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.

Although the “Mosque Controversy” is fading from daily headlines, in today’s blog, I move on to the next question in the politics of empathy: Why do so many Americans allow themselves to be driven again into a frenzy of fear of Islam and Arabs?  To empathize, we must know the conditions and situations in which those we empathize with act and behave.A long time ago, a friend, an Italian diplomat, pointed out to me that Americans are almost the only people in the world who believe that they not only can but must be protected at all times from any possible harm that could come to them.  But people who live through wars and conflicts know that perfect, ultimate protection is impossible.  Still Americans live in the illusion of perfect protection which justifies their state turning other parts of the world into killing zones.  As President Obama told us, he escalated the war in Afghanistan “to keep Americans safe.”  Under such delusions, those who provoked the “Mosque at Ground Zero” controversy intensified white Americans fears that their safety is at stake with Muslims in their midst.  They promoted systematic lies and misinformation about the proposed community center to feed fear and the fiction that every Arab and any Muslim is a threat to our security.  That is racism, the strategy of choice for pro-war, pro-military fanatics. But hatred is not their final goal which is to turn the majority of Americans’ attention away from the ever expanding U.S. military and ongoing war. We can do better than that.  Next blog: How can those Americans with good hearts and positive intentions, who, not being fanatics, turn against the racism that some would use to drive us into expanding wars?