MIDDLE?:

Ministering to the Enemy (TED CONOVER, 10/12/03, NY Times Magazine)

I spoke with Captain Yee only once and never met al-Halabi or Mehalba. But the situation of all three reminded me of another American Muslim I met, in Lackawanna, N.Y. Lackawanna, of course, is the suburb of Buffalo from which hail a handful of young men who a year after 9/11 were discovered by the government to have spent time at a camp for Al Qaeda in Afghanistan the preceding summer. My acquaintance -- who does not wish to be named -- proudly served in the U.S. military during the first gulf war and organized an American flag-raising in Lackawanna after 9/11. He is also a devout Muslim. It pained him to learn what his childhood friends had done, made this ''knuckleheaded trip'' inspired by another neighborhood kid who returned from a stay in Yemen a religious zealot. But he was dismayed to see the way federal agents then stormed through his neighborhood, roughed up and frightened people and set up a surveillance camera outside his mosque. I can think of few things that are harder to be right now than a Muslim and an American patriot. There seems to be less and less space for that crucial middle ground.

"Crucial middle ground?" Are being a Muslim and being a patriot really extremes? This seems a dangerous idea. Because if they are polar opposites, there are an awful lot more of the latter than of the former.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 12, 2003 6:07 AM