Walking a Tightrope

Given the New Jersey incident, we can no longer ignore that militant Muslims reside in the United States, so how do we detect them from non-militant ones?
The thwarted attack by Muslim youths on Fort Dix where young army recruits train, when they hoped to kill as many American soldiers as possible before getting themselves killed, should serve as a warning shot across America’s bow. Although the result was not deadly like 9/11, the incident points to the dilemma Americans must now face: neutralize militant Muslims, citizens or non-citizens, while protecting the rights of not-militant ones. Respecting an individual’s rights is as much a part of our psyche diet as food is to our body, but protecting ones self is paramount to living. There lies a dilemma.
These six Muslim youths, three illegal immigrants, were unconnected to any militant organization such as al Qaeda. One youth was a pizza employee making frequent deliveries to the Fort Dix soldiers. He and other Muslims planned to infiltrate the base delivering pizzas. What could be more American than youths and pizzas, non threatening to the unsuspecting eye?
These Muslims fed their hatred of the United States and their dream of eternal glory in a jihadists’ heaven with internet replays of the murder of U.S. Marines in Lebanon, U.S. soldiers in Saudi Arabia and sailors on the U.S. Cole; pumping themselves up watching images of black hooded jihadists stabbing the air above their heads with Ak-47s, shouting, “Allahu Akbar.”
Developing from a rudimentary conspiracy, the thwarted attack was a grass roots one, which should bristle the hairs on the back of our necks, because if there is one grass roots cell with a religious mandate to murder, then we can bet our last dollar there are more such cells, illegal or legal residents, intent upon killing us, be they rudimentary or well organized, funded ones. Suicide bombers on a public bus, in the grandstands at a sporting event, a car bomb driven into a schoolyard at recess--the means and methods to get a grass roots or organized plot off the ground are readily available.
Given that all the mass bloodshed--American, English, Spanish--spilled by Arabs who are Muslim, Timothy McVey the exception, it is not illogical to believe that future blood shedding will be by Arabs who are Muslims.. So, what is a body to do if he/she does not want to be surrounded by dead bodies or worst yet, be one?
Should we round up all Arab Muslims and sequester them in an interment camp such as with the Japanese during WWII; send them back to their native soil like we did the Chinese Coolies when they seemed too troublesome; massacre them like the Seventh Calvary slaughter of Sioux at Wounded Knee Creek? Of course not, we have come too far as a people to do that.
Would the plotting to murder us cease if we stopped giving carte blanche to Israeli apartheid in Palestine and become a fair broker in the Middle East, stop sending billions of dollars to the Israeli government until they pull back to the pre 1967 Palestinian borders; pull our troops out of Iraq and Saudi Arabia. As wise and humanitarian as those moves might be, they are not going to happen with our current outlook. I simply don’t know or have not heard how we respect others creed and color while weeding out the plotting Muslim murderers, Arab or otherwise, from those Muslims who wish us no harm.
Where is the magic mirror, whose image will show us a way? The answer could be reflected in Islam itself. Islam controls militant Muslims’ every waking hour, controls their dreams, their goals. The life blood of this control flows in the mosques across this country. There, connections are made to plotters, paths to a jihadists’ heaven laid out, not in every mosque or madrassas, but in enough to be alarming. Hopefully, the FBI has these hotbeds under surveillance. A way, for lack of better way, a glimpse to neutralizing militant Muslims, may be with the less radical Muslims and their mosques.
Some of us were raised as Christians, so we are linked by origin to Christian fundamentalists intent on militancy, feeling a touch of understanding for them, enough not to cry foul when they badger single pregnant mothers, torment gays and impose their beliefs upon school children; some of us are of the Jewish faith who, because of common ground, tolerate the ultra orthodox militants who kill Palestinians while living on their land; understanding militant Muslims seems to be more common in mainstream Islam throughout the world. In Islam, there exists an across-the-board feeling that grievous injustices have been and are being inflicted upon Muslims by us, causing followers to look the other way when militants plot to massacre us.
With freedom of religion in this country there must be an implied responsibility to keep one’s faith non-militant. Just as it should be within the Christian and Jewish faiths, this responsibility falls on non-militant Muslims to not only speak out, but act against their religion’s wrongdoers, the plotters and murderers. Public awareness, not threats, along with government awareness should be directed toward the Muslim community and their leaders, especially toward their mosques and imams to daily speak out against the murderous plots being planned at this minute. A Muslim grass roots voice against militancy might not stop all plots, but it could neutralize grass roots plots like Fort Dix if they take the responsibility.
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