Donald Trump is wrong, well-integrated Muslims vindicate the idea of a melting pot

Conservative and liberal commentators alike were warning of a widening gulf between America’s non-Muslim and Muslim communities and of a surge in Islamophobia, even before the San Bernardino shooting rampage.

There is a little truth in the assertion. All too easily however, it could become a self-fulfilling prophecy, founded on misconception. In fact, Muslims constitute a tiny portion of the US population – less than 1 per cent, a quarter of whom are not immigrants but African-Americans who converted to Islam. They are as well, if not better, integrated into society than other immigrant groups, certainly much more successfully than the much larger Muslim populations in Britain, France and Belgium.

Far from living in impoverished ghettos in big cities they are spread all over the country. On average, Muslim-Americans are better educated than white Americans, and are slightly more prosperous. Their experience has been a vindication of America as melting pot, in a way “Old Europe”, entrenched in its ways, could never be.

As for charges that Islamic communities are breeding grounds of terrorism, a 2013 study by Duke University in North Carolina showed that more terrorist suspects have been identified by tips from within a Muslim community than by FBI investigations. Even so, according to another survey, half of US Muslims believe their leaders aren’t speaking forcefully enough against extremism.

So much for the deliberate fomenting of terrorism. And no wonder requests from US officials – including Jeh Johnson, the Director of Homeland Security – that Muslims step up their role as informants against potential terrorists have drawn resentment.

The truth is that since 9/11, despite the 2003 invasion of Iraq, despite the disgraceful images from Abu Ghraib, and despite the siren calls from Isis, Islamic-American terrorism has paled beside its home-grown, gun-enabled counterpart. Between 2001 and 2014, Islamic-American terrorism killed 50 people. In 2014 alone, 136 people died in mass shootings. Of the 350 mass shootings in the US so far this year, only two were by Muslim-Americans.

Yes, a section of the population succumbs to Donald Trump’s lies and rabble-rousing. And yes, there have been some hate crimes against Muslims, though they hardly rate as an epidemic. Trump and others warn how terrorists can pose as refugees. In reality, no immigrants are more thoroughly vetted than refugees from the Middle East. A Syrian woman now resident in Baltimore recently told The Washington Post how she and her family underwent five separate interviews, in a process lasting over a year, with every fact about her life from birth cross-checked, before they were allowed in.

US history is littered with examples of how the country can fall prey to fear-mongering against “aliens” – the 19th-century ban on Chinese immigration, the internment of Japanese-Americans in the Second World War, the refusal to take in Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany in case they were Communists, and the 1950s “Red Scare”. In this heated pre-election year, an “Islamic scare” would be no surprise at all. Thus do prophecies fulfil themselves.