Muslims Don't Scare Me; American Extremists Do

A New York City police officer separates an anti-mosque demonstrator from a pro-mosque demonstrator in New York. (AP)

Oh, you've gotta be lying down for this one. Ready? Feet propped up yet?

President Obama is Malcolm X’s illegitimate son!

Where did I get such nonsense? Why, on the Internet, of course! Ain’t this computer stuff fun?

This foolishness comes to us courtesy of Pamela Geller, that inspired blogger who’s responsible for all the brouhaha about the proposed mosque “at” Ground Zero. Though Geller, a New Yorker who formed the organization Stop the Islamization of America shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, denied she got the stop-the-mosque-“at”-Ground-Zero ball rolling, the truth is she should get the lion’s share of the credit.

And let’s make one thing clear: Her organization should be called Run All Muslims Out Of America.
The notion that this country is being “Islamized” – whatever that idiotic term means – is patently absurd. Reasonable people – and you can rest assured that Geller isn’t one, nor is her fellow Muslim basher Terry Jones down in Florida – need only surf the Internet and go to the Web site www.factbook.net and look at the 2009 population figures for Muslims in the countries of the world.

According to www.factbook.net, the United States has a 2009 population of about 307 million people. America’s Muslim population is roughly 1.8 million. That’s less than 1 percent of the population of the country.

So it’s not like we’re swarming with Muslims. It’s more likely that after the events of Sept. 11, 2001, Americans inclined to bigotry found their comfort zone once again. For years – centuries, actually – they found that comfort zone by directing their bigotry mainly at black Americans, although Latinos, Native Americans, Asians and Jews felt some of the heat. Heck, many non-Jewish European immigrants weren’t safe until they’d been completely assimilated.

But then along came people like Martin Luther King Jr. and James Farmer and Medgar Evers talking all this civil rights stuff. Malcolm X – you know, Barack’s daddy – and others did their thing on the black nationalist tip, and suddenly white folks had that bigots’ comfort zone yanked out right from under them.

Oh, what to do, what to do? Why, find another target for the bigotry of course. And those Muslim nut jobs who abused, misused and misinterpreted their religion by killing thousands of Americans on Sept. 11, 2001 provided just the excuse. Muslims would now be the new whipping boys – and gals. Those right-wing Christians who already had one foot in the loony bin and the other on a sheet of ice all of a sudden became experts on Islam, the Quran and everybody and everything Muslim.

Now, I wouldn’t dream of calling Geller loony, even though the folks behind the Web site www.loonwatch.com dubbed her “the looniest blogger ever.” I wouldn’t even call Jones that, with his “I’m gonna burn a bunch of Qurans” and “No, I won’t burn ‘em” flip-flop this past week. But I will say this: There exists an entire body of people in this country who have let what happened on Sept. 11, 2001 cause some damage to the synaptic functions in their brains.

How else do you account for the attacks on Islam as a “fascistic” religion or “the devil’s” religion? It took one ninth-grade world history class for me to learn this: The deity Muslims worship is the same one of Jews and Christians, which is to say the deity of the prophets Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses. Jesus is revered in Islam not as the Son of God, but as a great prophet in the tradition of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses. So when these new experts on .....

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Muslims Don't Scare Me; American Extremists Do