Dear Readers,
In 2001 after 9/11, the Shepherd Express did a special issue on Muslims in Milwaukee in response to the hatred and bigotry that was being expressed on talk radio and various other venues. We wanted to help Milwaukee understand who our Muslim neighbors really are and the great contributions they make to our community.
Today with Donald Trump spewing anti-Muslim rhetoric and the tragic event in San Bernardino, Calif., we are unfortunately seeing a new wave of anti-Muslim bigotry. I believe it is necessary to do another special issue on Muslims in Milwaukee to help counteract this new wave of bigotry by simply reminding Milwaukeeans about who our wonderful neighbors in the Muslim community really are. I asked Janan Najeeb, a prominent member of the Islamic community to write the main article, and she has done a great job.
This is a very personal issue for me. I have spent considerable time in the Middle East and worked as a consultant in a few majority-Muslim countries. For example, after the Palestinians created their parliament, the Palestinian Legislative Council, PLC, in 1995, I was hired by the U.S. Agency for International Development in both 1996 and 1997 to advise the new PLC on building a strong parliament that can provide a balance of power with the executive. They were creating a democratically elected body that represented the Palestinians, a body which the rest of the world would respect and with which it could negotiate. The quality and character of the members who were elected in 1995 were amazing and immediately made the composition of the PLC a world-class body of intellectual heavyweights and prominent civic leaders. A number of them obtained their doctoral degrees from American universities.
I also worked with regional parliaments in the country with the largest Muslim population in the world, Indonesia, where I worked in the East Kalimantan province on the island of Borneo.
In the summer of 2010, I was invited to teach a course, “Global Shifts in the World’s Political Economy from WWII to the Present,” at the Hariri Canadian University in Beirut, Lebanon, a small country of 4 million citizens and 18 different religious sects and currently the home of more than 1 million Syrian refugees. Beirut is a wonderful cosmopolitan city and has often been called the “Paris of the Middle East.” For most of my students, I was the only American with whom they had talked or spent time. The students were fantastic. We had many enlightening discussions from which we all learned a lot and despite the fact that many of these students had never actually spent time with an American, they all loved America.
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With these experiences, it is particularly painful to listen to Trump and his supporters who echo his cruel biases against some pretty wonderful, sophisticated and very welcoming, family-oriented people. Are there some terrible Muslims represented by, for example, ISIS? Absolutely, but we also know that we have some terrible people in our country. The first major terrorist act in our recent history was by Timothy McVeigh, an American-born and -raised terrorist, who bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 and killed 168 innocent people including 19 children under the age of 6.
As we know, the world is a very complex place, and it is easy for demagogues to attack and divide people when times get tough. So we at the Shepherd respectfully ask you to take several minutes and read about our Muslim neighbors and encourage your neighbors to try to set aside their various biases and judge people for who they are. In the following piece, we will introduce you to a number of your Muslim neighbors, many of whom I know personally and are great people.
Louis Fortis
Editor/Publisher
