The Washington Post reported yesterday that the U.S. military “is struggling to recruit Arab-Americans for its war on terrorism some five years after September 11” and “[bemoans] the shortage of soldiers with Arabic skills that would be invaluable on the ground in Iraq.” The article notes some of the challenges that the military may be facing in the recruitment of Arab-Americans, namely the disagreement that some may have with our country’s current foreign policy as well as distrust that some might feel for a government they see as discriminating against them post 9/11.

As the story references, the Association of Patriot Arab Americans in the Military (APAAM) estimates that “there are about 3,500 Arab-American in the armed forces.” According to its website, the association "was created shortly after September 11th, 2001, in an effort to organize current and former Arab- Americans in the military…Due to the backlash against Arab Americans and the backlash directed towards his family, [U.S. Marine Corps Gunnery Sergeant Jamal S. Baadani] decided to establish APAAM in order to make a difference in Arab American Communities nationwide.”

Although the military probably is more interested in numbers and skills, the issues of patriotism and loyalty are the lenses through which most of the country views the question of Arab-American participation in the military. Case in point: See this post and follow-up comments from “Citizen Journal,” which were posted on RedState (RedState has disassociated itself with “Citizen Journal,” saying “This is not a site for indiscriminate religious and/or ethnic attacks, particularly when they are as inaccurate as this one was.”)

In the original post, Citizen Journal says,

[The story] buys into the mendacious lie that Muslim antipathy for the US is a product of the Bush administration. Let's face facts: Many Muslims in America may not feel any loyalty to the US - especially the engrained love of country required to join the military. A disproportionate share hope and pray for more 9/11-style attacks on the US; they cheered when the towers fell; they believe in "moral equivalency."

And in a later comment,

[I don't know where you live, but I live in New York City and the Muslims I talk to -- and I do talk to them -- eventually concede my primary point: their loyalty to the US is tenuous, at best.

The problem with thinking about loyalty and patriotism is that there is an assumption that everyone has the same definition of “America,” what it means to be an American, and what values underpin these definitions. Our definitions and characterizations of loyalty and patriotism derive from the way we think about our country and can affect everything from whether we want to say the Pledge to how we feel about the current war.

These definitions were in conflict during the controversy surrounding the memorials at the World Trade Center site. For some, those memorials should represent “faded flags or hand-painted signs of national unity…the yearning to return to that day…to the place where heroes died.” For others, the memorials would remind us that “Freedom…is not a gift from our parents to be put on a shelf and admired. It requires work in our own time, work each of us can do and all of us must do.” The competing definitions of our country, of our freedom, of what was attacked and of the best way to respond to that attack are all wrapped up in the debate over what the memorial should symbolize.

Debra Burlingame, who wrote the opinion against the original memorial plan at the WTC site, renders a scene of Marines who have been fighting in Iraq returning to the WTC site and says, “do not be fooled into thinking that [the memorial’s designers’] idea of freedom is the same as that of those Marines.”

The question, though, is whether all Marines, or all soldiers for that matter, have the same “idea of freedom.” Do we all have the same “idea of freedom”? This isn’t just a question about Arab-Americans. The question becomes something greater than differing political parties or ethnic/religious groups competing over our issues and interests. The war at home, right now, is about competing American narratives - the stories we tell ourselves about who we are as a nation. It is a question about all of us – and what it means to have representatives who carry out actions based on those narratives, how dissent (from any side) challenges those narratives, and what it means to have soldiers dying for a narrative that you don’t believe in.