(ThyBlackMan.com) Last night TLC premiered its brand new series All-American Muslim. The show follows five Lebanese families through their lives in Dearborn Michigan. The docu-series is a vast departure from a documentary I watched last week on Current TV.
The Vanguard documentary ”Islamophobia” depicted the rise of hatred toward Muslims in America and England by way of the English Defence League and smaller groups in America. Both organizations bent on proving Islam is an evil religion and those that subscribe to it, Muslims, are evil people keen on terrorism and destroying the very countries they call home.
Watching the documentary and the docu-series one controversial thought popped in my head. In this post 9/11 world, this world where a war on terror mostly means war against Islamic countries and Muslim people, is it a fair 
assessment to say Muslims in the West today are similar in their struggle and vilification to Jews in the East heading into World War II?
I know the question is a controversial one. But think about it. In post World War I Germany, Jews were looked at as the bars preventing a natural German’s success. They were seen as the leeches on Germany society. They were a problem that had to be gotten rid of. They were singled out by being forced to wear the star of David on their clothing. They were cloistered together, kept separate from the rest of German society in ghettos. And when Hitler’s power was cemented and he was ready for war he went into the ghettos where they were sequestered rounded them up and shipped them off — via cargo train — to 15,000 concentration camps in areas occupied by Germany where work was supposed to set them free.
Nothing so extreme has happened in the United States. But in every state in this country the Muslim community is readily identifiable. For the TLC show it just happens to be the largest Muslim community in the world outside of the Middle East; Dearborn Michigan. In every city the people know where the Muslim community is located and where Islam is practiced. In Chicago mosques populate the Southside. Farrakhan lives in Hyde Park blocks from President Obama’s home residence. There is a large community of Muslims in Murfreesboro, Tennessee and in Manhattan. These communities of Muslims have not been cloistered by U.S. government mandate. But if our leaders, bent on blood as some of them seem to be, wanted to round up the Muslims in this country and send them to interment camps like what was done with the Japanese in World War II, we would be no better than we were in 1942 and no better than Hitler was through all the years he allowed concentration camps like Auschwitz to run freely from the meager beginnings to the violent end of the Holocaust.
Since 9/11 the United States has been on a witch hunt to get even with those that wronged us and forever changed our naive since of security. It matters not that the 19 hijackers that actually wronged us died the same day as nearly three thousand of our country-men. It matters not that the self-proclaimed mastermind behind the attacks remains in a cell at Guantanamo Bay. It matters not that the man who so wanted to see the attacks happen and funded them was shot to death inside his own Pakistani home and buried at sea before anybody could say “Oh you shouldn’t do that.” The United States remains on a witch hunt to root out the elements of terrorism, when terrorists with Islamic leanings are as common as domestic terrorists and hate organizations that can’t stand having big government and a Black President.
This past March the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, New York Republican Representative Peter King, led the hearings on the radicalization of Muslims in America. The hearings, nearly 10 years after 9/11, and before the killing of Osama bin Laden came out of the shadows of the Fort Hood Massacre by Nidal Malik Hasan, the attempted underwear bombing by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the attempted Times Square bombing by Faisal Shahzad, the arrests of 5 Muslim-American men in Pakistan who allegedly wanted to wage holy war against U.S. troops, and let’s not forget “Jihad Jane” and her cohorts, Americans radicalized to commit terror around the world.
Yet these instances of plotted terror attacks are not as common as my list makes them seem. They do not happen everyday and many of the plots, like the foiled plot of the Colorado airport driver are stopped before they truly become serious threats. These instances of radicalized Muslims in America plotting against America are less common compared to the five families we met on TLC’s All-American Muslim. Shadia — the wild child — married a newly converted Muslim man. Her mother and father are traditional. Nawal and Nader are also very traditional; in dress and action. Nina Bazzy is Muslim but she is definitely all-American from her style of dress to her business ventures. Angela and Mike Jaffar also represent more of a modern-American family than they do anyone’s stereotypical image of Islam. And Fouad and Zaynab Zaban are somewhere in the middle; she traditional in her dress, they as a couple living their lives and raising their family. The common thread between these 5 families we’ve been introduced to is not that they are Muslim, or all follow Islam because clearly some are more liberal than others, the common thread is that they are families living in the same America that fears death at the hands of terrorists — foreign or domestic — as any other family living in America. If anything they should feel worse because the war directed at America, and the one we are in turn engaging in, is a direct attack on their faith, community and culture.
The five families in the TLC docu-series are not the infidels and devils that the English Defence League would have you believe in. The five families in the TLC docu-series are not the mass murderers who want to create a third world war into a massive jihad. The men and women behind the Muslim Community Center two blocks from ground zero are no different from the Christians who like to have a place to go in the YMCA or a Jewish community that finds solace in their synagogue.
Some of our warped perceptions of the Muslim community not only harm them but ourselves. For example, living in good old Florida there is a pastor by the name of Terry Jones. You may have heard of him. He likes to burn Koran’s. He did. Muslims in Afghanistan retaliated immediately killing American soldiers sent to fight for Terry Jones’s freedom to be a bigot. We cannot at once be a country that embraces the Arab world made of Muslims who worship Allah in Islam during their Arab Springs then at the same time be a country afraid of them governing themselves their own way.
We may not subscribe to an ideology as stringent as the Mein Kampf of the Third Reich but that doesn’t mean the growing islamophobia in this country isn’t just as bad. As TLC explores the positive attributes of Islam and Vanguard exposes the ugly sides of Americana and Britishness we should realize that terrorism is not an attribute or characteristic applicable to only one group, one minority or one sect. The English Defence League and Pam Geller and her legions of followers are just as capable of carrying out violence against Muslims as are Muslims capable of carrying out violence against Americans or the British.
As was said in All-American Muslim ”society evolves…it doesn’t stay the same.” Many of the families pointed out that if they are not talking about their faith, or aren’t wearing any identifying markers like hijab then people can’t readily tell they are Muslim. “In complete darkness we are all the same. It is only our knowledge and wisdom that separate us.” And it is only our ignorance that makes out act out in cruel retaliation toward a group of people of which the majority have not harmed us but wish us peace and love.
Do you think TLC’s All-American Muslim will help curb growing Islamophobia in America?
Staff Writer; Nikesha Leeper
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