This is how it starts.
According to the New York Times' Andrea Elliott, 20 clergymen dressed in white robes and crashing cymbals led a procession through the streets of Jersey City, as Bishop David, the main Coptic leader in the northeast United States, chanted a dirge asking for God's mercy. Behind them poured hundreds of wailing mourners, many holding signs depicting black crosses, others slapping their faces or the sides of the four copper coffins, each casket bearing a photograph of the victim inside. "Even the pallbearers wept," Elliott wrote.
The funeral was for Hossam Armanious, 46; his wife, Amal Gargas, 36; and their daughters Sylvia, 15, and Monica, 8. On January 15, the Egyptian Christians were found in their Jersey City home bound and gagged, their throats and heads bearing multiple stab wounds. Local police, joined by the FBI, have stressed that robbery may have motivated the killers: according to some press report, the house was so stripped of cash and valuables, that authorities found only one penny.
Not everyone believed mere criminals murdered the Coptic family. Rumors spread that Armanious' anti-Islamic comments on an Internet chat room may have enraged some religious fundamentalists. Others speculated the murderers had targeted the family because a distant relative served as a government translator in the case of lawyer Lynne F. Stewart, accused of aiding terrorists. Others noted the problems that have long existed between Egypt's Christian--or Coptic--community and its Muslim majority (see my post, Did the Priest's Wife Convert?). Although sectarian tensions have largely not spilled over into the U.S., it soon became apparent that they exist beneath the surface.
As AP's Wayne Parry reported, skirmishes broke out between Copts carrying anti-Muslim signs and chanting anti-Islamic slogans and mourners who demanded more respect for the dead. As Parry notes,
One sign, above a photograph of the smiling family, read, "American Family Beheaded on American Soil. Welcome bin Laden." Another read, "Terrorists Reach Our Home."
He goes on to quote mourner Ashaf Baul. "Muslims as a group kill people."
Around 2,000 people attended the funeral held at St. George and St. Shenouda Coptic Orthodox Church. Among the mourners were Sheik Tarek Yousef Saleh, the imam of Brooklyn's Oulei Albab Mosque, and around 10 other Muslims, including the editor of a local Arabic-speaking paper and Ahmed Sheded, president of the Islamic Center for Jersey City. When the cleric--who was wearing a distinctive white abayya--entered the church, people shouted "Out! Out!" A man screamed "Muslim is the killer! Muslim is the killer!" before police dragged him away. One of the victim's brothers cried out in Arabic for calm, followed by Bishop David's plea to the crowd to "show the teachings of Christ, of love."
Upon leaving the service, however, angry mourners again accosted the Muslims, who by now were under police guard. One woman, Elliott wrote, cried out "Animals! Animals!" Another shouted "Those are the killers! We don't want them in the church!" Others yelled, "Bring a stick to his head. Beat him, take him away!" Elliott quotes one Nadia Sourrial, "echoing a sentiment expressed by numerous other people,
We tell the Muslim people, 'Don't come here.' We don't like them and they come. They like to show us we're dead."
"I didn't come to hurt anyone, I came to support them," Sheik Saleh told Elliott. His presence, in fact, came as a response to an editorial in an Arabic newspaper to attend the funeral and show support for the grieving Coptic community. "I don't blame any one of them," the Sheik added. "Emotionally, they are not happy right now."
We can sympathize. Grief, fear, anger are powerful emotions, especially when stoked by particularly gruesome murders, the horror which merges with centuries of sectarian tensions in Egypt and the Middle East. We can sympathize and --like Sheik Saleh--understand. But we must not excuse. For this is America, the New World, where every person has an opportunity to start his or her life afresh, unburdened by debilitating antagonisms of the past. It doesn't work out that way in practice, of course--one only has to look at the Metro section of any newspaper. But the ideal is one of the greatest gifts America has given the world, one worth stressing and, when necessary, defending.
As the Armanious family is laid to rest, it's that last point that needs emphasizing now, I think. The anti-Muslim sentiments of the Copts--whether it represented a majority of the mourners or not--clearly comes from the experience of newcomers to this country, for whose hearts the alembic of American life has yet to distill ancient hatreds. But how many of us are free from such reactions, especially when under stress? A friend of mine who spent time in jail once told me, "You can get along fine with everyone in the prison, but as soon as trouble breaks out--you run to your color for protection."
As trouble breaks out around the world, people are increasingly running for protection to religion, rather than ethnicity (or, in the case of many Arab Salafists, both). And indeed, the murder of the Armanious family put pressure on a wound many immigrants Copts still bear, resulting in yesterday's spasm of anti-Muslim bigotry. Credit must go to those Copts who attempted to calm the mourners, but the point is clear: we as Americans, as conscientious people, must take pains to differentiate, when we can, between Muslims and religious extremists. They are not the same. It should be self-evident to everyone that the vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists, nor are all terrorists Muslim.
Anyone reading these words knows this already. And we pride ourselves in our own open mindedness and tolerance, our ability to judge between friend and foe. But what happens if--and, should our experts prove correct--when Al Qaeda launches a successful attack on the U.S.? An attack, we can be sure, will come with the banners of Islam unfurled and proud of whatever devastation has ensued. Will we still engage in the same kind of lucid thinking and unemotional judgments regarding Muslims--or will we run to our religion, our nationalism, our fears? Will the spasm of anti-Islamic feeling we saw in New Jersey turn into a blind, reflexive blow against millions of innocent people?
This is not to say that there are not Salafists in this country who bear us ill will. There are. Nor am I engaging in the kind of empty "peace and tolerance" talk exhibited by naive civil liberties advocates and multiculturalists. America's future as the nation we know and admire is at stake. In this month's Atlantic Monthly, Richard Clarke depicts the consequences of a U.S. defeat in the War against Islamofascism. Perhaps the most troubling aspect of Clarke's scenario is the siege state of fear such a defeat would entail and the inexorable shrinking of our constitutional freedoms (a possibility underscored by the Patriot missile batteries currently stationed in Washington). Our enemy does not have to occupy our cities and towns to destroy the Republic. Rather, he only need frighten us into occupying ourselves with the atavistic impulses of ethnic and religious tribalism and undermining our own civil liberties. And this is how it starts--in the streets, amidst the cries of an angry, grieving, terrified people. It ends when, by our own actions, our own lack of nerve, fortitude and faith, the slogan ceases to become inflammatory rhetoric but rather a sad statement of fact.
Terrorism has reached our homes. Welcome bin Laden.
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