For starters, it ignores the 300 million Muslims--the size of America's population--in the world who are Sufis, a mystical form of Islam that is essentially pacifist and believes that the path to God is through music and dance.
Worse, Maher doesn't understand one can't characterize a whole faith as extremist without also legitimizing the idea that extreme measures are necessary to control it.
That's something even the un-cool George Bush instinctively understood. That's why he took pains to stress that America's beef wasn't with Islam--only the extremists perverting their faith. The upshot was that even though the attack killed 3,000 Americans, America avoided a backlash against Muslims. To be sure, a handful of innocent Asians, some of who weren't even Muslims, suffered random attacks, but there would have been far more bloodshed if Bush had followed Maher-style Muslim bashing.
Contrast this with India, my native country, where Maher-style denunciations of Muslims are part and parcel of the political culture. Barely six months after 9/11, about 2,000 Muslims were butchered in a pogrom in the state of Gujarat. (The governor on whose watch this happened just became the prime minister of India this week.)
India's majority Hindu population has historically had tense relations with the country's Muslim minority so anti-Muslim violence is nothing new. And in this case, the proximate cause of the massacre was retribution for some 50 Hindu pilgrims who died in a train fire that Muslims were rumored to have caused.
But the larger cause was that post-9/11, Maher-type talk of rising Islamofascism raised anti-Muslim sentiment in the country to a fevered pitch. It legitimized the ongoing demonization of India's Muslims, leaving the country with few inner resources to contain the violence against them.
The new leader of India, Narendra Modi who is referenced by the writer, Shikha Dalmia was the overwhelming choice of big business interests and just ode into power on a wave of nationalism bears the stain of the 2002 pogrom unleashed on Muslims at Gujarat. Not that I give the Bush administration much credit for anything and they do have a huge share of culpability of exploiting anti-Muslim animosity for political points but they did deny Modi a visa in 2005. In a telling sign of the times the triumphant strongman of India has been invited to visit with President Barack Obama at the White House. The unifying factor of anti-Muslim fanaticism washes away many a sin, especially when there is a boatload of money riding on providing the military hardware, surveillance power and ideological clout of the bought and paid for media that promotes it.
Shame on the New York Times, Shame on them All!
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