Opinion: Two cheers for the police
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Nour Merza is a freelance writer and poet whose family’s globe-trotting tendencies have allowed her writing to be influenced by places as varied as Saudi Arabia, Chicago, Los Angeles and the United Arab Emirates. In between reading, writing and friends, she enjoys learning foreign languages. She is currently studying mass communication and international relations at the American University of Sharjah. Here, she responds to an article in The Times. If you would like to respond to a recent Times article, editorial or Op-Ed in our Blowback forum, here are our FAQs and submission policy.
Self-revision has historically been a sign of America’s strength. Last week, the world had an opportunity to see this process in action. As an American Muslim living outside the United States, I join the L.A. Times editorial board in applauding the Los Angeles Police Department‘s decision to scrap its ill-advised plan to ‘map’ the Muslim community in Los Angeles. I also applaud the LAPD for its cooperation with national organizations, including the Muslim Public Affairs Council and the American Civil Liberties Union, in coming to this enlightened decision.
Considering today’s highly-charged social and political atmosphere, few things could have done more to harm U.S. intentions at home and abroad. If America had allowed this not-so-discrete form of religious profiling to pass, it would have done nothing but isolate its Muslim youth and further tarnish its already sore international reputation.
Los Angeles has always been a beacon of American multiculturalism. Growing up there, I remember how the city’s diversity made it very easy to feel accepted — even as a Muslim after the 9/11 attacks. It is partly because of this all-embracing atmosphere that the Muslim community, particularly its youth, has been able to integrate so well into American society. Go to your local mosque on Fridays and you’ll see an average-looking bunch of Americans — skater boys, fashion divas (yes, even veiled ones) and perhaps a nerd or two.
But an initiative like the mapping project would have implied that the presence of American Muslims is a threat to the greater community. Muslims in the United States, and I again stress their youth, feel betrayed and isolated by the rejection of the community they are proud to be a part of. Instead of inadvertently humiliating them, governmental institutions should foster closer ties with their local Muslim populations. Positive engagement with Muslim Americans will get America much further in combating terrorism than any mapping program might.
In addition to undermining American interests domestically, the Muslim mapping project also would have hurt America’s international reputation. Living in Dubai, one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world, I am constantly bombarded with varied opinions that express an intense love-hate relationship with the United States. People recognize America’s historic promotion of valued democratic ideals like freedom and equality, but they are repulsed by what they feel is a blatant contradiction of those ideals in the country’s current political environment.
This new ‘anti-terrorism’ initiative would have been explicit proof in the eyes of Islamic extremists that America is on a crusade against the Muslim world. If Americans are willing to treat their own countrymen as criminal threats solely on the basis of religious belief, the extremists would have argued to Middle Eastern Muslims, what will they do to us? The last thing the United States needs to do is validate the views of the very people we are trying to fight in the war on terror.
This is a time for America to build bridges, not dig ditches between itself, its own citizens and the rest of the world. America has its problems — we are all intimately acquainted with this fact. But there is another side to America that much of the world, and many Americans, seem to believe is now strictly in the past. By putting aside the Muslim mapping plan, the LAPD and the people of Los Angeles have demonstrated that this is not the case. America still holds tightly to its values of freedom and civil liberty — especially in the face of paranoid prejudice. I hope that this experience can be one of many future examples of American self-revision that lead the U.S. back to its historically intended role as living, breathing proof that the respect of our rights and the rights of others can create a progressive, harmonious society.