c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Almost without fail, whenever a terrorist strikes _ especially one of the Muslim flavor _ a backlash against innocent Arab and Muslim citizens follows.

It happened after the Oklahoma City bombing, and it resulted in a miscarriage by a pregnant Muslim woman whose home was attacked.

It happened after the Sept. 11 attacks, and it included a Sikh American (who wears a turban but is not Muslim) being shot to death in Arizona.

It happened in Britain after the July 7 train bombings, and Muslims in Britain have reported more than 500 percent increase in hate-related incidents since those attacks.

The London backlash has even reached American shores: the Council on American-Islamic Relations has reported that a Muslim woman in Virginia _ eight months pregnant _ was physically and verbally attacked by three men, calling her a “terrorist b*tch.”

It is truly sad and unfortunate. The overwhelming majority of Muslims are nonviolent, and they reject the sort of violence and terror that is being committed in their name. They do not espouse the hateful and violent views of al-Qaida and similar extremist groups. Why, then, are they victimized and terrorized long after the deafening blast of the bomb and the choking haze of the smoke has gone away?

The only explanation I can muster is ignorance. Plain and simple ignorance.

And it truly is ignorant _ to physically and verbally attack a pregnant Muslim woman in Virginia taking a morning walk, who has nothing to do with any act of terror, makes no rational sense. It is a stain on our national fabric, and those who perpetrate hate crimes against their fellow citizens of any race, creed or faith should be punished. Yet, the best way to rid our country of this scourge is to identify and address its root causes.

When we hear of terrorist attacks against innocent civilians overseas, our initial reaction is one of shock and sadness, which rapidly turns to anger. at the senseless loss of life at the hands of vicious murderers.

Yet, more fundamentally, the aftermath of a terrorist attack brings fear and a sense of loss of control and security. No one likes to feel afraid every day; no one likes to lose control. The tremendous anxiety this brings leads many to become angry, and for a tiny minority, a way to discharge this anger _ and perhaps gain some semblance of control _ is to attack the symbol of their source of anger.

That symbol comes in the form of a community mosque, or Muslim woman wearing a headscarf, or a Muslim man wearing a skull cap. Yet, what does assaulting an innocent Muslim fellow citizen or vandalizing the neighborhood mosque accomplish? Does calling a Muslim woman a “terrorist b*tch” make us any safer from subsequent terrorist attacks? Does throwing a rock into the window of a mosque deter a would-be terrorist from carrying out his next attack? Does beating a Muslim American enhance our national security? Absolutely not.

All it accomplishes is to tear at the fabric of the unity of our country, and if the unity of our people is destroyed, then haven’t the terrorists already won? It is an unholy logic, and it must be defeated.

The best way to do defeat it is to increase the dialogue between Muslim and non-Muslim America. This dialogue must be done face-to-face, over coffee and cake, or hot dogs and hamburgers, or pizza and ice cream. The dialogue must occur at cookouts and picnics, block parties and barbecues, golf outings and baseball games.

When this dialogue occurs, non-Muslim Americans will realize that their Muslim neighbors are not much different than they are, and ignorance will decrease as a result. When that happens, not only will we become better as a people, but our country will become better as well, because the logic of backlash will become as unholy as the act of terror that spawned it in the first place.

KRE/JL END HASSABALLA

(Hesham A. Hassaballa is a Chicago physician and columnist for Beliefnet. His forthcoming book, the “Beliefnet Guide to Islam,” will be published by Doubleday in 2006. You can read his blog at: http://www.hassaballa.org.)

Editors: Note language in 5th and 11th graphs