The title says it all. Sometimes you just have to wonder what is going on in people's minds … or what is not going on in there. State Department's love affair with Islamists The latest example is a State Department booklet issued in March titled “Being Muslim in America.” The 64-page booklet seeks to arm consular officers and diplomats with information they can take to Muslims around the world to rebut slanders about US “persecution” of Muslims. The booklet deluges readers with color pictures, statistical tables and individual profiles in an effort to show the world that American Muslims are a success story, noting that they have become entrepreneurs, professional athletes, entertainers, doctors, soldiers, firefighters, politicians, fashion designers and pianists. The booklet aims “to disabuse people of wildly false myths of the United States – that `Muslims are repressed, marginalized,` fill in the blanks,” said Michael Friedman, division chief of print publications with the State Department`s Bureau of International Information Programs. The government has not produced similar booklets for any other faith, Friedman said. With limited funding available, the decision to produce a publication on American Muslims came because “the struggle against Islamic terrorism is a struggle for hearts and minds in the Muslim world.” Unfortunately, the booklet perpetuates the mythology that American Muslims are united in the belief that law enforcement and the public are willing to flout innocent Muslims` civil rights post-September 11, describing American Muslim reactions to the attacks as follows: “A new, truly American Islam is emerging, shaped by American freedoms, but also by the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks – planned and executed by non-Americans – [which] raised suspicions among other Americans whose immediate responses, racial profiling among them, triggered in return a measure of Muslim-American alienation.” This is an extremely tendentious, even intellectually dishonest, description. From reading it, one would have no idea that there have been numerous convictions and guilty pleas on terrorism-related charges since September 11 that involved Muslims living in the United States. This includes terrorist plots to attack the military base at Fort Dix, New Jersey, to create a terrorist training camp in Bly, Oregon and to attack US military and Jewish targets in California.
