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Bernie Sanders won Arab Americans in Michigan. The media is wrong about why. [View all]
All of it is deeply reductive thinking. In its own way it is as damaging to the perception of American Muslims as the overt prejudice espoused by the loudmouth, firecracker-flinging charlatan who currently and jaw-droppingly remains the prohibitive favorite to win the Republican Party's nomination.
The modern paranoid mode regarding Muslims in America, any Muslim in America, is that without warning one of them could activate as an agent of mayhem, or at the very least seek to poison the principles of the nation by pouring Islamic law into the constitutional reservoir. This mode is so stitched into our daily lives that some Americans can't even look at a starving, traumatized Syrian child without being fearful that this child will murder them.
The result of such a paradigm is that even in this data point about a single state's primary victory, Muslims continue to be defined as a group by what they are assumed to hate: women, Jews, the Western world in general.
It seems to take an extraordinary force of will on the part of media analysts to instead consider these Muslim voters as individuals with nuanced sets of political beliefs. Sanders is indeed a secular Jew, but he is also a firebrand preacher against economic inequality and racist systems still festering within the American social structure. Clinton is not Jewish, but she also has in her long political career voted to support the 2003 invasion of Iraq and had a heavy hand in a government drone program that has killed numerous innocent civilians in its pursuit of confirmed terrorist operatives — a program, it should be noted, that Sanders has said he would continue.
The Muslims have also, in the past, supported Christian after Christian, despite being told in no uncertain terms that certain Christians don't want any Muslims living here; despite long-past historical instances of Christian persecution of Muslims during the Crusades or the Spanish Inquisition. Muslim Americans support candidates of non-Muslim faiths in their bids for elected office because they are invested in the quality of life and of leadership in America. And they do this because very rarely are they given the option to vote for another Muslim American for any elected office at all.
The modern paranoid mode regarding Muslims in America, any Muslim in America, is that without warning one of them could activate as an agent of mayhem, or at the very least seek to poison the principles of the nation by pouring Islamic law into the constitutional reservoir. This mode is so stitched into our daily lives that some Americans can't even look at a starving, traumatized Syrian child without being fearful that this child will murder them.
The result of such a paradigm is that even in this data point about a single state's primary victory, Muslims continue to be defined as a group by what they are assumed to hate: women, Jews, the Western world in general.
It seems to take an extraordinary force of will on the part of media analysts to instead consider these Muslim voters as individuals with nuanced sets of political beliefs. Sanders is indeed a secular Jew, but he is also a firebrand preacher against economic inequality and racist systems still festering within the American social structure. Clinton is not Jewish, but she also has in her long political career voted to support the 2003 invasion of Iraq and had a heavy hand in a government drone program that has killed numerous innocent civilians in its pursuit of confirmed terrorist operatives — a program, it should be noted, that Sanders has said he would continue.
The Muslims have also, in the past, supported Christian after Christian, despite being told in no uncertain terms that certain Christians don't want any Muslims living here; despite long-past historical instances of Christian persecution of Muslims during the Crusades or the Spanish Inquisition. Muslim Americans support candidates of non-Muslim faiths in their bids for elected office because they are invested in the quality of life and of leadership in America. And they do this because very rarely are they given the option to vote for another Muslim American for any elected office at all.
http://www.vox.com/2016/3/11/11193030/bernie-sanders-muslims
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