(Washington, D.C., 7/4/2021) – The US Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO) congratulates our nation for its 245th year of independence this July 4th, 2021, a celebration that comes with particular poignancy and sharpened relevance following the January 6 insurrection after the recent presidential election. The American people, and the Capitol police, who moved with courage and valor into the breach through the most harrowing circumstances, are to be saluted and thanked.
This July 4th gives us solemn pause and heralds a stark reminder that we cannot take freedom and liberty for granted but rather we must remain vigilant in our upholding of equal justice and equitable fairness for all.
In his new and chilling book, It Can Happen Here: White Power and the Rising Threat of Genocide in the U.S., Alexander Hinton, one of the world’s leading scholarly authorities on genocide and atrocity crimes, details how America now evinces all the genocide and eradication risk assessment clusters established by the United Nations to determine which societies are susceptible to committing these large-scale killing crimes against targeted groups: a history of mass atrocity (think Hiroshima and Nagasaki), social upheaval (an intractable pandemic), and the erosion of the buffers that stand between people and accepting widespread savagery (bolstering American exceptionalist ideologies, conspiracy propagation, xenophobic mongering, gutting the U.S. Justice Department and isolating administration critics within and without).
On this July 4th, we Americans pay special tribute to the spirit of independence that thwarted a new and rising threat to liberty and justice for all from within – a supremacy that seeks and requires political authoritarianism to empower it.
Let us remain eagle-eyed against it – together, in all our beautiful spiritual and colorful plurality – and recognize that our striving to overcome its proponents’ reactionary ambitions, like the work of freedom itself, is not yet done.
