Congressman Keith Ellison’s poignant testimony last week before the House Homeland Security Committee brought to mind Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan.  Ellison, who broke down mid-way through his remarks, told the heroic story of Salman Hamdani, a New York City paramedic of Islamic faith who died in the tragedy of 9/11.  Those familiar with the parable know that Jesus told it in response to a question from a lawyer who asked Jesus what he had to do to gain eternal life.  Jesus answered with a question of his own for the lawyer, asking him to tell him what the law had to say on the subject.   The lawyer dutifully recited scripture for the proposition that eternal life was gained by loving God completely and by loving our neighbors as we love ourselves.  

Unsatisfied with his own answer, the lawyer posed a further question asking Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied with the story of a man who was beaten by robbers and left to die by the side of the road.  One of his own countrymen and later a priest passed the man without rendering aid.  The man was rescued by an unlikely hero, a man from an enemy land with a different set of religious beliefs. 

The not-so-subtle point of the parable was that our “neighbors” do not necessarily share our beliefs and our heritage. Eternal life, according to the parable, finds its source in our ability to recognize the common humanity of everyone.  Put another way, the parable calls us to render mercy to and receive mercy from even those who are most different from us.  Regardless of one’s faith traditions, this short passage rather clearly distills the thousands of pages written in all of the holy texts of all of the great world religions.

Apparently, this fundamentally important passage was missing from the Bibles of Congressman Peter King and a whole lot of other “good Christians” supporting the Islamophobic hearings his committee held.  Salman Hamdani gave his life trying to save others.  As he rushed headlong into the carnage of ground zero, I am quite certain he knew he had placed his own life in peril so that he, like the good Samaritan, might save the lives of others.  I am equally certain that the last thing he would have thought to ask those he died trying to save was whether they shared his religious beliefs.  To the contrary, unlike the Congressional bigots and cowards that allowed this disgraceful display to occur in the very seat of our national government with nary a peep of outrage, his actions recognized the fundamental humanity that all of us share.    

None of us should be terribly surprised.   While our federal government obsesses over the alleged radicalization of Islam within our country, it turns its back on radicalized elements within our population that pose a clear and present danger to the approximately seven million American Muslims.  This threat, in contrast to the imagined one investigated by those of Rep. King’s ilk, is real as was recently demonstrated by the planned attack on a local mosque.  The incident, which has now faded to the back pages of our “mainstream” newspapers provides a remarkably stark example of the stunning double standard applied to violence committed against Arabs in general and Muslims in particular. 

One can easily imagine the disparate manner in which the full weight of the federal bureaucracy would have sprung to action against Arabs had the story, instead of being about a crazed middle-aged white man’s failed attempts to drive all the way from California to destroy a mosque and kill those inside it, been about a devout young Muslim travelling far intending to blow up Blessed Sacrament Cathedral on Woodward Avenue during Sunday mass.  Those of us who suffered through the post-9/11 dragnets and false prosecutions that followed can easily surmise how our deaf, dumb and blind federal law enforcement agencies would have reacted to punish someone . . . anyone . . . fitting a profile probably similar to one that Salman Hamdani could have easily fit.

In a fitting twist of irony, we have now learned that Congressman King has spent a career defending the tactics of the Irish Republican Army, long regarded by our government as a terrorist organization responsible for the murder of hundreds of innocent civilians.   King’s links to the military wing of the IRA are well documented as is his personal relationship with its chief arms supplier, Michael McKevitt.  It is also well-documented that McKevitt’s chief arms supplier was none other than Libyan dictator, Muammar Gaddafi.  The IRA’s trades with Gaddafi occurred at a time when he was busy blowing up American commercial airliners.  Given Rep. King’s sympathies for Irish terrorism and his prior condemnation of religious intolerance against Roman Catholics by officials affiliated with Bob Jones University in South Carolina, one might expect that King would seek to extend the same religious tolerance he claims for his people to upwards of seven million of his fellow Americans who choose to worship and serve the same God he claims to worship.

Unfortunately, there are no laws requiring that our members of Congress behave in a manner that is consistent with their rhetoric.  Indeed, the only thing remotely resembling consistency on Capitol Hill these days is a stunning lack of courage.  Throughout its history, our nation has demonstrated an almost pathological need to sacrifice civil liberty in the name of “Homeland Security.”  And just as often, we fail to recognize that these sacrifices give us none of the security we seek.  During these all-too-frequent blights on our history, we abandon our core ideals and we become that which we say we loathe.  The resulting hypocrisy prevents us from recognizing sacrifice that matters, sacrifice that demonstrates what we proclaim we want to become; in short, sacrifice bravely displayed by the many Salman Hamdanis in our midst.

James Allen,  a founder of the Detroit-based Allen Brothers, PLLC firm.