Last year Americans were less likely to be killed by a Muslim terrorist (odds of one in six million) than for<br />being Muslim (odds of one in one million), according to Charles Kurzman of the University of North Carolina.<br />On a Portland Train, the Battlefield of American Values -<br />America may seem leaderless, with nastiness and bullying ascendant,<br />but the best of our nation materialized during a moral crisis on a commuter train in Portland, Ore.<br />A white man riding on that train on Friday began screaming anti-Muslim insults<br />at a black 16-year-old girl and her 17-year-old Muslim friend wearing a hijab.<br />What the three men in Oregon understood, but the White House doesn’t, is<br />that in a healthy society, Islamophobia doesn’t disparage just Muslims, racism doesn’t demean blacks alone, misogyny hurts more than women, xenophobia insults more than immigrants.<br />We don’t know whether the murderer on the Portland train felt empowered to scream at a Muslim girl because of Trump’s own previous Islamophobic rants, any more than we can be sure<br />that Trump’s denunciation of reporters led a Montana candidate to body slam a journalist.<br />One can imagine people pretending not to hear and staring fiercely down at their<br />phones; instead, three brave passengers stepped forward to protect the girls.
