Want to do something good?
We can all help preempt the on-coming backlash against innocent Muslims in our own country and abroad. Many of us have stated on other threads that we are in contact with Muslims on FB, etc. We can let them know that we find this type of violence against them abhorrent and unacceptable, just as many of them have denounced the Paris attack to us.
Imagine that you’re a Muslim man, or a man that many people in a Western country would mistake for being Muslim––a Sikh, a Syrian Christian, a Hindu from India. You live in London or Paris or Queens with a wife and a ten-year-old child. If you heard that Islamist radicals had just carried out an attack on your city, or your country, or even in another country, would you worry about a backlash?
Would you worry a bit putting your child on the bus to school the next day?
If you were a Muslim or a Sikh or a Christian of Syrian descent in Paris or London or Queens, sitting up at your computer after your wife and child had gone to bed, wouldn’t it make you feel a bit more safe, and experience a little bit less dread, if your Twitter stream and RSS feeds included a dozen people––a political leader, a few journalists, a blogger, six or seven everyday folks you follow––trying to inculcate the norm that it’s wrong and irrational and discrediting to harm or hate people like you?
We can all give comfort to these total innocents at a moment of understandable anxiety, and perhaps make it less likely that they will be targeted. Urging people against turning their anger against innocent people is a serious priority. It is a reasonable, pragmatic, decent act.
That does help millions feel a little bit less dread.