We have been down this road before. It’s always the same road, and as such, it always leads to the same place, a dangerous and unstable place. Along this newly paved road, the Muslim has become the new Communist in the West, but this time around the ‘enemy’ is ostensibly easier to define, easier to pick out of a crowd, easier to hate, and easier to target.

To some, identifying the ‘enemy’ might seem as easy as taking note of skin color, accents, facial features commonly attributed to people hailing from Arab nations, that swarthiness that once had Western women swooning, dress, and cultural mannerisms. Where women are concerned, the headscarf is a dead giveaway.

The point is that the masses generally do not know where to direct their hate, and are forced to rely on misperceptions that generally based on physical appearance and cultural differences. I recall once, years ago, when things were “better” and when 9/11 was unthinkable, I was walking along a street in St. Petersburg, Russia, with a group of friends, among them an Armenian of the Catholic faith. We were distracted by the screams of an elderly woman from across the street, as she made her way hurriedly, finger poised in a wag of anger, to our group on the opposite side of the street. Her message was directed at my Armenian acquaintance, whom she had taken for a Jew and whom she accused of being behind all of Russia’s problems. More than this, though, she was looking around and summoning passersby to her cause, hoping to turn the incident into one of violence – an easy thing to do in modern-day Russia, where anyone who does not enjoy the traditional White Russian look is a target for extremists, or law-enforcement (the latter, particularly if they are from Russia’s volatile Caucasus). Nothing came of the incident with the elderly woman, largely because the unfortunate young Armenian simply smiled sympathetically and walked on, saying later: “They don’t even know who to hate.”

We should have realized how far along this dubious road we had come when the issue of textiles became such an urgent one. The debate surrounding both successful and failed attempts to ban the wearing of Muslim headscarves in public should have been a signal that this has gone too far; instead, we allow this debate to take a front-row seat in the global theater of the absurd.

Uncertainty, All Around

While once migration to a Western country might have seemed a dream come true for those Muslims who emigrated for reasons of political asylum or the perceived chance of greater opportunities, now there is much to fear, and every step taken is done with the uncertainly that comes with being made to feel like a terrorism suspect and wondering if their every move is being monitored by government agencies (or their neighbors). Certainly, this has made many Muslims, particularly in the US, the most upstanding American citizens: after all, one wrong move, one unpaid parking ticket, one unfortunate correspondence back home, could earn them the unwanted attention of national security forces.

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