Terrorist threats have been exaggerated beyond belief to manipulate a frightened, but also a growing impoverished population. The threat level was assigned colors, and each time the color vacillated towards the red, the nation drops all of its grievances, fights for equality, jobs and health care and unites in hating Muslims, people they never met.
It mattered little that, since September 11, the odds of being killed by terrorism are 1 in 110,000,000, an extremely negligible number compared to the millions who die as a result of diabetes, for example, or shark attacks, for that matter.
"Terrorism" has morphed from being a violent phenomenon requiring national debate and sensible policies to combat it, into a bogeyman that forces everyone into conformity, and divides people between being docile and obedient on the one hand, and "radical" and suspect, on the other.
But blaming Muslims for the decline of the American empire is as ineffective as it is dishonest.
The Economic Intelligence Unit had recently downgraded the US from a "full democracy" to a "flawed democracy." Neither Muslims nor Islam played any role in that.
The size of the Chinese economy is soon to surpass that of the US, and the powerful East Asian country is already roaring, expanding its influence in the Pacific and beyond. Muslims are hardly the culprits there, either.
Nor are Arabs responsible for the death of the "American dream," if one truly existed in the first place; nor the election of Donald Trump; nor the utter corruption and mafia-like practices of America's ruling elites and political parties.
It was not the Arabs and Muslims who duped the US into invading Iraq, where millions of Arabs and Muslims lost their lives as a result of the unchecked military adventurism.
In fact, Arabs and Muslims are by far the greatest victims of terrorism, whether state-sponsored terror or that of desperate, vile groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda.
Americans, Muslims are not your enemy. They never have been. Conformity is.
"In this age, the mere example of nonconformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service," wrote John Stuart Mill in "On Liberty." The English philosopher, had a tremendous impact on American liberalism.
I read his famous book soon after I arrived in the US. It took me a while to realize that what we learn in books often sharply contradicts reality.
Instead, we now live in the "age of impunity," according to Tom Engelhardt. In a 2014 article, published in the Huffington Post, he wrote: "For America's national security state, this is the age of impunity. Nothing it does -- torture, kidnapping, assassination, illegal surveillance, you name it -- will ever be brought to court."
Those who are "held accountable" are whistleblowers and political dissidents who dare question the government and educate their fellow men and women on the undemocratic nature of such oppressive practices.
Staying silent is not an option. It is a form of defeatism that should be outed as equally destructive as the muzzling of democracy.
"One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws," wrote Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
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