In the quiet moments before Ahmed Al-Jumaili died, he and his wife
stepped out of her family's apartment, in a small complex in a suburb of
Dallas, to photograph the first snowfall he'd ever seen.
Al-Jumaili had hesitated to leave his home in Iraq, but his wife had
urged him to come to the US, where he'd be safer. She'd gone ahead to
Dallas not long after their 2013 marriage, but he stayed in Iraq to work
and save for their new life. Finally, last month, he followed her to
Texas, where she had family, and left behind the chaos of Iraq.
On Thursday, the last night of his life, three and a half inches of snow fell on Dallas,
the most since 1942. It was almost midnight when he and his wife stood
outside to take photos of this new sight, in the country that was to be
his new home. As they lingered, what residents would later describe
to police as two to four men, moving on foot, entered the small
complex. One or more of the men raised a rifle and shot Al-Jumaili.
Police would later find bullets lodged in nearby cars as well. He died a few hours later at a nearby hospital; he was 36 years old and had been in the US for three weeks.
An echo of Chapel Hill's murders, and the silence that first greeted them
Neither police nor Al-Jumaili's family are yet claiming a motive, but
focus has naturally fallen on the growing trend of violence against
Muslims in the United States. Dallas Police Major Jeff Cotner said
police considered hate crime a "possibility." A local Methodist pastor,
as well as a representative from the Council on American-Islamic
Relations, have both said the local community already fears as much.
And yet Al-Jumaili's killing has received strikingly little
attention, other than a few mostly brief media reports, and the
statements of faith leaders in Dallas hinting at a climate of hostility
toward Muslims there.
This is a silence that has accompanied the recent wave of hostility
against Muslims in America. Just three weeks earlier, when a man in
Chapel Hill gunned down three Muslim-American college students, it took a
grassroots social media campaign — #MuslimLivesMatter
— to compel coverage of murders that were initially treated as a
"parking dispute," and of the growing fear that Muslims are made to feel
in this country.
Yes, perhaps the murder will turn out to be unrelated to Al-Jumaili's
faith or background. It could have been a random attack, or even, as
police say they are considering, an accident. But it seems odd that
Americans, who pride themselves on inclusiveness and tolerance, would be
so blithe and so uninterested that, in a time of increasingly overt
hatred toward a minority group, yet another member of that group has
been murdered for no apparent reason, in his third week in this country,
while photographing snow with his wife.
"We're here to stand up for the American way of life"
When Ahmed Al-Jumaili left Iraq for America, in February, his wife
Zahara greeted him with a homemade sign: "I've waited 460 days, 11,040
hour, 662,440 minuts for this moment. Welcome home." The English that
was to be their new language was imperfect, but the expression on
Zahara's face universally recognizable.
Whether he knew it or not, Al-Jumaili was also arriving in Dallas at a
moment when hatred of Muslims was spilling over. A few weeks earlier,
in the nearby suburb of Dallas, thousands of local residents had
gathered to protest a Muslim community conference held at a local event
center. Meant to raise money to build a center dedicated to promoting
tolerance, it was organized by the local school system and called "Stand
With the Prophet Against Terror and Hate."
Protesters waved anti-Muslim signs and American flags for hours,
surrounding roads and sidewalks leading to the conference and forcing
local Muslim families who attended to endure a gauntlet of hate. "Go
home and take Obama with you," one sign read. Many referenced the
Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris.
"We don't want them here," a woman at the protests told a local TV reporter.
One man explained, "We're here to stand up for the American way of life
from a faction of people who are trying to destroy us."
What happened a few weeks later, when unknown men entered
Al-Jumaili's apartment complex and killed him, might have had nothing to
do with those protests. But the possibility that it wasn't a
coincidence has received strangely little attention.
After the murder, a local Methodist pastor named Wes Magruder told the Los Angeles Times that he and others in his community feared a connection.
"There are more and more Iraqis coming here to Texas," Magruder told the newspaper.
A local representative of the Council on American-Islamic Relations,
Alia Salem, was more circumspect about suggesting a motive, but made
what is in some ways the more salient point: that Muslims in the area,
and in America, are increasingly made to live in fear of violence.
"Because of recent incidents targeting American Muslims, including
the murder of three young Muslims in North Carolina, we urge law
enforcement authorities to address community concerns about a motive in
this case," she said.
Salem has set up a crowd-funding page to raise money for Zahara, who had planned to rely on her husband for financial support. What else can they do?
A wave of hatred is becoming a wave of violence
Alia Salem's concern, that the murder will deepen fear among American
Muslims for their safety, even if it was not a hate crime, makes more
sense if you consider the broader context.
The rise of ISIS in the Middle East, and attendant media coverage,
has coincided with Islamophobia's growing acceptance in mainstream
American discourse.
Media outlets, particularly on TV, are increasingly promoting overt bigotry against Muslims,
stating over and over that Islam is an inherently violent religion and
that peaceful Muslims are somehow to blame for ISIS. Hateful stereotypes
are treated as fair game; the question of whether Muslims are somehow
lesser human beings is raised as a valid or even necessary debate.
The politics of Islamophobia are ascendent as well. These attitudes initially spiked
after President Obama's election — a continuation of the dogwhistle
politics that Obama is a secret Muslim, or at least suspiciously
un-hostile toward Islam — but are now resurfacing. State legislatures
are passing laws banning "sharia" or "foreign law," a barely-veiled
expression of official legislative hostility to Islam and to Muslim-American communities.
Elements of the Republican party have been hijacked,
at state and national levels, by a fringe group of anti-Muslim
activists who see Islam itself as a threat. While some leading
Republicans resist their agenda, others embrace it; Louisiana Governor and presidential hopeful Bobby Jindal
has falsely claimed that Muslims in the UK have set up "no-go zones"
that police refuse to enter and where sharia law prevails, and that
Muslim immigrants coming to the US are an "invasion" and "colonization."
In January, Warner Brothers released
American Sniper, an Iraq War film that portrays Iraqis as an undifferentiated mass of terrorists and terrorist sympathizers who can only be confronted with violence.
In one scene, the film's protagonist and namesake shoots an Iraqi woman
and child to death — an act the film tacitly approves by later showing
them as having carried a grenade. The morality of killing Iraqi
civilians is raised only so that the hero protagonist can shout down
whoever has had the gall to question his decisions by explaining that
those civilians were no innocents. The film went on to become one of the
most successful war films in American history, to be nominated for the
Academy Award for best picture, and to inspire a wave of death threats against Muslims and Arabs.
These sentiments are translating into physical violence. Thankfully,
so far most of that violence has targeted Islamic buildings rather than
people — a series of mosques and Islamic cemeteries have been vandalized — though even this is rightly perceived by Muslims as a threat of more deadly attacks.
In November, someone opened fire
on a California mosque as several worshippers prayed inside. In
December, a man in Kansas City wrote on his SUV that the Koran was a
"disease worse than Ebola," then drove it into a 15-year-old Muslim boy
in front of a local mosque, severing his legs and killing him. Then the Chapel Hill murders. And now this.
In late January, shortly before Al-Jumaili arrived in Dallas, a state legislator from a different part of Texas protested
the state capital's Muslim Capitol Day, meant to promote tolerance, by
demanding that any Muslim "publicly announce allegiance to America and
our laws" before entering her office. "We will see how long they stay in
my office," she said.
Her stunt likely seemed silly to many Americans — another far-flung
legislator saying something outlandish — but it was surely not perceived
as such by the 2.6 million Muslims in America, for whom such statements
are neither isolated nor fringe at all, but rather part of a concerted
and deliberate campaign to promote anti-Muslim fear and hatred that has
coincided with anti-Muslim violence.
Ahmed Al-Jumaili's murder should concern all Americans. Why doesn't it?
Zahara Al-Jumaili welcomes her husband to America (Photo via LaunchGood fundraiser for the Al-Jumaili family)
While M
uslim American circles are acutely aware
of the growing hostility and even danger facing them and their
families, this has received less attention in American media and
politics than one might expect.
The absence of concern may be easier to see if you consider, briefly,
how we might view these killings if the identities of the killers and
their victims were reversed.
If Islam had been the religion of the shooter rather than the religion of the victim, if
police suspected a motivation of Islamic extremism rather than a
possible motivation of anti-Muslim extremism, the murder would have been
enormous national news. But because the shooter was perhaps instead
motivated by extremist Islamophobia (again, at this point an unconfirmed
but widespread perception), and because it was the victim rather than
the killer who was Muslim, it hardly caused a blip.
In February, when a man known for railing against religion murdered
the three Muslim-American college students in Chapel Hill,
Muslim-Americans asked on social media why the crime was not considered
an act of terrorism. Had the killer been a Muslim who killed three
non-Muslim with an apparent religious motivation, it would have been
instantly labeled as terrorism - and there would surely be a beltway
political controversy if President Obama failed to denounce it as such
within hours. But because the religious identities were reversed in this
case, it did not "count" as terrorism, and the press has shown very
little interest in compelling a response from the White House.
In Dallas, the killer or killers' names are not yet known, and so
there are no clues to motivation beyond the larger climate of
anti-Muslim hate that has pervaded the US, including Dallas, and the
absence of any evidence suggesting a different motivation. All the same,
Muslim-Americans could not be blamed for asking the same questions they
asked after Chapel Hill. Why do so many Americans seem so unconcerned
by this? Would this wave of hate and violence be so ignored if it were
targeting Christians or Jews, and if not then why do our lives matter
less?
Those in America who truly hate Islam enough to use violence are a
tiny fringe. Still, the problem of Islamophobia in America is larger
than them, and it would be wrong to focus only on those most extreme
voices. So too would it be wrong to focus only on those in more powerful
positions, the Bill Mahers and Bobby Jindals who use their platforms to
push an Islamophobia that is less extreme but still encourages those
who take it a step further.
In many ways, the onus of responsibility lies with the larger
mainstream that neither promotes nor resists Islamophobia, that
immediately classifies the murder of three Muslim-American students as a
"parking dispute" and doesn't bother to even acknowledge the
dead-of-night murder of Al-Jumaili. The absence of concern for or even
knowledge about the rising wave of anti-Muslim hatred, deliberately or
not, enables it to proceed.
Americans have a national responsibility to protect their own. Even
if it turns out that Al-Jumaili's death had nothing to do with his
religion, it is at this point a very real possibility that he was
another Muslim targeted in the United States for this faith, and the
national shrug that has met this possibility — the fact that most
Americans have no idea this man was shot to death on Thursday night
while photographing his first snow — shows that we, as a country, are
not fulfilling that responsibility.
Credit to Max Fisher
The
Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Muhammad Abubakar Sa’ad, has urged Nigerian
Muslim women to support the current fight against corruption by
discouraging their husbands from engaging in corruption.
