Nine years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, one thing remains certain: Some politicians and media types can stir the nation’s darker impulses to tar all Muslims with the same hatred most people feel toward the 19 fanatics who killed nearly 3,000 people in New York and Pennsylvania, and at the Pentagon.
America’s conflicting feelings toward Muslims and Islam are woven through the saturation TV coverage of the mosque planned near ground zero in New York and the repeated threats by Gainesville, Fla., pastor Terry Jones to burn copies of the Quran today on the anniversary of the attacks.
“This is a controversy ginned up by the right-wing media,” said the Rev. Jim Wallis, a progressive evangelical Christian author and activist who serves on the advisory council to the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.
Wallis, who participates in many interfaith activities, said he thinks relations with Muslims have improved since 2001.
“People are making a mistake of believing what the media points to as real,” Wallis said. “All you have to do to get attention - whether you’re in a cave in Afghanistan or a pastor in Florida - is to be on the extreme.
“There is a theological term” for Jones, Wallis said: “He’s a nutcase.”
Changing opinions
But opinion polls show the public’s feelings toward Islam have deteriorated since former President George W. Bush asserted in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks that the nation was not at war with Islam.
Only 30 percent of Americans say they have a “favorable opinion” of Islam, according to a Pew Research Center survey in August. Five years ago, 41 percent did.
A different Pew poll last month found that nearly 1 in 5 Americans believes President Obama is a Muslim - up from 11 percent a year ago. He is a Christian.
“There is a clear correlation (in the survey data) between what people think of the president’s job performance and whether they think he is a Muslim,” said Alan Cooperman, associate director of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
The roots of America’s continuing “ambivalence” toward Muslims and Islam is rooted in larger forces shaping the culture, said John C. Green, a professor of political science at the University of Akron and expert on the relationship of religion and politics.
“Part of it is the continuing threat of terrorism - not just in this country but around the world,” Green said. “A lot of it has to do with the economy. There is a sense that life is unstable. The American public is under siege. So, foreign threats are magnified. In a lot of people’s minds, there is this sense that this religion is associated with violence.”
Faulty associations
Controversy over plans to build an Islamic cultural center and mosque a few blocks from the former site of the World Trade Center towers in Manhattan has given some influential voices an opportunity to equate all Muslims with those who commit terrorism in the name of Islam. Most polls show Americans opposed to plans to build the center there.
As conservative commentator Glenn Beck said on his radio show last month: “You look for things that are uniting; I’m sorry, but the Cordoba Project (the cultural center and mosque) is not uniting,” Beck told his audience. “If you wanted to unite people, you don’t spit in their face. You don’t spit in their face. After you’ve killed 3,000 people, you’re going to now build your mosque on there, really?”
Before the rise of 24-hour cable news networks that thrive on tales of the extreme, the story of Jones threatening to burn copies of the Quran wouldn’t have spread far beyond his hometown.
Blanket coverage of Jones, and fears of the impact his actions could have on U.S. troops serving abroad, prompted Defense Secretary William Gates to call the pastor and urge him not to go through with it.
Growing acceptance
But there are signs of increased acceptance of American Muslims, who represent roughly 1 percent of the population, Green said.
Rima Fakih, born in Lebanon, won the 2010 Miss USA title, becoming the first American Muslim to wear the crown. And this month, the nation’s first Muslim liberal arts college - Zaytuna College - opened in Berkeley. While surveys show a growing mistrust of Islam, opinions are softer toward “American Muslims,” analysts said.
Jones’ threat to burn the Quran has inspired several examples of cross-cultural unity to counter him. The Military Religious Freedom Foundation offered to donate a new Quran to the Afghan National Army for each one Jones destroyed.
“We have a long experience with these sorts of problems in the United States, but historically we’ve been able to assimilate groups pretty successfully,” Green said, adding that Catholics and Jews had similar experiences. “But the experience of assimilation is often fraught with conflict. In this sense, Muslims are just the latest new group to encounter this kind of pushback from the groups who are already here - many of whose ancestors experienced the same sort of pushback when they arrived.”
But assimilation will probably be more difficult for Muslims, said the Rev. Hubert G. Locke, acting president of the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley. While Catholics and Jews experienced backlash after coming to America, “we were dealing with religious traditions that people already had some familiarity with. It wasn’t as alien to so many people.”