In case some readers have formed the impression that this paper is inveterately anti-American and likes nothing better than to indulge in regular US-bashing, that simply is not true. It is American policies and the attitudes and actions of certain US groups and organizations that we often feel the need to criticize; not the United States itself.
There is much to admire about it: its belief in justice and fair play, its love of freedom, its admiration of hard work and achievement, its compassion for the underdog (in most cases), its belief that everyone in the country has the right to succeed (or fail) by his or her own honest efforts.
It is a good moment then, just as the US government is condemned, and rightly so, for its bias in the Middle East and its abysmal lack of action in driving the peace process to a conclusion, to halt and reflect on America’s better side. The death sentence imposed by a Texas court last week on a man who shot dead an Indian immigrant in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks provides just such an opportunity.
There has been a tidal wave of attacks on Muslims and as well as members of ethnic minorities in the US following Sept. 11, from murder, violence and attacks on mosques down to race hate mail and harassment. The Council on American Islamic Relations reports 1,717 such incidents in the past six months.
The scale of attacks led some Muslims in America and no small amount of others elsewhere to claim that the US is intrinsically anti-Muslim. That there are racists and bigots in the US, and a frightening level of institutionalized bigotry, there is no question. There have been some appalling stories of harassment of Muslims in there. Many foreign Muslim students, including a significant number of Saudis, found it intolerable and quit. But bigotry is not a US preserve. No human society, not even the most liberal, is without its bigots and racists. Those who believe that the US is inherently anti-Muslim are wrong; they allow their understandable anger at American policies to cloud their judgment about America itself. They are, in their own way, just as bigoted and ill- informed as the Americans they condemn.
Certainly, whatever the view on capital punishment, American justice clearly works. Murder has been treated as murder — and in President Bush’s home state of Texas moreover, so often derided by his detractors as hopelessly redneck. Indeed, it seems that the judge imposed the full rigor of the law purely because it was a racist murder. In a nation composed almost entirely of the sons and daughters of immigrants, the killer (still to be tried for killing a store owner and wounding a third man, both Pakistanis) had done the unforgivable: destroyed an immigrant family’s American dream of freedom and prosperity through hard work.
However, while admiring America’s justice system, one is forced to recognize an irony: It is a system built on a strong sense of justice on the domestic front, which does not extend abroad.Where is the anger at the perpetual injustices meted out to the Palestinians? Where is the determination that they must end? The Americans have not begun to ask themselves such questions.
