I have a Muslim friend who happens to work close to my place of work and so we often meet and, as he is as much a political junkie as I am, we inevitably talk about the presidential election. He is married and has two children. And he has been growing more and more despondent over the past few months. We met today and I was startled to hear him talk about how he feels and what his fears are for the future. Startled, because he is the quintessential optimist and because we both live in New York where religion is not usually an issue. Startled, moreover, because although I have followed the current wave of gratuitous Islamophobia on display in the GOP field (see my diary here) I had not realized how far things have gone and because, frankly, only Muslims know the many ways in which they feel threatened or degraded by what is occurring.
He told me that at his son’s school, some kid told his boy that “all Muslims should go to jail”. This after the hoopla surrounding Ahmed Mohamed’s clock that has become a landmark for the conservative xenophobic circus of politicians and media pundits. And that a teacher said something to the effect that it was “inevitable” that sooner or later the United States will have to simply nuke the Muslim world and “solve all these problems”.
“Where can we go,” my friend said, “how will I start again from scratch?” I realized with a shock that he has been thinking and quite seriously about leaving the country. Upon probing further, I realized he believes that a wave of Islamophobia is on the horizon. “If not this time,” he said, meaning the 2016 election, “then sometime soon” the country will elect someone in the mold of Trump or Palin and it will become intolerable for Muslims to live here.