On Sept. 17, 2001, President George W. Bush gave a speech at the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C. In this speech so soon after a tragedy, he said, “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace, they represent evil and war.”
Twelve years later, this is still something many Americans forget. Islam is not the problem. Just because someone looks like someone who is bad, or shares a religion with someone who is bad, does not mean that they are a bad person. We must respect people as people. Someone is not lesser because they call their God by the name of Allah. This is a country that does not believe in discrimination, yet we still see mainstream arguments that people who look like Arabs or Muslims should be singled out.
Recently, I was watching a documentary where at one point a man went to the home of a family of Iraqi immigrants. This is a family of American citizens. They fled Iraq due to terrible circumstances. Yet even today people will come up to them in the streets and call them terrorists. People will tell them to go back to their own country. Yet to them, their “own country” is the United States.
When they return to Iraq, they are seen as Americans, not as Iraqis. They have started life anew in a new country. In their new home. And the father of this family would explain to people that they were in fact American citizens. That they had American passports. Only then would some people start to treat him as a human being.
For some, it takes a piece of paper to treat someone as a human. This man being an American citizen did not make him a better person; it does not make him any different from who he was. Yet that was what it took to gain a stranger’s approval to even exist. This is only one example of what happens to the millions of Muslims who are also Americans.
We must all remember that a religion does not make a person. Regardless of faith, gender, race, creed or sexuality, a human being is a human being. It is wrong to characterize an entire community due to the actions of individuals in that community. I hope that all of us can understand why that is wrong. Christians do not want to be judged as not caring for children because of the actions of Fundamentalist Latter-day Saints in Texas who regularly abused minors. In the same way, Muslims do not want to be judged by the actions of extremists.
My hope in writing this is the same hope that George W. Bush had in giving his speech 12 years ago: treat each other with respect. We might have different religions, we might look different, we might speak differently, but that doesn’t matter. We are humans. We owe it to ourselves to treat others as humans.
I leave you with more words from President George W. Bush.
“Those who feel like they can intimidate our fellow citizens to take out their anger don’t represent the best of America. They represent the worst of humankind. And they should be ashamed of that kind of behavior.”
Jay Nogami is a senior public policy leadership major from Denver, Colo.
