Stop asking me to condemn terrorists just because I’m Muslim
I have no reason to say sorry, and Islamophobes won’t believe me anyway.

As an American Muslim, I am consistently and aggressively asked — by media figures, religious leaders, politicians and Internet trolls — to condemn terrorism to prove my patriotism.

I emphatically refuse.

Make no mistake: The terror imposed by those who sympathize with Daesh (an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State militant group), al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, al-Shabab and other groups is just as foreign to me as the terror advanced by mostly white men at the alarming rate of one mass killing every two weeks in this country.

Therefore, just as I have never been asked to condemn Dylann Storm Roof’s attack on parishioners of a historic black church in South Carolina, Robert Dear’s attack on a Planned Parenthood facility, the murder of 20 children at Sandy Hook Elementary School, or the slaughter of moviegoers in Colorado or Louisiana, I will not be bullied into condemning terror perpetrated by psychopaths who misrepresent and distort Islam for their deranged purposes.

Not surprisingly, nativist rhetoric and policies targeting American Muslims always start with the same feral calls for condemnation. Asking us to apologize for violence that has orphaned generations of Muslims has the perverse effect of re-victimizing us by erasing our humanity and experiences. There is no other acceptable scenario in which the media, politicians and even our president would urge and expect victims to apologize publicly and rout out the ideology that contributed to their own persecution.

[Trump supporters are angry at the wrong people]

Since 2000, the majority of terror attacks have occurred in five countries — Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria and Syria, all Muslim-majority countries. Close to 90 percent of the victims of Daesh are Muslims. A 2009 study conducted by the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point concluded conservatively that al-Qaeda has killed eight times as many Muslims as non-Muslims.