Religion is like a pair of shoes

WHILE I tried to make sense of Apostle Suleiman Johnson’s unguarded utterances which hardly reflects the tenets of the gospel he sought to defend, I was further mortified by the executive bill signed by President Trump that temporarily bans travels into the United States from seven countries; Iran, Sudan, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Iraq and Somalia.

The ban however comes with a somewhat divisive caveat which gives non-Muslims a preference and stereotypes all Muslims.

Such a simplistic bill lacking in intellectual rigour only ends alienating friends and giving foes something to rejoice about.

Little wonder republican Senator Benjamin Sasse argued that “if we send a signal to the Middle East that all Muslims are Jihadists, the terrorist recruiters win by telling kids that it is America against Muslims”.

This kind of populist thinking that paints every Muslim with the same brush was the exact same kind that Hitler thrived upon which resulted in the execution of over six million Jews.

We cannot afford another global catastrophe. Very few of us forget that the tech maestro Steve Jobs was the son of a Syrian immigrant Abdulfattah Jandali, or that Sergey Brin, co-founder of google was the son of a Russian immigrant.

Whether it was Albert Einstein, Henry Kissinger or even the very vocal Rudy Giuliani (former Mayor Of New York), the American dream, at its very core, is about giving opportunities to the children of a nobody, irrespective of race, religion or gender to become the best they possibly can be.

I dare say that without the noble contributions of immigrants, even Muslims, and the constitutional guarantee of liberty for all, the American dream would have lost its flame to bigotry. Populists must come to the realisation, that hundreds of thousands of people do not leave their home to the West just to catch a glimpse of Disney land, they do so out of utter economic desperation and survival.

These refugees from Syria, Libya, Iran, flee from oppressive regimes, economic exclusion, extreme violence and a total breakdown of order and hence are not forced out of free will but by necessity to knock on the door of conscience of the West.

Do we then ignore the cry of young innocent children just because they are Muslims?

Do we shut our door to young men and women deeply immersed in pain simply because we do not speak the same language or call God by the same name?

Or why, in the words of Malala Yousafzai, should Syrian children who have suffered through six years of war by no fault of theirs be singled out for discrimination?

After years of reflection, Malcom X arrived at the pool of wisdom towards the end of his short lived life when he uttered the following words “Don’t be in a hurry to condemn because he doesn’t do what you do or think as you think or as fast.

There was a time when you didn’t know what you know today.

I cannot pretend that responding to hate with love is an easy task, it is difficult and requires deep convictions but it is all we have got to build a safer society.

I also know that people have lost families and friends to violence from militia herdsmen but that is not enough to say that all Fulani men are evil and their blood should be spilled.

There is so much emotion about the killings that reason has become the first casualty, but we must refuse to resort to the medieval days of “us against them” where without reason people kill and discriminate anything that is not them.

Today’s society requires a new kind of leadership rooted in compassion, driven by sound judgement and anchored by reasoning. But of course, events in our world today only prove that reason is dead.