Editorial: San Bernardino shooting should not prompt anti-Muslim hate
By Editorial Board
Dec. 7, 2015 12:09 a.m.
After the shooting that left 14 dead in San Bernardino, California last week, the nation is searching for a way to heal.
Some have held vigils. Others have offered prayers. Yet for a significant number of people, healing has taken the form of hate. To many, the shooting has come to represent the dangers of Islam and the people that practice it.
Claiming the actions of the few represent a much larger whole is patently illogical. To the rational observer, it may seem outrageous that this needs to be spelled out for the American people.
But the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and its recent high-profile massacre in Paris have created a climate of fear and paranoia in the United States, a climate that is facilitating the proliferation of hatred and bigotry against Muslims, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the aftermath of 9/11. The slaughter in San Bernardino may very well be the spark that causes the powder keg to explode.
UCLA’s Muslim students aren’t exempt. In response to the shooting, the Muslim Student Association held a rally against Islamophobia and condemned the violence committed by the perpetrators.
Disassociating themselves from murderers who share their religious background has become a sad necessity for Muslims in the United States. In another depressing sign of the times, Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs Janina Montero had to send a campus-wide email to assure the student body of one of the top-ranked universities in the world that “Muslim students at UCLA bear no relation to the extremists who have committed these acts of violence.”
Muslims at UCLA often talk about how many of their fellow students interrogate them about their faith or suspect them of being affiliated with terrorist organizations that claim to act in the name of Islam. Anti-Muslim bigotry isn’t some social phenomenon we observe from a distance. It occurs right here in our own backyard.
What often gets lost among the backlash is the initial crime itself. It’s reasonable to expect outrage after one of the largest mass shootings in American history. But there is no worse way to react to a tragedy than to follow it with hatred that could only produce more tragedies, even if they are smaller in scale.
Unfortunately, that’s the direction this country is headed in. And it doesn’t seem like we’re going off course anytime soon.
