Trouble in My 'Hood: The Muslim question in Brooklyn

National Review, April 7, 2003 by Rod Dreher

If it's too dangerous for Arab Christians to speak out against Islamist neighbors, what is it like for dissenting Muslims? A senior terrorism analyst with The Investigative Project, which specializes in monitoring Islamic radicalism, insists that Muslims of goodwill believe, with reason, that standing up to Islamist thugs will get them killed. "Fundamentalists are the ones who have the drive. For non- fundamentalists, speaking out against them is not worth their life," explains TIP's Evan Kohlmann.

Kohlmann says that Islamic radicals get away with their activities both by stifling dissent within Muslim communities and by "turning any criticism into a civil-rights and a humanitarian issue. They know that by appealing to our sense of diversity and humanity, they evade scrutiny." Indeed, many non-Muslims in the liberal neighborhoods flanking the al-Farooq mosque would consider it racist and McCarthyite to question the loyalty of their Muslim neighbors.

Because the U.S. government does not collect census data on issues pertaining to religion, there is no way to know precisely how many Muslims live in New York City. Two years ago, Columbia University released a study estimating a total of 600,000, and noted that the number of mosques in the city had risen from 10 in 1970 to over 100. Those mosque numbers indicate a remarkable influx of Muslims in the past three decades, all of them from the Third World. Most behave as all immigrant groups historically have, settling into poor and working- class ethnic enclaves throughout the city -- which in turn can become breeding grounds for radicalism.

Mansoor Ijaz, an American-born, New York-based consultant of Pakistani descent, says that most Muslims in America want nothing to do with Islamic radicalism. Those Muslim communities most open to radical appeals are like Brooklyn's: filled with God-fearing, working-class immigrants struggling to make it in a strange land where they don't speak the language, and who feel they are discriminated against. They get angry, and are easily manipulated by the radicals who run some of these mosques.

"We shouldn't blame the immigrants. They're basically shut inside a room where all the walls are caving in on them at the same time," Ijaz says. "The real disease exists in those people that run these mosques and religious institutions."

Of course, New Yorkers are used to living among people different from themselves. But Muslims are the only New Yorkers whose co-religionists murdered 3,000 of us in the name of a radical version of their faith -- a version that is preached right here in Brooklyn. There is apparently no outcry from our neighborhood's Muslims against the extremists among them. There is little evidence indicating that they value American citizenship over their Old World hatreds. And the al-Farooq mosque remains in the headlines as an Islamofascist icon. You can hardly blame people for being suspicious.

And that suspicion breeds fear, alienation, and anger -- on all sides. Brooklyn's Muslims wonder whether their Jewish and Christian neighbors would support putting them in detention camps in the event of another 9/11. Non-Muslims may wonder -- no, do wonder -- whether their Muslim neighbors are giving money and moral support to evil men who want to kill them. You walk down the street these days thinking: What's under that man's coat? What's behind that shopkeeper's smile? Is that hijab- wearing woman just another mom on the playground, or does she believe my kid and I are infidel scum who deserve to die? Am I being paranoid, or merely streetwise? It's a rotten way to have to live.