Stephan Salisbury is cultural writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer. His most recent book is Mohamed’s Ghosts: An American Story of Love and Fear in the Homeland.
Who is being killed by firearms, and in what numbers?
The government is spending real money on an imaginary war.
Far from winning votes, “Muslim-bashing” alienates large swaths of the electorate—even as it hardens an already hard core on the right.
Gunned down in Tucson, shot to death at the Pentagon and blown away at the Holocaust Museum, as well as in Wichita, Knoxville, Pittsburgh, Brockton and Okaloosa County, Florida, the landscape of America is littered with bodies.
In a relentless effort to watch and hear everything, government and law enforcement agencies today are actually casting a far broader surveillance net in the name of security than they ever have before.
There is a distinct creepiness to the controversy now raging around a proposed Islamic cultural center in Lower Manhattan.
On the home front of the war on terror, we are largely fighting ghosts and phantasms, some helpfully conjured up by the government itself.
Since 2001, the treatment of the Muslim community in America, especially by law enforcement authorities, has made no sense at all.