A t the time I am composing this essay, my wife and I are expecting a visit from two friends from the Middle East.They will be our guests during the week after Christmas.We had all hoped to meet earlier in the year in Boston during a national plastic surgery meeting. Our friends canceled their trip, however, because the husband's burn unit was filled with victims of a terrorist bombing and he would not leave his patients.I suppose that, if this couple had to check a box on some form, they would identify themselves as Muslim. I am not completely certain because we have not discussed religion in the same detail that we have talked about plastic surgery, research, the histories of our countries, and friendship. As a onetime Catholic, I am sufficiently preoccupied with my own ambiguities to not press my friends to make personal declarations.In addition, at the time of this writing, a self-enthralled profiteering speculator whose wealth is based on an inherited fortune is making a preliminary run for the presidency of the United States. In doing so, he is unleashing the full force of subcortical media-based discourse into the already very cognitively shaky world of our country's political culture. His prominence is at least partly based on the sad possibility that perhaps more people in this country can name the participants of "American Idol" or "Dancing With the Stars" than they can their congressional representatives or describe in any detail the positions and performance of those representatives. The speculator brings his reality show persona into his political venture with all the bluster, oversimplification, and opportunism of a faith healer competing with oncologists for the attention of patients with serious problems.One of the speculator's most recent attempts at crowd panic has been to propose a ban on all Muslims entering this country. Viewed critically, this proposal is almost completely baffling in its impossibility, its ignorance, and its dangerous dabbling in sectarian inflammatory rhetoric. The frightening prominence of its declaration, however, demands a response.In 2001, barely 6 weeks after the suicidal, homicidal destruction of the World Trade Center buildings, Dr Fu-Chan Wei persisted in hosting the Congress of the World Society of Reconstructive Microsurgeons in Taiwan. 1 The times were extraordinary, with fears and uncertainties attached to any plan for travel and gathering. The success of the meeting, however, was spectacular and, in its own way, heroic. The proceedings of that diverse, international association of individuals dedicated to sophisticated patient care were not shut down by the fear of terrorism.A similar commitment is necessary today. Mass murders in this country have recently included school children, college communities, those attending political events, churchgoers, moviegoers, military personnel, and coworkers attending a holiday luncheon. These atrocities defy any simple categorization except murder. They certainly do not conform to any ideological, ethnic, or religious patt...
