Punch, counterpunch, and what we fear most

This past weekend  at a Town Hall in South Carolina, Republican presidential hopeful Marco Rubio took a verbal shot at newly minted (Democratic) Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney: “There was a terrorist attack yesterday, in the city of Philadelphia. A terrorist attack,” Rubio said about the shooting, two days before, of Officer Jesse Hartnett allegedly by Edward Archer.
“The police chief stands up says, ‘This was the guy. We arrested him. And he said he did it in the name of ISIS.’ And then, (Jim Kenney) gets up and says, ‘This has nothing to do with Islam and radical Islam,” Rubio added, according to CNN. “This is ridiculous. This is absurd. This is a radical person, living in United States, who became radicalized. This is the new face of the war on terror, and it is dangerous and we need to confront it and defeat it. I will not stop until we do.”
Mayor Kenney clapped back. On Monday he told Citified: “This man was a violent criminal with a deranged view of what the Quran teaches. He is not representative of Islam. Period. I think candidates for office, particularly for president, should not demonize an entire group of Americans because of the actions of violent criminals with deranged views of Islam.”
At the heart of this punch-counterpunch are two fundamentally distinct definitions of what, at this precise moment in history, we as Americans have to fear most.
Rubio — in line with GOP thinking — believes terror is something visited on Americans primarily from abroad. Thus, he doesn’t support taking in Syrian refugees, for fear that terrorists would be among those admitted.  For him, Archer isn’t American first, but a “radicalized Muslim” first — prompting the classification of a “terrorist attack” — something Americans have grown more and more fearful of experiencing.
Kenney’s reaction, too, is about addressing fears — but of a far more immediate sort. Whenever an individual Muslim is implicated in a shooting or act of violence, the public outcry takes the form of criminalizing every Muslim.
This was viscerally evident after the December mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., when a pig’s head was thrown at a North Philadelphia mosque — an act of both desecration and intimidation.
Earlier, in July, anti-Islamic ads were displayed on SEPTA buses  — something that had to make Philadelphia Muslims feel singled out and apprehensive, and which clearly would exacerbate any preexisting prejudice against Islam in general. (Philadelphia has  a population of 100,000 to 200,000 Muslims, around 85 percent of whom are African American). 
Some have been highly critical of Kenney’s statement about the shooting having nothing to do with Islam: a tawdry photoshopped image of Kenney with a beard and other “Muslim” trappings circulated immediately on Twitter. Others have grumbled in less gross ways.
But here’s the thing — in our view, the mayor is displaying the same moral character and fortitude he does when talking about undocumented immigrants: he is refusing to let the actions of an individual criminalize all members of that group.
Just because you are a character doesn’t mean you have character ... but in this, Kenney has shown us  he does.