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Chronology of Islam in America (2010)
By Abdus Sattar Ghazali
December 2010 (Page Two)
The Great Islamophobic Crusade
Dec 19: Nine years after 9/11, hysteria about Muslims in American life has gripped the country. With it has gone an outburst of arson attacks on mosques, campaigns to stop their construction, and the branding of the Muslim-American community, overwhelmingly moderate, as a hotbed of potential terrorist recruits. The frenzy has raged from rural Tennessee to New York City, while in Oklahoma, voters even overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure banning the implementation of Sharia law in American courts (not that such a prospect existed). This campaign of Islamophobia wounded President Obama politically, as one out of five Americans have bought into a sustained chorus of false rumors about his secret Muslim faith. And it may have tainted views of Muslims in general; an August 2010 Pew Research Center poll revealed that, among Americans, the favorability rating of Muslims had dropped by 11 points since 2005. Erupting so many years after the September 11th trauma, this spasm of anti-Muslim bigotry might seem oddly timed and unexpectedly spontaneous. But think again: it’s the fruit of an organized, long-term campaign by a tight confederation of right-wing activists and operatives who first focused on Islamophobia soon after the September 11th attacks, but only attained critical mass during the Obama era. It was then that embittered conservative forces, voted out of power in 2008, sought with remarkable success to leverage cultural resentment into political and partisan gain. (Alternet.org)
Right-Wing money-fed campaign escalates latent 9-11 paranoia into anti-Muslim hysteria
Dec 19: Moments of imperial and economic decline -- according to a recent poll, 65% of Americans now believe this country to be “in a state of decline” -- can also be periods of cultishness, even of madness incarnate. Such a mood now seems to be spreading through the United States. It’s not so surprising, really. Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, fear has been injected into this “homeland” like a drug and a penumbra of official secrecy has settled over the land in a way that makes the secrecy of the Cold War years (when this country faced a superpower, not a ragtag set of jihadis, guerrillas, and terrorists) seem like an era of sunshine. In an atmosphere of swirling fears and hysteria amid declining living conditions, “explanations” that at other times might have remained confined to tiny crews of conspiracy-mongers can suddenly gain a patina of plausibility and so traction. No wonder then that, as hard times hit, as the financial system seemed on the verge of collapse, as unemployment soared and a massive wave of home foreclosures swept into view, increasing numbers of Americans became prey to any wacky explanation for our troubles, none more so than the idea that Islam was somehow responsible, that mosques and Islamic centers meant for a sliver of a minority here were capable of imposing anything, no less a way of life on this country, or that Sharia law (of all things) might somehow worm its way into state legal systems, or that YouTube was a hotbed of terrorism worthy of suppression, or... well, you name it. (Alternet.org)
Islam-bashing bigots train counterterrorism agents
Dec 20: "Kill them...including the children." That's how to solve the threat of militant Muslims? This quote is from what one official involved in homeland security said was the theme of a speech by Walid Shoebat at an anti-terrorism training in Las Vegas in October 2010. Our source had turned around after Shoebat's speech and asked the woman in the chair behind them at the conference what she thought was the solution offered by Shoebat. "Kill them...including the children...you heard him," was the full response. Shoebat's Las Vegas speech was described by our source as "frightening." Bigoted trainers including Shoebat are highlighted in today's Washington Post article on "Monitoring America." Much of this information is new. Some of it was previously documented in a PRA Report, "Platform for Prejudice." …. According to religion writer Richard Bartholomew, "Shoebat is a pseudo-expert on terrorism, Islamic extremism, and Biblical prophecy, and he teaches that Obama is a secret Muslim and that the Bible has prophesized a Muslim anti-Christ." This means for some apocalyptic Christians that Muslims then would be allies of Satan in the End Times battle between good and evil. This battle ends when Jesus returns and with a vengeful God kills all these deemed to be non-believers in Christianity. This bloody and bigoted version of apocalyptic prophesies is rejected and condemned by the Catholic and Orthodox churches and every major Protestant denomination. Abdus Sattar Ghazali wrote about Shoebat and other anti-Islamic bigots on the website of Muslim Military Members, an organization that serves as a network for Muslims serving in the US Armed Forces. "Walid Shoebat has built a lucrative speaking career by manipulating the fears and whipping up hatred between Jews and Muslims," wrote Ghazali…. Shoebat may be the most outlandish example of the coterie of anti-Islamic bigots and fear mongers who are training law enforcement officials and anti-terrorism agents, but the problem is corrosive. Why are tax dollars being spent to peddle prejudice against Muslims in the United States? (Huffington Post)
Monitoring America
Dec 20: Nine years after the terrorist attacks of 2001, the United States is assembling a vast domestic intelligence apparatus to collect information about Americans, using the FBI, local police, state homeland security offices and military criminal investigators. The system, by far the largest and most technologically sophisticated in the nation's history, collects, stores and analyzes information about thousands of U.S. citizens and residents, many of whom have not been accused of any wrongdoing. The government's goal is to have every state and local law enforcement agency in the country feed information to Washington to buttress the work of the FBI, which is in charge of terrorism investigations in the United States. The Post explored how Top Secret America plays out at the local level with a web of 4,058 federal, state and local organizations, each with its own counterterrorism responsibilities and jurisdictions. At least 935 of these organizations have been created since the 2001 attacks or became involved in counterterrorism for the first time after 9/11. (Washington Post)
U.S. ordered to pay Muslim charity
Dec 21: A federal judge ordered the government today to pay nearly $2.6 million in lawyers’ fees and damages to officials with a shuttered Islamic charity in Oregon who the judge said were wiretapped without a court order under the surveillance program approved by President George W. Bush after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The ruling by Vaughn R. Walker, the chief federal judge in San Francisco, punctuates a years-long lawsuit that tested the balance between civil liberties and the president’s authority. The dollar amount of damages is relatively insignificant for the government. But the principle the judge first laid out in a March ruling and expanded on Tuesday was critical to all parties. For charity officials and their lawyers, the ruling offered vindication in a case that the Justice Department fought largely by relying on the president’s executive power and the government’s claim to keep certain “state secrets” out of the judiciary.
The judge awarded more than $2.5 million in legal expenses accrued by lawyers for Asim Ghafoor and Wendell Belew, officials with Al-Haramain’s Oregon affiliate who the judge said were wiretapped, and he awarded the two officials each $20,400 in damages. Judge Walker refused to grant punitive damages based on the claim that the wiretapping under the National Security Agency program showed “reckless or callous indifference” to the plaintiffs’ rights. Judge Walker said that the government “had reason to believe” that Al-Haramain supported acts of terrorism.
However, he criticized the way that Bush officials went about approving in secret a wiretapping program that operated outside the bounds of judicial scrutiny and in conflict with surveillance rules set by Congress. (New York Times)
Pete King's plan to grill Muslims is flashback to
Joe McCarthy's Hollywood witch hunt for Communists
Dec 21: According to Joanna Molloy of New York Daily News, Rep. Pete King's proposal to hold hearings on the "radicalization" of American Muslims is something straight out of the Bad Ideas Department. Make that the Worst Ideas Department. Just substitute the word "movie" for "Muslim" and you've got McCarthyism. As in Sen. Joe, who called in actors from Lucille Ball to Judy Holliday simply because they had had naughty liberal thoughts. McCarthy found nothing on Holliday, but ruined her life and scores of others in Hollywood. What's next, internment camps? I wondered if that thought went through the mind of King's colleague, Rep. Doris Matsui. She was born in an internment camp in Arizona, where her parents were locked up during WWII for the crime of being of Japanese descent….Perhaps King's been reading Glenn Beck's book "The Real America," in which the statistical genius states, "Ten percent of Islam wants us dead." Make no mistake, homegrown terrorism is a real threat, but is hauling someone before Congress for being a Muslim the solution? King, an Irish-American involved in the Northern Ireland peace process, should know better. He was a prosecutor when four men, including Brooklynite George Harrison, were arrested for running 2,500 guns and a million rounds of ammunition to the IRA in Belfast. We didn't see him talking about the radicalization of Irish-Americans and calling for hearings, did we? (The New York Daily News)
Dakota City councilman places a sign on his property reading:
"Never Trust a Man Named Mohamed"
Dec 21: Dakota City (Nebrasca) councilman Bob Lane whipped up a controversy when he placed a sign on his property reading "Never Trust a Man Named Mohamed." The sign led several residents to lodge complaints at City Hall. Lane told the Journal he had removed the Mohamed sign after it had been up for more than a week and replaced it with a holiday message. "It is freedom of speech. Whenever we have a problem in the nation, the first name, the middle name or the last name is often Mohamed," said Lane, a multi-term councilman who was re-elected this year. Kathy Bruyere, who lives in South Sioux City and owns rental property in Dakota City near the sign, said "I find this very offensive." "We have a lot of East African workers who come to Tyson (Foods packing plant), and they are going to see this every day. A city councilman should not be representing the city of Dakota City in this manner. It is a manner that promotes hate and fear." Bruyere said she called the city of Dakota City and heard there had been several complaints. Yet, the city has no control over the sign because it is on private land and is an expression of free speech. (Sioux City Journal)
NJ dad: I was denied custody of son for being Muslim
Dec 22: A New Jersey father says he's being denied custody of his young solely because he's a Muslim. At a news conference, Muhammed Khalil, a green card holder originally from Egypt, told reporters that a Division of Youth and Family Services worker unleashed a barrage of insults at him in a crowded Paterson restaurant. He said the case worker asked him "where is your knife? You'll slit my throat" and also asked "where is your bomb strapped on you?" Another Muslim woman, Sandy Dahmra, who was with Khalil at the restaurant, was allegedly told "go back to your country." Both Khalil and Dahmra said they had other comments directed toward them including "terrorist," "Bin Laden lover" and "why don't you call your Allah." The case worker also publicly declared he would never get his boy back, Khalil said. Khalil has not seen his 6-year-old son since he was taken from his mother's home a year ago and placed with foster parents for reasons unknown because of privacy laws. Khalil was not living there at the time and is separated from the boy's mother. (CBS New York)
Ohio: Muslim woman reports attack near mosque
Dec 22: In Columbus, Ohio, the FBI has begun a civil-rights investigation because a Muslim woman said she was harassed and pepper-sprayed outside a West Side mosque on December 20. The 20-year-old Somali native, Saida J. Said, has lived in central Ohio for more than 10 years. She wears a niqab, a veil in which only the eyes are visible. She said she was stopped in her car at an intersection on Sullivant Avenue about 1:30p.m. Monday when she noticed that a man in a sport-utility vehicle was watching her. The man followed her to a bank and then into the parking lot outside the Abubakar Siddique Islamic Center at 3437 Sullivant Ave.The man pulled his white SUV behind her car. He got out and pepper-sprayed Said through her car's side window, yelled racial and religious slurs and profanities and then drove off, she said. She had headed for the mosque because she was scared and it shares a parking lot with the Westside Mall Cafe, where her brother was working, she said. "He wanted to hurt me," she said of the man who accosted her. "He didn't care who I was. He just cared that I was Muslim. He said, 'All you Muslims go back to where you came from.'" The incident was caught on the mosque's surveillance camera. Romin Iqbal, a lawyer with CAIR's Columbus chapter, said Said's ordeal is part of a pattern of hatred across the nation toward Muslims living in American society. (The Columbus Dispatch)
Three Anti-Islamic Security and Training Companies
Dec 22: Three security and training companies need special scrutiny from the U.S. Justice Department for their role in spreading bigotry within the ranks of law enforcement and counterterrorism agents. Their seminars are so biased and ideologically-driven that not a single dime of tax dollars should be allowed to fund their seminars. If tax dollars were being spent to train counterterrorism agents about the inherent violence of Christians or Jews, the public outcry and government response would be swift. Our nation's indifference and inaction writes its own indictment of our bigotry against Islam and Muslims. In the bigoted version of counter-terror training about the threat of "radical Islam" in American society every Muslim ends up being a scapegoat for our fears and anxieties in our post-9/11 nation. Here are brief sketches of three firms spreading bigotry through trainings:
1. Security Solutions International, LLC (SSI) is a Florida-based privately held company that takes an aggressive, entrepreneurial approach to spreading an anti-Muslim agenda. SSI called the conference a "central event in the First Responder calendar." DHS was listed as a Silver Sponsor of the conference, where participants heard SSI President Henry Morgenstern and David Gaubatz, the author of Muslim Mafia International, rant about alleged "Muslim Brotherhood infiltration" of the United States through front organizations that allegedly provide financial and ideological support to terrorists, influence politicians, and stifle the truth through litigation against hate crimes.
2. The Counter Intelligence Centre (CI Centre) functions as a training academy and speakers' bureau in the D.C. beltway. Here, veteran cold warriors mingle with a new breed of Muslim converts and terrorism pseudo-experts to propagandize about Global Jihadi Threat Doctrine--a conspiracy theory that renders all Muslims suspect and replaces the Soviet threat with a new existential, permanent threat from Islam.
3. International Counter Terrorism Officers Association (ICTOA) is a nonprofit founded by New York Police Department officers. The ICTOA gives speakers a pulpit to address a cross section of law enforcement. At this year's convention, Walid Shoebat gave a five-hour keynote speech peppered with vignettes of rape, gutting, beheading, burning, and killing of victims by Muslims, whom Shoebat alleges are all violent. Shockingly, not a single one of the hundred fusion-center analysts, sheriffs, police, or military personnel in attendance questioned any of Shoebat's theses. The same conference included speakers from the FBI's New York Field Office and the federal Terrorism Screening Center with Steven Landman of the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT). IPT is led by Steve Emerson, a former freelance journalist who has been repeatedly criticized for producing faulty analyses and having a distinctly anti-Islamic agenda. (Huffington Post)
Idaho man arrested for threatening Muslim woman
Dec 23: In Twins Fall, Idaho John C. Larsen, was arrested today for threatening a Muslim woman while she was shopping at a Walmart. The man approached the woman, who wore a headscarf and was with her two children, and asked if she was Muslim. When the woman said she was, Larsen told her he spent 2 1/2 years in Iraq and “my friends were killed by you, I was blown up by you,” according to court records. The assailant also shouted that the woman "didn't belong here in the U.S." and claimed he had killed Muslims and planned to kill more. He also told the Muslim woman that he had a concealed weapon. A loaded weapon was later found in his car. The 42-year-old man was arraigned Thursday (12/24) on a charge of felony malicious harassment. CAIR has called on state and federal law enforcement authorities to bring hate crime charges against Larsen. (Times-News/CAIR)
Top secret America: Billions used to spy on Americans
Dec 27: A large network of military and intelligence agencies working with large corporations; The government spending billions of dollars undermining citizens' privacy; A major database filled with names of everyday people; Self-described experts on terrorists; Battlefield technologies being used in neighborhoods. Though it sounds like something out of a futuristic film, it isn't. These points describe the current post 9/11 homeland security measures, which the government says is intended to protect citizens from terror threats, according to a recent ongoing series of investigative reports by The Washington Post. The Post released the report on the extensive security measures entitled "Top Secret America." The investigation was first released in July of 2010, and is a series that is being updated, with its latest installment "Monitoring America" released on December 20. The investigation goes into what the Washington Post calls the "fourth branch" of government, private intelligence communities that have the goal of defeating "violent extremists" according to the report. The organizations, 263 of which have been created or reorganized in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, receive billions of dollars from the government, and do not adhere to the usual standards of personal privacy, the report said.
Critics of the security measures find flaws, not only in the billions used to fund the operation, but the possibility of profiling innocent individuals. "The FBI is building a database with the names and certain personal information, such as employment history, of thousands of U.S. citizens and residents whom a local police officer or a fellow citizen believed to be acting suspiciously," the latest report said. This database is updated by "experts" who receive their expert status from themselves, not previous studies in institutions. They train FBI members in the understanding Islam, Muslims, and American Muslims."
Local community leaders and scholars are concerned about this intelligence apparatus leading to a McCarthyism practices of conducting "witch hunts" against American Muslims. The report indicates that Michigan has been a target of the intelligence community. "The current surveillance being conducted by the FBI, Homeland Security and the Defense Department on American citizens and residents invites abuses," said Dawud Walid, Executive Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations-Michigan. "It is disturbing that the intelligence community equates Michigan as a location for potential terrorists simply because of our large Muslim population." (The Arab Americans)
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