I Emphatically Refuse': Muslim ACLU Activist Explains Why She Won't Condemn Islamic Terrorism

The deputy director of the ACLU of Michigan said in an op-ed Monday that she refuses to condemn radical Islamic terrorism in order to prove her allegiance to the United States.

Rana Elmir wrote that she's “consistently and aggressively asked” to condemn Islamic terrorism, and is tired of having her religious views linked to atrocities like the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and in Paris and San Bernardino this year.

“I emphatically refuse,” she wrote in an opinion piece in The Washington Post.

The op-ed was titled: "Stop asking me to condemn terrorists just because I’m Muslim."

Elmir, who lectures on issues related to Islamophobia, free speech and the intersection of race, faith and gender, asserted that she “will not be bullied into condemning terror perpetrated by psychopaths who misrepresent and distort Islam for their deranged purposes.”

Elmir compared the terror created by groups like the Islamic State and Boko Haram to “the terror advanced by mostly white men," which she says happens at the rate of one mass killing every two weeks in the U.S. For example, Dylann Roof’s attack on parishioners of a historic black church in Charleston, S.C., Robert Dear’s attack on a Planned Parenthood facility, the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School and “the slaughter of moviegoers in Colorado or Louisiana" — none of which she says she was asked to comment on.

Guilt by association is more prevalent in the case of American Muslims, Elmir argued, and the distinction between radical and peaceful Muslims is better made in silence.

“Muslims across the globe are not threats. They are threatened,” Elmir wrote, arguing that Muslim victims are wrongly pressed by politicians and journalists to publicly apologize for “the ideology that contributed to their own persecution.”

Such apologies, according to Elmir, become “admission[s] of guilt” that contribute to further Muslim oppression in America.

“The pernicious disease that is Islamophobia is spreading at home, thanks to a steady diet of repugnant rhetoric and equally misguided policies,” she wrote, citing a rise in anti-Muslim hate crimes reported to the FBI in 2014. Condemning Islamic extremism would only serve “zealots who will never be satisfied," Elmir wrote.

Muslims have been subject to slavery and persecution since America’s founding, she said.

“The first Muslims in the United States were brought over bound as slaves, not immigrants,” Elmir wrote. "While some American Muslims have prospered, many face challenges — poverty, unemployment and undereducation.”

But condemning or claiming terrorism through an apology is the wrong course of action, Elmir concluded.

“Terrorism is not mine,” she said.

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H/T: Washington Post