Daily Times

Politicians in the United States (US) keep asking: why do they hate us? The “they” is all the people in the rest of the world that are directly or indirectly responsible for terrorist activity directed against US “interests.” These politicians conveniently forget all the countries the US and its allies keep bombing into rubble. The only major act of terrorism committed over the last many decades inside the US by “foreign” nationals is obviously what happened on 9/11. Since then most major “terrorist” actions have been carried out by US citizens. As such the question that should be asked is why so many US citizens are so full of hate that they are willing to commit random murders.

Hate crimes are pretty common in the US. And the Lesbian-Gay-Bi-Trans (LGBT) communities have been frequent victims of hate crime. The latest attack on a gay club in Orlando is really a hate crime. There are reports that the attacker, a native born American Muslim, declared his sympathy and allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) just before the attacks, but there is no evidence that he had any direct connections with them. Because of these “declarations” the attack is also being classified as terrorism. Reports have brought out a history of spousal abuse and homophobia. Without indulging in armchair psychoanalysis, it is still fair to say that Omar Mateen had a troubled past. But then everybody with a troubled past does not pick up an automatic rifle and go on a killing spree.

In the minds of most people living in the US including Muslims the big question is what Islam as a religion has to with such outbursts of violence committed by Muslims and directed against fellow Americans. The term used by officials is “radicalisation” of Muslim youth that leads them to terrorist activity. So far most of the Muslims involved in such activity were grown men and not “youths.” In my opinion, radicalising grown up men is rather difficult but what does happen is that as these men grow up they do accumulate grievances against a society for real or imagined slights. And of course, if they are living in the US they do confront things that they believe to be contrary to Islamic values. And that in my opinion is the major problem. The Islamic values being imparted to Muslims in many mosques and Islamic centres in the US are quite conducive to extremist thought.

Many of the older members of different Muslim religious congregations in the US do not pay much attention to what the prayer leaders in these mosques are saying. Many in the first generation of American Muslims grew up in Muslim majority countries, and for most of them what was “happening” in the mosques constituted a relatively small part of the Islamic environment that they lived in. But younger people born or growing up in the US are more susceptible since they do not have a large Muslim society around to balance out what they hear in the mosques. In time these young people absorb these ideas and start to accept extreme points of view. What the Islamic preachers in the mosques are pushing is the lifestyle acceptable to those running Saudi Arabia. Why they do that is an interesting question, and perhaps US authorities need to concentrate on that a bit also.

Here I must blame some of us among the older generation of American Muslims, at least a little bit. Most of us are comfortable with our religious feelings and have little need to monitor what goes on in the mosques and the Islamic centres. So, many of us abandon our children to the sort of extremism being peddled in many of these “Islamic” centres, and don’t really think much about what they are learning. When these otherwise “well-brought up” children suddenly want to emulate men and women in Saudi Arabia, we get confused and cannot figure out why this happened.

When parents abandon their children’s intellectual needs, strange things can happen to those children. Not just that they might become radicalised but they could well swing to the other end of the spectrum. Of course, I am not talking about children being brought up in broken homes or in great poverty and deprivation. Most incidents of excessive religious zeal leading to terrorist attacks in the US have not been committed by people coming from poor backgrounds. The poor have no time for morality; they are just too busy trying to survive.

The “austere” brand of Islam that many of the Islamic centres are pushing and is also being glorified by ISIS and other Islamist sources in social media and on the Internet have some things in common: misogyny, gay-bashing and justified violence against “non-believers”. Mateen evidently imbibed all these lessons and then acted on them. Muslims insist that this particular “lone wolf” does not represent the Muslim community in the US, but they are not willing to repudiate the anti-women, anti-LGBT and pro-jihad sentiments that are openly expressed in the local Muslim environments. It is correct that very few if any Muslims in the US support ISIS or want anybody to commit acts of terrorism in the US. But they are not willing to entirely repudiate the religious ideology that motivates ISIS.

Muslims that call the US home must learn to live with the cultural values and legal norms that surround them. All citizens including women, members of different ethnicities and religious beliefs as well as members of the LGBT community are equal under the law. Unless American Muslims accept these values they will always be malcontent. And Muslim malcontents will be susceptible to radicalisation by extremists. If Muslims in Muslim majority countries can also accept these values then it will be much more difficult for ISIS to find recruits to fight its battles. But then that is a different battle for a different day.

The author is a former editor of the Journal of Association of Pakistani descent Physicians of North America (APPNA)