our schools. We generally don’t delve
into other religions at all. I earned a degree in Middle Eastern
Studies from a first-tier university and never had to take a single
class on Islam. I did so on my own volition.
If we’re going to get past this bigoted ignorance of
others, other Americans, it has to start in our schools. It has to start
when our educations begin. It has to continue through our college
years. It must be addressed in the mainstream media. And it should have
started years ago.
John Kiriakou is an Associate Fellow with the
Institute for Policy Studies in Washington DC. He is a former CIA
counterterrorism operations officer and former senior investigator for
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
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