It's Sunday

By "Christians" no doubt.

After a mosque in Murfreesboro, Tennessee triggered intense community opposition when it attempted to expand in 2010, a fire that was ruled to be arson damaged the mosque; after facing years of vandalism, bomb threats, and efforts by local and state officials (including state judges) to block its expansion, the mosque was finally able to open only this week only after the DOJ and a federal judge (to their credit) intervened on the ground that the mosque’s religious liberty was being infringed.

In October of last year, a Texas man pled guilty “to a hate crime charge stemming from an arson of a children’s playground at the Dar El-Eman Islamic Center in Arlington,” and admitted that the fire was “part of a series of ethnically-motivated acts directed at individuals of Arab or Middle Eastern descent associated with the mosque.” In August of last year, an Oregon man was indicted “on federal hate crime and arson charges for intentionally setting fire to the Salman Alfarisi Islamic Center.” In May of last year, a fire at a mosque in Stockton, California was ruled to be arson. Last year in southwest Houston, surveillance cameras “captured images of a group of at least three men in masks” attempting to set fire to a local mosque; “prayer rugs at the back of the mosque were doused with gasoline.”

Last year in Dearborn, Michigan, a serious attack on one of the nation’s largest mosques was thwarted when a man was arrested carrying large amounts of explosives. In Massachusetts last year, the Islamic Society of Greater Worcester was set on fire by a man apprehended before the fire could spread. A fire that seriously damaged a mosque in Wichita, Kansas on Halloween night last year was ruled to be arson. In July of this year, a South Carolina mosque was vandalized; such vandalism against American mosques is incredibly common.

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The greatest harm from these incidents is not to the property they damage. It’s the climate of fear that is created for Muslims living in the United States. As I’ve written about before, it’s hard to put into words how palpable and paralyzing this fear is in American Muslim communities. It’s infuriating to behold: perfectly law-abiding citizens and legal residents feeling — rationally and accurately — that they are subjected to constant surveillance, monitoring, suspicion, denial of basic rights, hostility and worse solely because of their religion and ethnicity.

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And, as I wrote about yesterday, America’s foreign policy is, and for the last decade has been, driven by endless violence against Muslims in numerous predominantly Muslim countries, sending a message loudly and clearly to the American citizenry about the Real Enemy.

  Glenn Greenwald

Meanwhile, in a good turn of events, the burned down mosque in Joplin, Missouri, has raised over $300,000 online to rebuild in the couple of days since it was torched.