Some nice conversations here about Pakistani identity and heritage.
Concerning the OP topic, Fareed Zakaria is an Indian American who supports the Republicans and has a friendship with the Bush family.
He never stopped criticizing and belittling Pakistan. It is sad because I saw many Pakistani Americans admire him as a Muslim who made it mainstream. I always corrected them on it that this man has a primal uncontrolled rage for all things Pakistan.
In the same way I see Pakistanis claim Aziz Ansari as our fellow Muslim, even though he is an avowed atheist, anti-Muslim, and affiliated with Hindu radicals.
Western Muslims should really start owning their own heroes who represent them instead of finding the West’s useful Muslim backstabbers as idols worthy of emulation.
Well Fareed Zakaria calls himself a "secular" person according to these articles. lol.
I am a Muslim. But Trump’s views appall me because I am an American.
Fareed Zakaria
December 10, 2015
I think of myself first and foremost as an American. I’m proud of that identity because as an immigrant, it came to me through deep conviction and hard work, not the accident of birth. I also think of myself as a husband, father, guy from India, journalist, New Yorker and (on my good days) an intellectual. But in today’s political climate, I must embrace another identity. I am a Muslim.
I am not a practicing Muslim. The last time I was in a mosque, except as a tourist, was decades ago. My wife is Christian, and we have not raised our children as Muslims. My views on faith are complicated — somewhere between deism and agnosticism. I am completely secular in my outlook. But as I watch the way in which Republican candidates are dividing Americans, I realize that it’s important to acknowledge the religion into which I was born.
And yet, that identity doesn’t fully represent me or my views. I am appalled by Donald Trump’s bigotry and demagoguery not because I am a Muslim but because I am an American.
In
his diaries from the 1930s, Victor Klemperer describes how he, a secular, thoroughly assimilated German Jew, despised Hitler. But he tried to convince people that he did so as a German; that it was his German identity that made him see Nazism as a travesty. In the end, alas, he was seen solely as a Jew.
This is the real danger of Trump’s rhetoric: It forces people who want to assimilate, who see themselves as having multiple identities, into a single box. The effects of his rhetoric have already poisoned the atmosphere. Muslim Americans are more fearful and will isolate themselves more. The broader community will know them less and trust them less. A downward spiral of segregation will set in.
Here's what some people really think of Trump's 'ban Muslims' plan
[Krauthammer: Why take the Trump stunt seriously?]
The tragedy is that, unlike in Europe, Muslims in the United States are by and large well-assimilated. I remember talking to a Moroccan immigrant in Norway last year who had a brother in New York. I asked him how their experiences differed. He said, “Over here, I’ll always be a Muslim, or a Moroccan, but my brother is already an American.”
In an
essay in Foreign Affairs, British writer Kenan Malik points out that in France, in the 1960s and ’70s, immigrants from North Africa were not seen as or called Muslims. They were described as North Africans or Arabs. But that changed in recent decades. He quotes a filmmaker who says, “What, in today’s France, unites the pious Algerian retired worker, the atheist French-Mauritanian director that I am, the Fulani Sufi bank employee from Mantes-la-Jolie, the social worker from Burgundy who has converted to Islam, and the agnostic male nurse who has never set foot in his grandparents’ home in Oujda?” His answer: “We live within a society which thinks of us as Muslims.”
Once you start labeling an entire people by characteristics such as race and religion, and then see the whole group as suspect, tensions will build. In a poignant article on Muslim American soldiers,
The Post interviewed Marine Gunnery Sgt. Emir Hadzic, a refugee from Bosnia, who explained how the brutal civil war between religious communities began in the Balkans in the 1990s. “That’s what’s scary with [the] things that [Donald Trump is] saying,” Hadzic said. “I know how things work when you start whipping up mistrust between your neighbors and friends . . . I’ve seen them turn on each other.”
[Ignatius: Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric will live in infamy in U.S. history]
I remain an optimist. Trump has taken the country by surprise. People don’t quite know how to respond to the vague, unworkable proposals (“We have to do
something!”), the phony statistics, the dark insinuations of conspiracies (“There’s
something we don’t know,” he says, about President Obama) and the naked appeals to peoples’ prejudices.
But this is not the 1930s. People from all sides of the spectrum are condemning Trump — though there are several Trump-Lites among the Republican candidates. The country will not stay terrified. Even after San Bernardino, the number of Americans killed by Islamist terrorists on U.S. soil
in the 14 years since 9/11 is 45 — an average of about three people a year. The number killed in gun homicides this year alone will be
about 11,000.
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People and groups Donald Trump has denounced
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Not one to back down easily from controversial statements, the Republican presidential candidate continues to add to the list of people he condemns.
In the end, the United States will reject this fear-mongering and demagoguery, as it has in the past. But we are going through an important test of political and moral character. I hope decades from now, people will look back and ask, “What did you do when Donald Trump proposed religious tests in America?”
Read more from Fareed Zakaria’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...af6af208198_story.html?utm_term=.e23dd88be478
I caught Fareed Zakaria on Charlie Rose Tuesday night.
CHARLIE ROSE: Your parents are Muslim?
FAREED ZAKARIA: Yes, and I was brought up that way. I am just not a particularly religious person. I think I sealed my fate when I became the wine critic for "Slate" magazine.
CHARLIE ROSE: That will do it.
I found that exchange pretty funny, but also illuminating, given that Zakaria could be considered one of the most famous Muslims in America, and by his own account, he's a MINO: Muslim in Name Only.
Even then, Zakaria has been a vocal supporter of The Mosque. He's written on the topic in Newsweek --
"Build the Ground Zero Mosque" -- and to buttress his words, even
returned an award to the (anti-mosque) Anti-Defamation League.
But understandably, Zakaria supports this not as a practicing Muslim, but as a secular American. More from his
talk about the mosque with Charlie Rose:
...the gut reaction I think we all have is, you know, there is a sense of unease, there is a sense is that the right thing, there is a sense that maybe this is going to provoke a reaction among people. And you can see the reaction. The polling is I think 60, 65 percent opposed.
But American democracy is not just about mob rule, it is not just about the tyranny of the majority. It is about fundamental rights that we believe in. That is what the Bill of Rights was about. The Bill of Rights is an anti-democratic document. It says no matter what the majority thinks, these rights are sacrosanct and the first of those rights, the first amendment is freedom of religion.
It's hard to say what impact Zakaria would have on the debate, but his very presence points to a larger problem that faces the Muslim community: When it comes to these polarizing issues, there are few American Muslims who can command a national stage, and have intellectual credibility outside their community or activist circles.
Who are the most famous Muslims in America?
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar? Muhammad Ali? Cat Stevens? I only found out Dave Chapelle was Muslim the other day. But of course, he walked off his stage, and the rest are relatively absent from public discussions. More to the point, they are all black or white; none of them resemble the foreign-born Muslims that grab the headlines in this country: the extremists, or the imams who speak with exotic accents.
The issue here, I believe, is that Americans have few options when it comes to the Muslim American experience, few well-known, widely accepted people who can act as barometers, or help the country simply by saying, "I know that imam -- he's fine."
I was once at a journalist's event at which Zakaria spoke. At the time, he was a regular guest on George Stephanopoulos' Sunday morning talk show, but by his own account, viewership plummeted whenever he was on. This wasn't meant to be funny so much as an indicator of America's discomfort, still, with foreign-born commentators.
Much of this is inevitable. Muslims have only been coming here in large numbers for the last couple decades, from South Asia and the Middle East and elsewhere, and it takes time for any immigrant community to transcend material success -- as business people, or doctors or engineers -- and start making a name for themselves in the popular culture (think Aasif Mandvi, of "The Daily Show," or Aziz Ansari). Eventually, some of those successful, accent-free celebrities will act as reference points for the country, people who can define Muslim society more effectively than any Islamophobes or radicals.
Until then, Americans will have to rely on people like Fareed Zakaria, lapsed, wine-drinking Muslim that he is.
https://www.wnyc.org/story/90760-fareed-zakaria-and-mosque/
