How Well-Meaning Americans Are Drawn Into Opposing the Islamic Center

The extreme-right hate campaigns are aimed at reducing all Arabs and all Muslims to Al Qaeda style terrorists in the minds of Americans. In other words, they are doing the public relations work of the military in promoting fear to sustain our support for ongoing war.  But that, I suggest, is not enough to pull into their ranks the vast majority of those 80% of Americans who have opposed the Islamic Community Center.  When I hear from people who I know are sensitive and caring and they tell me of their opposition to the Islamic Community Center near Ground Zero, and I know many of them do not support the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I have to ask ‘how are they drawn in?”

Selective empathy?  How do we break out of it?

Engaging empathy requires consciousness and facts if it is not to turn to selective empathy only for one’s own group – in the case of those fueling the Mosque controversy, that group is primarily white, American and Christian.  We begin by asking critical questions, allowing caring and sensitivity to fed by our conscience.  Three hundred Muslims were killed in the towers on 9/11.  What of their families?  As soon as we ask that question, it is clear that this controversy has made empathy selective, confined to one’s own race, nationality and religion – primarily white, Christian Americans. That is the strategy of the right wing fanatics.  They use selective empathy to emotionally manipulate well-meaning Americans into fear of all Muslims and Arabs.  In what seems like caring, selective empathy is actually the foundation for the racism, hatred of the other that drives extremists into the mainstream.  That is what we should fear and must challenge.