What Muslims Should Fear Most

I am often told that America is a dangerous place for Muslims. Recently, the left-of-center news site Vox published a piece insisting that the shooting death of Ahmed Al-Jumaili, an Iraqi who had recently moved to Dallas, be seen as part of “the growing trend of violence against Muslims in the United States.” But it seems that this claim was unfounded. Soon after Al-Jumaili’s death, police apprehended a 17-year-old suspect who was apparently unaware of Al-Jumaili’s religious background. Earlier, three Muslim Americans — Deah Barakat, Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, and Razan Abu-Salha, all of them very young adults — were shot to death over a parking space in Chapel Hill, N.C. Ever since, many Muslims, in the United States and elsewhere, have insisted that their killer, Craig Stephen Hicks, was motivated by anti-Muslim animus and that to suggest otherwise is to diminish what is undoubtedly a grave crime. Yet it appears that Hicks behaved in a hostile and threatening manner to neighbors of all persuasions, and his angry Facebook rants suggest that he reserved his deepest hatred for Christian fundamentalists.

The death of a loved one is always a tragedy, and to lose a loved one to senseless violence is more tragic still. It is easy for me to see why the families of these victims might have wanted to give some larger meaning to their deaths. That I can forgive. I’m less inclined to forgive the political activists who’ve rushed to use these tragedies to advance the notion that anti-Muslim xenophobia is somehow a graver threat to civil peace than is violent Islamic extremism. In truth, the United States has proven a very hospitable home for Muslims, and in particular for those who reject the most austere and the most radical interpretations of Islam. Indeed, the fact that observant Muslims feel comfortable wearing religious garb in America all but guarantees that some of them will be victims of violent crime, if only because it would be statistically improbable for a large group of people to be completely exempt from our country’s larger violence problem.