Objectify This

Recently I was listening to this episode of This American Life (Act Two, to be precise) and realized that the American Muslim community is experiencing a frightening witch hunt.

In short, Masan Azbahi  was an Obama campaign liaison to Chicago’s Muslim community until he was accused of being a terrorist.

Why? Because he had once served on the board of an investment fund with Jamal Said, an imam who was later named, along with the rest of the Muslim leaders in Chicago, as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in a case that ended in a mistrial.

Ironically, the newspaper that drew attention to the unsubstantiated rumors about Said’s support for Hamas was the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ is owned by the Dow Jones corporation, which also has ties to the investment fund that both men served on.

Check out Azbahi’s complete story here. In the meantime, though, we have to ask ourselves how we got to this stage where we conduct witchhunts against religious groups. This is McCarthyism; it’s anti-Semitism (literally, a semite is a person who speaks a middle=eastern language); it’s objectification and it’s obviously wrong.

At the end of Act Two, Ira Glass adds that after Azbahi resigned from the Obama campaign to avoid besmirching Obama’s message of change, his replacement faced similar accusations of ties to terrorism.

“Fight in the cause of Allah those who fight you, but do not transgress limits; for Allah loves not transgressors,”instructs the Koran (chapter two, line 190).  Sometimes I think that people forget that Muslims are also Christians– in the sense that they believe that Jesus Christ was a prophet and revere his teachings, which are also in the Koran.  Let’s not make religious extremism our everyday policy.