> Yet, even in the early parts of the 2000s, an Muslim cab driver in New York would willingly sell a ride to a Jewish passenger, and a Jewish landlord would willingly rent a space to a Muslim renter.
In the early parts of the 2000s, Muslims (and people who had outward appearance that ignorant people associated falsely with Islam, often Sikhs) were targeted in a wave of hate crimes across the US, as well as fairly arbitrary acts by government, with very little public opposition.
(Largely, this was triggered by an act which itself was something of the antithesis of love and tolerance, though it was directed at people who had nothing to do with it.)
Fixating on an uptick in the occurrence of a low probability event (hate crimes) is missing the forest for the trees. It’s like analyzing the performance of a website under a major DDOS and fixating on the fact that 99th percentile response times went up, while ignoring that the site stayed up. It’s sloppy analysis.
America’s domestic response to 9/11 was nothing short of amazing. Had Muslims killed 3,000 people in India in a similar attack, Muslims would have been driven out of their homes en masse. You would be able to see the effects of that on aggregate statistics such as income, health, wealth, etc. 9/11 had no effect on the fact that American Muslims are among the most affluent groups in America, much more so than white Christians (which is an achievement unmatched in pretty much any other country).
As a brown guy with a Muslim name who moved to the south in 2002, I didn’t even notice any anti-Muslim reaction. What I noticed was there were suddenly all these movies about civil liberties, and the TSA was conspicuously searching white women at the security line. (Contrast with say Japan or China, where to this day I have a nice airport lady follow me around before boarding.) That is of course not to say there wasn’t none. But when shit goes truly goes sideways for a minority in a country everyone notices it.
Yes. This is a strength of our country. It's very weird that conservatives have a hard time capitalizing on it, and instead seem intent on legitimatizing the debate over whether it's a good thing at all.
In the early parts of the 2000s, Muslims (and people who had outward appearance that ignorant people associated falsely with Islam, often Sikhs) were targeted in a wave of hate crimes across the US, as well as fairly arbitrary acts by government, with very little public opposition.
(Largely, this was triggered by an act which itself was something of the antithesis of love and tolerance, though it was directed at people who had nothing to do with it.)