Skewed priorities. What's new?

To say that America has been preoccupied with "Muslim" terrorism over the past ten years is to state the obvious.  The scale of our interest, however, is vastly out of scale with the actual problem.

Muslim American terrorist plots have killed since 9/11 — since the 3,000 killed on 9/11 — have killed 33 individuals in the United States since that time. Over that same period of time, there have been more than 150,000 murders in the United States, or 14 or 15,000 murders every year. Muslim American terrorism, then, has been a very small, very low percentage of the overall violence in the United States.  Link

Americans understand that it's impossible to police everyone to stop murders, so they don't get overly excited about it.  But since Muslim terrorism sounds alien and scary, it's much easier to whip us into a security frenzy.  It's easier to demonize people than to work to make Muslim communities feel invested and safe in America.

Even so,

"the Muslim American community has been central in combating the low-level threat. Of the terrorist plots where researchers have been able to identify a tip that was responsible for foiling them, about one-third of those tips originated from the Muslim American community."

America's strength in diversity isn't just a vague concept.  Tolerance and diversity actually work to make all of us better and safer.