As soon as the news emerged of Ullah's alleged bombing in New York, the Trump administration moved in full force to target immigrants. It called on Congress to end the diversity immigration lottery program, and to also shoot down chain migration -- a government program that allows for easier immigration based on family connection.
The incessant media coverage and stubborn government targeting of Muslims have led to an unprecedented hysteria which, in turn, led to numerous incidents of Muslims being targeted because of their faith. Many accounts of Muslims being thrown out of airplanes, often kicking and screaming, is becoming a fact of life in the US.
When Khairuldeen Makhzoomi was kicked out of a Southwest Airlines flight last year for speaking Arabic on the phone, the agent who escorted him reprimanded him for using his mother tongue in public considering "today's political climate."
Anila Dualatzai was dragged down the aisle of a plane heading to Los Angeles. She was "profiled, abused, interrogated, detained, and subjected to false reporting and the trauma of racist, vitriolic public shaming precisely because she is a woman, a person of color, and a Muslim," her attorney told the Washington Post.
While this hysteria plays well into the hands of opportunistic politicians like Trump, actual facts suggest that violence is hardly a Muslim phenomenon.
Newsweek reported on statistics showing that white men have committed most of the country's mass killings. Since 1982, the "majority of mass shootings -- 54 percent -- were committed by white men," numbers show.
Stephen Paddock, the 64-year-old white man who massacred 58 people and wounded hundreds more at the Harvest Music Festival in Las Vegas last October, was only one of an ever-growing list.
Countless government officials and journalists have fanned out to find out why Paddock would carry out such a heinous act, as if a white man's violence is a rare event in a country supposedly threatened by Blacks, Mexicans and Muslims.
Yet the truth is that the white man's profile is the most violent in the US.
"White men commit mass shootings out of a sense of entitlement," John Haltiwanger wrote in Newsweek.
Research conducted by Eric Madfis from the University of Washington argued in 2014 that, in the US, "middle-class Caucasian heterosexual males in their teenage years and in middle age commit mass murder ... in numbers disproportionately high relative to their share of the population."
He ascribed this finding to "white entitlement" and "heterosexual masculinity," among other reasons.
Still, a whole race, gender and religion are not held suspect; a rule that applies to some and excludes others.
Certainly, anti-Arab and Muslim sentiment in the US has been around for generations, but it has risen sharply in the last two decades. Arabs and Muslims have become an easy scapegoat for all of America's instabilities and failures.
But demonizing and humiliating brown-skinned men and women is certainly not the way out of the economic, political and foreign policy quagmires which American ruling elites have invited upon their country.
Such unlawful and undemocratic behavior may feed anti-Muslim hysteria a little longer, and give the likes of Trump more fodder for their useless efforts in targeting innocent men and women. But, in the long run, it will do the country much harm, damaging its democratic institutions and contributing to the culture of violence, founded on entitled white men touting guns and killing innocent people.
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