We’re entering 2016 with a bit more trepidation than is usual when a new year rolls around.

Some of that fear is understandable, given the numerous incidents of multiple killings we’ve seen lately. I, for one, am not anxious to be shot at by anyone, be it a deranged white guy with a legally-acquired firearm hoping to start a race war, a Christian with the misguided belief that shooting up a clinic will save the life of even one baby or an extremist Muslim trying to take the world back to the first millennium.

Moreover, I have a very personal stake in the effort to predict and stop terror attacks here in America or overseas. My son’s family currently lives in a Muslim nation. That doesn’t bother me, because the nation is friendly to the U.S. But I am nervous about the three nations that border theirs, because Boko Haram, a thoroughly evil terrorist movement, is active in those countries. Worse yet, my daughter-in-law works out of the American embassy and her work requires considerable travel around the country. 

I am, of course, concerned about this, but I don’t lie awake at night worrying about it. More to the point, my concern is not about Muslims or their religion. I am concerned only about a group of angry, violence-prone thugs who are using Islam as an excuse for their actions. Ordinary Muslims are the ones who are risking their lives trying to get out of the Middle East, and refusing to accept a few of them is exactly what the extremists want us to do.

The worst thing Americans, both individually and as a nation, can do, then, is to treat all Muslims living here as if they were identical to the blood-thirsty thugs of ISIS. Muslims in America can be our best allies in stopping extremist attacks, but they won’t be if we begin treating them all as criminals. Putting them all on some kind of list and monitoring them or putting restrictions on their places of worship might make some of us happy and some presidential candidates more popular, but in reality, such actions would likely produce more terrorists.

Last month, for example, I wrote about a lady who smacked another woman in the face with a beer mug because she was wearing a hijab and speaking Swahili. It was an irrational act that in no way punished the couple who carried out the recent attack in California, and it certainly did nothing to protect us from terrorism. Instead, it provided extremists one more opportunity to convince a so-called “lone wolf” who is depressed, angry or unstable that America is an evil nation out to destroy Islam.

We will likely see more violent incidents in 2016; perhaps some of them will involve Muslims. As we have seen in recent years, though, there are plenty of other possibilities. Earlier I alluded to the young white man who killed several church members hoping to start a race war, and the old man who attacked a Planned Parenthood Clinic to prevent the selling of “baby parts,” something the clinic actually wasn’t doing. It was a mentally ill man who attacked an elementary school in Connecticut a few years ago, and before that another one shot up a crowd watching a movie in Colorado. None of them were Muslims

The incident I think is most relevant to my point, though, is the time an American decided to get back at Muslims for terrorism. In his ignorance, though, he attacked a Sikh temple, thinking that, because their men wear turbans and grow beards, they were Muslims. But the Sikhs are not Muslims, but an entirely separate monotheistic religion. The attack killed several people, but did nothing to punish terrorists or, more importantly, to end terrorism.

All of us fear terrorism, and we are rightfully angry when terrorists attack our nation.  But fear and anger usually don’t lead to rational decisions, and to defeat terror, we need to respond rationally. Punishing people who had no part in such attacks is not rational, because the punishment hurts innocent people and possibly ourselves while doing nothing to solve the problem.

I hope we can all act rationally during this new year.