Unheard Voices: How Prejudice Fuels the Killing of Innocents Here and Abroad

The violence that has been raging in Gaza may feel remote from us; it is not, after all, “our” war. Just recently, however, over Thanksgiving weekend the violence hit much closer to home when three Palestinian college students were shot as they were taking a walk in Burlington, Vermont.

This isn’t the first such incident that has occurred since the violence began. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) says that they have had an “unprecedented” number of “requests for help and reports of bias” from Muslims in America in the period from October 7 to November 4, a 216% increase over the same period last year.

These events and statistics show that the anger and hatred that envelopes the Middle East now is not as far away as we imagined it to be. Some of that anger and hatred lives here, among us.

Often, we can’t prove that prejudice can explain violence, but there are clues. The frequency of the mistreatment of people who look a certain way; the intensity and cruelty of the violence; his knee firm on his throat even as he begs for his life.

And in Gaza, a relentless bombing campaign, the deprivation of an entire population of food and water, the targeting of hospitals, the killing of over 17,000 civilians, including almost 8,000 children. An inhuman cruelty that often only appears when prejudice is at play. While many have raised their voice against this cruelty, too many others are silent. And Congress cannot pass a ceasefire resolution, instead continuing to send massive amounts of aid to Israel.

The numbers corroborate widespread prejudice against Muslims and “Muslim-looking” people in America. A recent public opinion survey by Pew indicates that about three-quarters of Republicans and a third of Democrats indicate that Islam is more likely to encourage violence than other religions.

How does prejudice allow us to be so cruel? We can only be so cruel when we don’t see or hear the individual. When groups of people are stereotyped, individuals who are part of that group disappear and are absorbed into the stereotype. They have their individual voices taken away. And when they lose their voices, they become less human, because to be human is to be unique and individual.

The “Palestinians,” as a group, are often seen–as Muslims so often are–as violent and backwards. Therefore each individual Palestinian is seen in that way. And all of the body bags, the rubble covering human remains (or humans still alive), the surgery without anesthesia–suddenly seem less objectionable to us.

I know Islamophobia, and I want to point out that I see it here, in this moment. For me, the results have never been so deadly and tragic. But as a Muslim woman who covers her hair, I know what it means to be absorbed into a black mass of Muslim backwardness. A fellow grad student once explained to me in class that I wore a scarf on my hair to indicate deference towards the men in my life. She did not care to ask me why I wear the scarf. My individual voice was absorbed into the group. Muslims are anti-woman, so I must be as well.

Racism and prejudice are often more serious, and more deadly, than I have ever experienced it. For Black men in America, as for Gazans, it is much more deadly. Black men are often viewed as violent and irrational. So the individual black man disappears in this mass of violence and irrationality. Even when he says something so simple, and so human, as “I can’t breathe,” he can’t be heard.

Similarly, three young Palestinian men can be doing something so simple, and so innocent, as taking a walk and yet still be perceived as a threat.

And the Gazan baby, thousands of them at once, are part of this mass. They cannot be heard as individuals. Even when they do something so simple, and so human, as to cry.

Which is why our struggle against the killing of innocents, whether here or abroad, begins with battling our own prejudices. As long as our biases condemn a group of people–as violent, as anti-woman–the individuals that comprise this group will be viewed as inferior. And then it becomes easier to look the other way when the worst of all cruel juxtapositions are made into a reality: when the innocence of a child is destroyed by the vicious violence of a bomb.