Saturday, August 9, 2014

If the first thing you ask a Muslim woman is if she's American, you might be a bigot

my oped in response to the Heritage Foundation event, published in The Guardian on June 18th, 2014 

It took one American Muslim law student, Saba Ahmed, making one mild criticism during a conservative panel discussion of Benghazi, to get people foaming at the mouth at an event co-hosted by a conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation.
What could she have said to deserve an upbraiding from the stage? "We portray Islam and all Muslims as bad, but there’s 1.8bn followers of Islam. We have 8 million-plus Muslim Americans in this country and I don’t see them represented here." 
Watching the video of the panelists respond to Ahmed on Monday afternoon, you can almost hear the wheels turning in their heads: How dare this young American Muslim law student – in a hijab, no less – talk back to us? How out-of-line for her to assert that the majority of Muslims in the world are peaceful people and that society should not use a broad brush to demonize an entire faith based on the acts of a very tiny minority! Read more


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