After 9/11 the United States has changed a lot from what it used to be –and not just that, the America that emerged out of the attacks on the World Trade Center has brought radical changes in the outer world too! Looking at the pre 9/11 American society, we would see a population that actually didn’t bother about what religion you followed –with a few expected exceptions. Now whether it is justified or not, that belief has been replaced by a certain level of discrimination in the recent years.
People who would usually weigh a person through his or her personality and nature now go for the outer appearance first, when choosing who to talk to among two strangers a young American would cancel out a person with a beard or Middle Eastern features. I am not saying that’s what always happens but it is true that such bigotry was seen rarely in the older days. This ideology has become quite deep rooted in the past few years –to the level that many of the opinion formers, bureaucrats, politicians and obviously think tanks label the increased Muslim population as a threat to the American national security.
And yes, the numbers have always been growing and are expected to grow as well; according to a survey conducted by The Pew Foundation on Religious and Public Life by the year 2030 the number of Muslims in USA will go up from a small minority of 2.6 million in 2010 to a whopping 6.2 million. It further provides that the number of new immigrants will continue to play an important role in the growth of the Muslim population in the country.
Being as much as 6.2 million in number is certainly a strong statement in itself but for some of the non Muslim natives of USA, this is surprisingly an alarm bell. Looking at what different groups of people have had to say about this; one can be sure that the ones who prefer to discriminate would want an end to this. Only recently a Danish psychologist Nicholai Sennels gave his rather biased opinion about Muslims and the apparent threat that Muslim immigrants impose to the west. In his book, he purports that the religious and cultural differences between the west and Muslims are so great that one should not even try to make them work together –according to him:
“The most compassionate thing we can do for Americans is to bring a halt to the immigration of Muslims into the U.S.”
This and a number of other such bigots who do not believe in coexistence have not only made it tough for the ordinary Muslims to be motivated towards improving the standards, it has also elevated the reservations that ordinary non Muslims have in their minds due to a handful of terrorists among Muslims.
The Muslim population of the world has now reached around 2.2 billion, and to me the issue is not whether Muslim immigration can cause problems because the immigration is something that is bound to happen. It is something that has to be considered normal; there is no other way around it! If you advocate that they can stop more than one fourth of the world’s population to enter half of the world, and then be justified in it; then you have never been more wrong. With the number of discriminatory elements increasing in the western society the problem is that normal/ordinary Muslims who go there for a living will have to face even more tough times.
The idea of coexistence needs to be reinforced among the people of the west and of course the Muslims who believe otherwise. The world is a global village now; those times are gone when two different ideologies could exist in their separate worlds without intermingling at any level. Whether the extremists are there in the form of Muslim militants or the non Muslim bigots; they all need to go for the world’s own good!
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