Twitter
Facebook
Reddit
Digg
Tell us what you think!Send a letter to the editor about this or any other article in The Maine Campus.
The Dec. 1 column in The Maine Campus by Ryan Campbell regarding monitoring of Muslims in America (“Swelling scrutiny for Muslim Americans warranted,” Dec. 1, 2011) caught my attention.
Campbell,wrote while security measures put in place to safeguard against another terrorist attack focus heavily on Muslims, “this type of surveillance is constitutional, and it’s not discriminatory at all.” What he fails to consider is if these practices are moral, or if they make us any safer.
One of Campbell’s most odious statement comes in his fourth paragraph, when he says even if Muslims are being singled out, “those who are not conspiring or contributing to terrorism shouldn’t worry and should let police and other officials do their jobs.”
The “if-you’re-not-doing-anything-wrong, you-have-nothing-to-worry-about” argument is often cited by supporters of increased state security power, to the great dismay of civil libertarians like me.
We believe statements like this go against the very nature of our constitution, stripping away protections granted to us in the Bill of Rights and leaving the door open to greater restrictions on privacy and individual liberty — to say nothing of the negative effects that racial and religious profiling have on fostering a sense of common cause in our melting-pot nation.
Campbell makes the argument that “[i]t’s no secret Muslim individuals have attempted attacks on U.S. soil,” and asserts that this makes profiling legitimate. After all, if “Catholics and atheists carried out the attacks, police and intelligence officers would investigate those groups.”
Surely I must have missed the news on the intense surveillance these two groups were subjected to after the Oklahoma City bombings — Timothy McVeigh, after all, was raised a Catholic but stated in a 2001 book that science was his religion. The FBI should have started watching Catholics, agnostics and scientists, just to be sure, right?
Supporters of American foreign policy often like to look outside our country to find the cause of our problems when all of us might benefit from looking inward.
It is taboo to consider wars of aggression in the Middle East, seemingly unconditional support for the state of Israel and the maintenance of hundreds of military bases in scores of foreign countries as possible factors in creating anti-American sentiment around the globe.
We believe we are an exception among the nations of the world, justified in our every action because we are a democratic republic. Our former president labeled this a War On Terror yet refused to negotiate peace — even though most wars end in a peace treaty, something that, by definition, cannot be unilateral.
Perhaps this was because the security elite in our corporate and governmental structures won’t stand for having their positions diminished.
We must ask ourselves: is this right? Can we really solve the problem of terrorism, fueled in part by the growth of the security state, by increasing the power of the very apparatus that breeds anti-American sentiment in foreign countries?
Can we continue to assume that because we are American, we are correct, while simultaneously giving up the civil liberties that define us?
What does it mean to “move forward by making rational decisions”? Does it mean accepting our Muslim friends, classmates and neighbors as Americans like anyone else, or continuing to eye them with suspicion, treating them as second-class Americans?
Campbell is correct in stating that our country’s relationship with Muslims changed for the worse on Sept. 11, 2001. We became a nation driven by fear on that day. It’s not too late to change both.
Michael Emery is a fourth-year sociology student.
