miamiherald.com: While serving Thanksgiving meals as a volunteer at a local community center, a fellow volunteer remarked “So you are doing the ‘American’ thing?’ ” Taken aback, I politely elaborated on how being American is perfectly congruent to being a Muslim. It was not a clichéd reply.

My organization, the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, is engaged in dozens of community-building initiatives on a local level. Serving mankind regardless of faith or creed is fundamental to our purpose. When we serve in our local community, it is merely an extenstion of our civic engagements on the national and international level.

The fact that few Americans personally know American Muslims creates an information gap that must be filled. In the aftermath of the San Bernardino tragedy, the urgency is palpable, as some have been hasty to generalize and deem 1.7 billion Muslims as a monolith bloc. The reality is anything but that. Had there been awareness about Muslims, it would have crystallized that majority of American Muslims condemn the tragedy unapologetically and categorically.

There is no justification whatsoever when a Muslim, aided by his wife, unleashes the worst form of terror on his co-workers at a holiday party. All Americans, including renowned security experts are bewildered by this new, emerging and rare form of domestic terrorism — disaffected Muslims venting out of a misconstrued ideology, albeit aided by immensely lax gun laws.

As a Muslim American of Pakistani descent, this tragedy has hit home, and it has hit hard. It is a profound heartache to see youth from my country of origin disregard every semblance of humanity and unleash hate at unarmed, innocent people. The fact that the perpetrators left their 6-month-old daughter points to their disturbed mindset.

As a parent of three Muslim-American children, the challenge of keeping them engaged and instilling in them the best of the values that my faith Islam espouses and integrating their American identity is a daunting one. The violent leanings of some disaffected Muslim youth that renders them vulnerable to the recruits of the Islamic State should be unnerving.