Fear of Muslims grips a North Carolina town that has hardly any

By Sabrina Tavernise, New York Times Services

Tuesday, Dec. 27, 2016 | 2 a.m.

HENDERSONVILLE, N.C. — Jeff Miller, a dry cleaner owner who serves on the City Council in Hendersonville, North Carolina, was driving his green truck late Monday afternoon when news of the Christmas market attack in Berlin came on the radio.

“I thought, here we go again,” he said. “So sad.”

But there was also something new.

“This world’s dangerous right now, and I don’t think we are nearly where we need to be with border security,” he said. “I believe Donald Trump wants to do it right.”

As Trump prepares to assume the presidency next month, one of the biggest issues he will face is immigration. His incendiary statements prompted some of the most enduring images of the campaign, with chants like “build the wall” and calls for deportations and bans on Muslims.

In Henderson County, an upper-middle-class patch of western North Carolina where solid suburban homes stand next to hilly apple orchards, Trump’s tone did not appeal, but the underlying message hit home. Immigration looms large: Hispanics make up about 10 percent of the population.

But they are a familiar part of the landscape. They are Christians. They have been a big part of the community for decades. Muslims, however, are none of those things. Most of what people know comes in the form of the daily drip of news into their iPads, and that does not leave a good impression. So the part of the immigration message that really resonates is about Muslims from the Middle East.

“It’s a little different than any time in history, when we are seeing this level of terrorism sweeping the world, and that has gotten people’s attention,” said Bill Campbell, pastor at Hendersonville Presbyterian Church. “Terrorism is an ideology, it’s not a religion, but the religion that tends to give birth to it most often these days is Islam. The threat from that is very real, and we can’t just ignore it.”

And while Trump has bounced around on the topic since Election Day — on Wednesday his spokesman indicated that suspending immigration from countries with a lot of terror attacks was still part of his plan — many moderate voters say they are hopeful about where he will eventually land.

“I’m telling you, he’s going to surprise people, he’s going to make people mad on both sides,” said Greg Mathis, senior pastor at the Mud Creek Baptist Church in Hendersonville. “Sometimes he’s too blunt, maybe a little too raw. But securing our borders has been a long time coming, and Donald Trump was the first one in a long time to say it. I think that’s what registered with so many people in this country.”

U.S. Muslim organizations say that singling out Muslims amounts to racial profiling, and that Trump has deliberately stirred the pot, promoting theories about Muslims that simply are not true. They say that violence comes from ideological zealots, not from Islam. They say that the United States already does extremely vigorous vetting of immigrants and that some recent attacks that cited the Islamic State were carried out by Muslims who were born in the United States.

“We’ve never said that people don’t have real fears about international or domestic incidents and national security,” said Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Washington. “But you want to take actions that are actually based on reality, not on wild conspiracy theories of Muslims about to overthrow the Constitution, or institute Shariah law.”

This summer, when word got out that some members of a local church were talking about resettling Syrian refugees, many people objected. Miller was among them.

The reluctance was not about lack of compassion. Local people, including his business, generously fund a well-equipped Boys and Girls Club. The Bounty of Bethlehem program draws hundreds of volunteers and donations for Christmas gifts and dinners for the needy every year.

But worries about migrants from the Middle East run deep.

“Let’s take care of our own before we expand to a group there’s so much uncertainty about,” said Miller, 62, a co-founder of a nonprofit for veterans. For example, there are many homeless veterans in the county who need care, he said.

“Some people believe they can wrap their arms around anyone and make them their friend,” he said. “But they could stab you in the back.”

Khalid Bashir, president of the Islamic Center of Asheville, in the nearby county of Buncombe, said Muslim Americans were no different from any other Americans in wanting to keep terrorists out of the United States. He estimated that there were 75-100 Muslim families in western North Carolina and that probably 20 of them lived in Henderson County. He knows one in which the mother is a nurse, the father a car dealer, and their daughter is in college.

“Generally speaking, the stand for the Muslims is that nobody wants to have borders which are porous, including Muslim people,” Bashir said. “But making blanket statements about whole groups of people, whole religious groups, that’s what people are against.”

Hooper said that many Americans had a distorted view of even the most basic facts about Muslims, one that often exaggerates their influence. He cited a recent study that found that on average Americans guess that Muslims are 17 percent of the population, when the real number is 1 or 2 percent. And unlike in some places in Europe, in the United States Muslims are well integrated into society.

He said anti-Muslim incidents had spiked since the election. He got a call recently from a man who was disparaging Islam. When he asked if the man was threatening him, the man replied: “I don’t have to. My president will take care of you for me.”