by, James Schmitz*
Following the murder of thirteen soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas, a right-wing chorus of bigots has concluded that the world’s one billion Muslims must be judged on the actions of an individual. These claims are absurd, ignorant, and distract from a serious discussion about mental health and workplace violence. 
A particularly ripe example of this anti-Muslim hysteria is Going Muslim by New York University business professor and Hoover Institution fellow Tunku Varadarajan. He argues that Nidal Hasan “went Muslim” the way other disgruntled workers “go postal.”
Varadarajan’s argument can be paraphrased by the following logical fallacy: Hassan killed because he was Muslim, thus violence is the essence of the Islamic faith (some dogs are black, thus all black things are dogs.)
Indeed, Going Muslim and pieces like it rail against imaginary enemies and make common cause bigotry. Americans aren’t willing to denounce women as psycho-killers, despite the examples of Lizzie Borden, Aileen Wuornos, and Elizabeth Bathory, because we know too many women. But most Americans know comparatively few Muslims.
The same holds true for Professor Varadarajan’s lack of knowledge about Islam. He presses that the religion was “founded on bellicose conquest, a contempt for infidels, and a [uniquely demanding] obligation for piety,” notwithstanding the fact that for five hundred years Islamic culture was centuries ahead of Christian Europe in science, medicine, poetry and commerce. One would hope that Professor Varadarajan, as an educator, could explain the tides of religion against the backdrop of modern history rather than simply exploiting popular prejudices.
Condolences are in order to the professor’s students, who pay good money to learn from him.
His ignorance of basic civil liberties is equally appalling. Varadarajan grants that “the appearance of equality . . . is a moral principle. But like all values, the appearance of equality is not infinite in its appeal—especially if it flies in the face of common sense and self-preservation.” But Americans do not grant Muslims civil rights out of public generosity, to be revoked if times change. Muslims’ freedom to worship, like our freedom to critique religion, is protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, perhaps the closest thing our secular government has to a sacred principle.
The “political correctness” which obliges us to tolerate law-abiding Muslims, and which so worries Professor Varadarajan and his ilk, is the Bill of Rights itself. The backlash of lynching he fears is only possible in an America that has completely abandoned the Rule of Law for vigilante mob justice. This slippery slope must level out well short of the apocalypse, but it’s still a useful rhetorical device to illustrate the supposed evils of over-tolerance.
Transforming the Fort Hood massacre into a political correctness issue, these hysterics like Varadarajan obscure an interesting legal debate. Federal authorities, including an FBI joint task force, investigated Hasan for several months, ultimately doing nothing—to our nation’s everlasting regret. Apparently the Army felt it had insufficient evidence to take disciplinary action against Hasan. This raises questions of civil law: what quantum of proof must a government agency show before firing someone in cases related to violent extremism? Should the government receive a heightened degree of qualified immunity in wrongful termination suits? (Government agencies already receive some immunity.) Was Hasan’s case simple bureaucratic incompetence, or are the existing statutes and case law inadequate to safeguard our federal agencies from workplace violence? These are difficult questions on which reasonable people may differ. Professor Varadarajan does address these questions briefly at the end of his piece, but only after spending 900 words intemperately denouncing Muslim Americans.
Ultimately these arguments are so sloppily reasoned and incendiary that it is difficult to accept them at face value. It’s hard to shake the feeling that Going Muslim is Professor Varadarajan’s ploy to promote himself on the Hoover Institution’s lecture program. If you’re willing to denounce the Muslim Menace and political correctness, people will pay to hear their prejudices defended. That Professor Varadarajan feels the need to advance his career on the backs of perhaps the most discriminated against minority in America today is pathetic, but he has the right to say what he likes so long as it poses no civic danger to others.
I urge all people of conscience, including the millions of law-abiding, patriotic American Muslims to exercise the same right and speak against his hateful diatribe.
James Schmitz is a lawyer living in New York City, and a volunteer at the New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, (CAIR) America’s largest Muslim civil rights organization.)
More articles by CAIR in NEEM Magazine:
