Muslims Brace for Reaction to Bombing

The phrases were sprinkled in the evening television reports about U.S. citizens killed in a truck bombing in Saudi Arabia, and Shabbir Mansuri’s heart sank when he heard them.

Once again, reporters were referring to “Muslim militants,” “Muslim terrorists,” as if the Muslim world and violence were inalterably paired.

His 16-year-old daughter, watching television with him on Tuesday night, heard the innuendo as well.

“Here we go again, Daddy,” she said.

As a Muslim who has lived in the United States for 27 years, Mansuri is all too familiar with the stereotypes. The memories are still painfully keen of the vitriolic calls and the bomb threat he received amid initial, erroneous reports that tied the Oklahoma City federal building bombing to Middle Eastern terrorists.

Tuesday’s bombing, which killed 19 Americans near Dhahran, has rekindled concerns of terrorist stereotyping in Orange County’s Islamic community.

An estimated 100,000 or more Muslims live in Orange County, their ancestral roots in Africa, Asia and Europe, local Islamic leaders say. Many have not forgotten how swiftly the specter of “Muslim terrorists” was blamed for the deaths of 168 in Oklahoma City, how quick people were to place blame and to link the violence with Islam.

“In my 25-plus years of living in California, that’s the first time I felt I was in a Christian country, the first time, the whole experience told me: ‘You’re not part of the equation here,’ ” said Mansuri, founding director of the Council on Islamic Education in Fountain Valley.

Mansuri recalls how, after Timothy J. McVeigh was arrested for the Oklahoma City bombing, his daughter asked him, “Why is Timothy McVeigh not called a Christian terrorist?”

And when the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Mansuri mused, “Was that a Christian bomb? Of course not.”

By contrast, the stereotyping of Muslims as terrorists implies that religion is responsible, he said.

News reports of this week’s bombing recalled how five Americans were killed on Nov. 13 in a bombing at a U.S.-run training center of the Saudi National Guard. Four Saudi citizens were beheaded for that bombing by Saudi authorities last month, provoking threats against Americans.

Mansuri described his horror in hearing about the latest bombing.

“The bombing itself is a horrendous act,” he said. “It’s against all principles of Islam.”

That reaction was echoed Wednesday by other leaders in Orange County’s Islamic community.

“We strongly condemn it. It is a terrorist act, which is horrible, a criminal act,” said Muzammil Siddiqi, director of the Islamic Society of Orange County and teacher of Islam and world religions at Cal State Fullerton.

Siddiqi also cautioned against stereotypes.

“There are wrongdoers in every country and every culture,” he said. “This is a criminal act.”

Haitham A. Bundakji, president of the Islamic Society of Orange County, spoke out firmly against this week’s bombing.

“Islam, in its teaching, is totally against this kind of act,” Bundakji said. “I pray to God that these people will be apprehended and punished for it.”

He also recalled the Oklahoma City bombing as evidence of the bruising power of what he called the “terrorist stereotype.”

“Within minutes, just minutes, after the bombing incident, we had bomb threats and people calling to threaten our families and children,” he said. “It’s a very, very painful experience. Any time anything happens anywhere in the world, some people try to blame us.”

Bundakji also noted the use of cartoonish Middle Eastern terrorists as Hollywood’s new favorite villains, filling the void left in international story lines with the end of the Cold War. Films like “Executive Decision” and “True Lies” fuel hatred of Muslims and other peoples of the Middle East, he said.

“There are 1.4 billion Islamic people in our world, and I assure you these terrorists are a very small segment of that population,” he said. “It’s so sad, so outrageous. It’s a small world; we all need each other. We are all children of God.”