Anti-Muslim Discrimination
Anti-Muslim discrimination has been a huge problem in America since the September 11 attack. Some authorities have likened the post 9/11 discrimination to that which was perpetuated against the Jews in the previous century. Since the world is rapidly becoming civilized, there is a need to look into ways of understanding and tolerating all religions. Unfortunately, it is worrying that discrimination has continued to increase in America; and is likely to continue increasing. It is hopeful that government authorities and other religions will change their view of Muslims as good people but not as terrorists.
There are a myriad of ways through which Muslims are discriminated. These include physical assault, employment realms and selective application of law. According to Nadine Epstein, the U.S government continually employs practices and policies based on such ethnicity (Epstein Web). Figure 1 shows economic charges based on Muslim faith. This has greatly stigmatized the Muslims as well as sidelined them from interacting freely with the other Americans. At the same time, there have been stringent measures to enforce equal treatment of all Americans, as enshrined in the constitution. In his article, in the Guardian, Townsend shows how anti-Muslim discrimination is on a global rise.
If Americans do not learn how to tolerate each other, misguided views of Islam are likely to worsen the discrimination situation. Already, there is massive data showing that discrimination against the Muslims has negatively affected their participation in the national economic agenda. Figure 2 shows a group of Muslims demonstrating following the post-9/11 discriminations. According to Coyle, understanding and accepting each other’s rights and freedoms of religion and culture will help the country to grow and make people more peaceful. Otherwise, there could be perennial demonstrations of Muslims as seen in the appendix. These demonstrations have negative effects in that the government is depicted at the world scene as a discriminatory.
The other issue concerns the rise of Muslim discrimination since the September 11 attacks. In spite of the fact that the President continues to make appeals for the respect of all religions, rates of discrimination have continued to rise. Figure 4 shows the discrimination against the Muslim students in the allocation of hostels. It shows, that following the attacks the greatest rates of decline in hostel allocation for Muslim students, was recorded in 2001 and increased towards 2010. In the same way, the Christian-Muslim crimes of hate increased in the same period, as seen in Figure 3. Studies and interviews conducted over the perceptions of Christians towards Muslims show that such perceptions were based on false information or generalization. According to Deane and Darryl, most of the terror recruits are from poor countries and have no education or anybody to look upon. These people then become targets of recruitment by people who want to use the Muslim religion and make the teachings from the Quran into their own words. In order to mitigate the discrimination, the law must be followed to the latter.
In conclusion, it has been evident that anti-Muslim discrimination has been a major problem since September 11 incidence. Thereafter, Muslims are under the discrimination in places of work as well as in government positions. This has led to protests from the Muslims and increased levels of discrimination. The conducted research revealed that the negative perceptive were based on uninformed decisions. In addition, the people that are used to perpetrate terrorism were uneducated and poor people from other countries who did not even have knowledge of Islam. In order to restore the pre-9/11 cohesion people must uphold the rule of law.
