Muslims Assimilate to America Better Than Teabaggers

Ted Olson, whose wife died in the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon, told Andrea Mitchell today that he thought President Obama was right in his stance on the community center in lower Manhattan. Still, Howard Dean opined that maybe it should relocate to another place since it might offend the 9/11 families. The developer of the 511 Park project said he's not moving. It seems now to be a white person problem.

Maybe the reason is that Muslim immigrants in the United States apparently have assimilated rather well compared to their brothers and sisters in Europe. There are an estimated 3 million Muslims in the United States but we don't have the Muslim ghettoes, separatist movements and the cultural clashes Europe has. While there have been some arrests for alleged home-grown terrorists in America,Muslim Americans embrace modernity in a higher percentage than the Christian Right, are better educated, and earn more money than their non-Muslim fellow citizens.

Pew did a study in 2007 and found that the Muslim American population is largely middle class, mostly mainstream, assimilated and content with their lives. The pollsters found that only 7% of American Muslims between the age of 18-29 had a favorable view of Al Qaeda; while only 4% of those above 30. Only 6% of the above 30 crowd believed that suicide bombing was justified in certain circumstances. With the youth, this rose to 15%, who were actually more devout and over 50% attended the mosque weekly or more often.

But they show appropriate mistrust of the U.S. government based on experience. More than 50% of Muslim Americans believe that the U.S. Government singles Muslims out for extra surveillance. And the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee says that since 9-11 there has been a rise in complaints of discrimination and racial profiling. What's more over 60% of younger Muslim-Americans now think of themselves as Muslim first, while the picture is much more mixed with those older than 30 years old. But generally, Muslim-Americans are much more optimistic about America than other groups.

As a side note, during the Census, Iranian-Americans showed a generation gap as older Iranians insisted on being categorized as white while younger Iranian-Americans wanted to write in Iranian. I have sense this was do to an identification with the Green Revolution. But also I think it reflects a difference now in what assimilation to America means. You no longer have to obliterate and down play your ethnic or national origins. For instance, the anti-German hysteria during WWI forced members of my family to stop speaking German and French because of ancient links to Alsace-Lorraine from the 17th century. They thought it more prudent after all that time to hide their origins in light of political hysteria. Luckily, we don't have to go through that today---yet.

And let's hear it for President Obama fulfilling one of his campaign promises. The Army's 4th Stryker Brigade Combat Team has finally left Iraq accompanied by Richard Engel of NBC News. Today, Operation Iraqi Freedom has ended. There are no more combat soldiers in Iraq. However, we are leaving 50,000 behind for training missions, which will conclude by the summer of next year. The Iraqi War left over 4,000 Americans dead, 32,000 wounded, millions of Iraqis displaced and hundreds of thousands dead. It will take some time to actually have an honest assessment of about what the whole war, which lasted longer than WWII meant for us as a nation and for the Iraqi people. But the Iraqi War is ended.

Now we are treated to the build-up for war against Iran. Jeffrey Goldberg writes in this week's Atlantic "Israel is getting ready to bomb Iran: How, Why-and What It Means." Former UN ambassador John Bolton says that Israel only has a couple of weeks before they must bomb Iran. He's referring to the start-up of the nuclear energy reactors. The Congressional Research Service has reported that recent sanctions against Iran have had a crippling effect curtailing its import of refined petroleum products, the servicing of its aircraft and its ability to trade using the global banking system. The Bazaaris,the merchants, have always been the key to a revolution and for the first time they have gone on strike for the past month or so. Observers of Iran's nuclear program talk about their being on the verge of producing weapon grade uranium. But I haven't heard any sound analysis of how long it would take to make a complicated nuclear device and any progress they might have made in creating a deliverable weapon system. Then I haven't heard any sober assessments of what they actually would mean.

We should expect to hear the war drumbeat go on. We should remember that these voices are the same ones against ratifying the new START treaty and who were against President Obama's anti-proliferation conference. The consequences of war with Iran would be dreadful, almost ensuring the United States would have to be permanently at war in the Middle East, something many devotees of the last administration support.