The American Muslims love their country as much as any Christian or Jew.
ISLAMABAD: Several hundred people turned out in New York’s Times Square to protest Republican Congressman Peter King’s hearings on the danger of radicalisation of American Muslims. Participants waved flags and placards decrying it to be a collective attack on Muslims. The American Muslims love their country as much as any Christian or Jew.
Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to the US Congress, has challenged the basic premise of the hearings. While welcoming the investigation, he said that it does not make sense to narrow in on a discrete insular group that has already been the target of discrimination.
Several speakers, including pastors, imams and rabbis noted that Times Square was the site of a major bomb scare last year, but that, while the would-be bomber was Muslim, so was the citizen who alerted the police. He was a Muslim from Senegal.
The real battleground is not between America and Islam. It is between extremists in Islam, extremists in America. American Muslims are as fully American as any other community and to hold hearings against them is an injustice.
Viqar Ul Haq
Published in The Express Tribune, March 11th, 2011.
