CHRIS MAISANO

When I first read about how Michael Enright nearly murdered New York City cab driver Ahmed Sharif simply because he is Muslim, I immediately assumed that the hysterical campaign against the Park51 “Ground Zero Mosque” had resulted in the kind of violent act it seemed it would inevitably produce. Over the last few weeks, the civic atmosphere here in New York turned poisonous as the conflict over Park51 reached a fever pitch. I have personally overheard numerous people around the city commenting ignorantly on the project, its backers, and Islam itself. Last Sunday, hundreds of people protested against the Park51 project in lower Manhattan in a demonstration inspired by raving Islamophobes like Pam Geller, whose Atlas Shrugs blog provides a glimpse into the terriyfing dreamscape that is the far-right id. Unsurprisigly, video emerged of a rabble of know-nothings accosting a black man falsely assumed to be Muslim and shouting charming epithets like “Muhammad was a pig!”

Considering the public mood, it wasn’t unreasonable to assume that the assailant would have been motivated primarily by opposition to Park51. However, as more information about Enright came to light, the seemingly clear-cut situation became increasingly murky. Here was no right-wing loon, but rather a young, idealistic film student who had done volunteer work for Intersections International, an organization dedicated to interreligious dialogue that publicly supports the construction of the Park51 project. Seizing on this information, conservatives like Jonah Goldberg quickly moved to cast this as a bizarre aberration, an isolated incident that had nothing to do with the seemingly rising tide of Islamophobia in the United States.

Commentary on the attack continues to focus primarily on its potential connection to the controversy over Park51, but it’s becoming increasingly clear to me that this focus completely overlooks the far more salient details – Enright’s exposure to the war in Afghanistan, and the wider “War on Terror” in which it is embedded. Enright traveled to Afghanistan for 35 days earlier this year to make a documentary film about a high school friend’s Marine unit. This experience left him clearly deranged. As today’s New York Daily News reports:

When he was arrested Tuesday in midtown, Enright had a personal diary filled with pages of “pretty strong anti-Muslim comments,” a police source said.

The source said Enright’s journal equated Muslims with “killers, ungrateful for the help they were being offered, filthy murderers without a conscience…”

…Friends of Enright were baffled, but said he had become short-tempered and withdrawn since returning from Afghanistan.

“He seemed a lot more quiet. He seemed to be a lot more pulled back than he used to,” said a friend, who asked not to be identified.

According to this and other reports, Enright yelled “this is a checkpoint! This is a checkpoint, motherf***er, I have to put you down” just before slashing the cab driver’s arm, throat, and face. To anyone who has been paying attention to the ongoing disaster in Afghanistan, Enright’s reference to checkpoints as he attacked is revealing and highly disturbing. Military checkpoints are major flashpoints of violence against civilians committed by U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Earlier this year, Gen. Stanley McChrystal admitted that U.S. forces have shot “an amazing number” of innocent Afghans at checkpoints:

“We have so many escalation of force issues, and someone gets hurt in the process, and we say, ‘They didn’t respond like they were supposed to.’ Well, they may not have known how they were supposed to respond, so as they approached an area or checkpoint or whatever, they may have taken actions that seemed appropriate to them, and when a warning shot was fired they may have panicked. I think this is a great thing to do, to engage people and tell them the kind of behavior on their part that would lower the chance that they would run into problems.

I do want to say something that everyone understands. We really ask a lot of our young service people out on the checkpoints because there’s danger, they’re asked to make very rapid decisions in often very unclear situations. However, to my knowledge, in the nine-plus months I’ve been here, not a single case where we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it and, in many cases, had families in it. That doesn’t mean I’m criticizing the people who are executing. I’m just giving you perspective. We’ve shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force.”

We have no idea what Enright saw or did in Afghanistan. But it’s entirely reasonable to surmise that while he was there, he internalized the paranoid mindset that seems to prevail at those checkpoints and in the War on Terror generally – the assumption that all Muslims are potential terrorist threats that need to be killed before they can kill you. No matter how often the president or the military brass claim that the United States is not engaged in a war against Islam – and I do not doubt that they truly believe this – this is what the War on Terror has become in practice, and many Americans have come to view it this way, including many of the opponents of the Park51 project.

Michael Enright’s attack on Ahmed Sharif is nothing but the War on Terror come home to roost. Still going strong after almost a decade and with no end in sight, it has turned what should have been a local zoning issue in lower Manhattan into an international political controversy. It is the source of a rising tide of intolerance and violence toward Muslims. And it is turning many otherwise decent Americans into paranoid bigots willing to believe the worst about their fellow citizens. Ahmed Sharif – and Michael Enright – are merely its latest victims. There will, I’m afraid, be many more.