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Bush may have dealt with Islamophobia better than Obama

The single term “Islamophobia” encapsulates a multitude of loaded viewpoints. This term and the opinions that follow seem to be the hottest topics in the news at the moment.

From our very own pages at the Daily 49er to the Galactic Empire known as Fox News, where has this venomous and debased discourse come from? Has “Islamophobia-palooza” really been nine years in the making?

New York Times opinions columnist Nicholas D. Kristof accurately provides his own assessment of this “national value testing debate” in a Sept. 12 article titled, “Is this America?”

According to Kristof, “It would have been natural for this test to have come right after 9/11, but it was forestalled because President George W. Bush pushed back at his conservative ranks and repeatedly warned Americans not to confuse Al Qaeda with Islam.”   

Just six days after 9/11 at the Islamic Center of Washington, President Bush said, “Those who feel like they can intimidate our fellow citizens to take out their anger don’t represent the best of America; they represent the worst of humankind.”

He added: “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace.”

Let us jump forward nine years with our first black president communicating essentially the same message to the American people. Why can’t President Obama keep a lid on this boiling pot as his predecessor did at a time when nationalistic emotions were at an all-time high?

It is simple. President Bush’s assurance meant more to white Americans because he is in fact a white American. Two years into the Obama presidency and people all around the country still think that Obama is a Muslim who wasn’t even born in the United States.

Every day there seems to be another random Gallup, ABC, or Fox News poll that gauges the frenzied status of our “Islamophobia-palooza.” Anyone who has taken a statistics course in college knows that polls are bogus. Pollsters essentially create their own results.

These statistics can easily be skewed by the many different variables that are involved in the polling process, such as how the question was asked to even the time of day a poll is being conducted.

For example, “Excuse me sir or ma’am, how do you feel about Sharia law slowly being imposed on our country?”

The general person doesn’t even know what Sharia law is, but the structure of the question leads the person in a certain direction when answering. 

My curiosity about the origin of this dangerous national narrative leads me back to the election of Barack Obama. This irrational breed of discourse seemingly emerged because we elected a black president whose middle name is Hussein.

What followed was the belief that President Obama was born outside of the U.S. This isn’t to mention that his estranged father was a Kenyan-Muslim. As if that was not enough, the Fort Hood gunman revealed that “they” — terrorists — can be secretly among us.

Let us not forget the Times Square bomber, a naturalized American citizen from Pakistan, or the calls to change the 14th Amendment because of “terror babies.”

If you lump all the previously mentioned examples together and then top them off with the “Ground Zero mosque” and “National Koran Burning Day,” you have our current national debate. 

I rarely watch MTV, but this past Sunday I recorded the MTV Video Music Awards on my Tivo, so I could watch a few music performances without having to waste two hours of my life.

I came across a public service-like announcement sponsored by MTV.

With an open Koran in the backdrop, the screen read, “Islam is not the enemy…Arabs are not the enemy … Hatred is the enemy.”

I never would have thought that MTV would provide a more rational voice than America’s most watched news channel.

Hanif Zarrabi is a Middle Eastern history graduate student and a columnist for the Daily 49er.

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