Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for September 11, 2010
September 10, 2010
September 12, 2010
Transcript:
Toggle: You... you right, Lieutenant. I'll s-s-start going to... to group again... B.D.: Good. It take time to demilitarize the mind, Toggle... until you do it, it can be alarming to encounter someone who reminds you of the enemy. Professor: Drop out? Why, Hakim? Man: The kid in the Army tee shirt. I can't sit with him!
Re: Why/how a traumatized Hakim is here.
Shortly after 9/11, in the midst of sporadic anti-Arab and anti-Muslim incidents in the US, a historian friend reminded me that most Arabs in this country were not Muslim (being Lebanese Christians), and most Muslims in this country were not Arab (being African-Americans who had in some sense followed Malcolm X’s movement away from Christianity and/or the Nation of Islam into a more orthodox Islam).
When I mentioned to my friend a few years later that I had often cited him on these facts, he had to correct me on at least one of them. Thanks to immigrants/refugees from our war, the majority of Arabs in this country are now Muslim. (I’m not sure about the current demographic breakdown of US Muslims.)
That’s pretty much how empire works.