Regarding Steven Stalinsky’s “Welcome to Dearborn, America’s Jihad Capital” (Cross Country, Feb. 3): It is wrong to characterize the community of Dearborn, Mich., as a “jihad capital” due to the actions of a few. Doing so risks fueling dehumanization, marginalization and radicalization.
Amid the Gaza war, an escalating culture of demonization is fueling alarming increases in anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish incidents. We shouldn’t underestimate how dehumanization can scale into much broader hate and violence.
I write this having just returned from Srebrenica, where ordinary people became complicit in the worst European genocide since World War II. My leadership of the first Islamic religious delegation to Auschwitz, a few hundred miles north, also reminds me that humanity’s darkest atrocities were perpetrated by “ordinary” individuals.
Muslims and Jews must not fall into the trap of “otherizing” one another. That’s why I encourage Dearborn’s Muslims not to react to hate with hate—doing so only exacerbates the us-versus-them mindset dividing our societies.
Instead, we must celebrate diversity. Muslims in Michigan aren’t extremists. They serve in the U.S. military, judiciary and legislatures. They are entrepreneurs and workers, and even comprised a significant portion of the initial workforce at the Ford factory.
We must weave such diverse strands of human experience into the fabric of media narratives in an authentic way. Doing so would inevitably foster empathy and prove that while America doesn’t have a “jihad capital,” it does have the ability to tackle hate at its roots.
This article was originally published in The Wall Street Journal Read here.
