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Chronology of Islam in America (2013)
By Abdus Sattar Ghazali
November 2013
The Criminalization of Independent Journalism: Truth in Media Categorized as Terrorism
Nov 3: The U.S. government is targeting whistleblowers in order to keep its hypocrisy secret … so that it can keep on doing the opposite of what it tells other countries to do. As part of this effort to suppress information which would reveal the government’s hypocrisy, the American government – like the British government – is treating journalists as terrorists. Journalism is not only being criminalized in America, but investigative reporting is actually treated like terrorism. The government admits that journalists could be targeted with counter-terrorism laws. For example, after Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges, journalist Naomi Wolf, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and others sued the government to enjoin the NDAA’s allowance of the indefinite detention of Americans – the judge asked the government attorneys 5 times whether journalists like Hedges could be indefinitely detained simply for interviewing and then writing about bad guys. The government refused to promise that journalists like Hedges won’t be thrown in a dungeon for the rest of their lives without any right to talk to a judge After the government’s spying on the Associated Press made it clear to everyone that the government is trying to put a chill journalism, the senior national-security correspondent for Newsweek tweeted: Serious idea. Instead of calling it Obama’s war on whistleblowers, let’s just call it what it is: Obama’s war on journalism. [Global Research]
FBI monitored anti-war website in error for six years, documents show
Nov 6: The FBI monitored a prominent anti-war website for years, in part because agents mistakenly believed it had threatened to hack the bureau’s own site. Internal documents show that the FBI’s monitoring of antiwar.com, a news and commentary website critical of US foreign policy, was sparked in significant measure by a judgment that it had threatened to “hack the FBI website” and involved a formal assessment of the “threat” the site posed to US national security. But antiwar.com never threatened to hack the FBI website. Heavily redacted FBI documents, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and shared with the Guardian, show that Eric Garris, the site’s managing editor, passed along to the bureau a threat he received against his own website. Months later, the bureau characterized antiwar.com as a potential perpetrator of a cyberattack against the bureau’s website – a rudimentary error that persisted for years in an FBI file on the website. The mistake appears to have been a pillar of the FBI’s reasoning for monitoring a site that is protected by the first amendment’s free-speech guarantees. “The improper investigation led to Garris and Raimondo being flagged in other documents, and is based on inappropriate targeting and sloppy intelligence work the FBI relied on in its initial memo,” said Julia Mass, an attorney with the ACLU of northern California, which filed the Freedom of Information Act request, and shared the documents with the Guardian. [The Guardian]
Muslim inmate given injunction to grow beard
Nov 15: A Muslim man must be allowed to grow a beard while he petitions the Supreme Court over prison grooming policies, the justices said. Gregory Houston Holt aka Abdul Maalik Muhammad says he must grow a beard but that the grooming policy for the Arkansas Department of Corrections allows only trimmed moustaches or quarter-inch beards for a diagnosed dermatological problem. Holt had filed suit under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, but a federal judge in Pine Bluff dismissed the action after learning of the other ways in which Arkansas lets Holt practice his religion. [Court House News]
Muslim woman bombarded with slurs at New School
Nov 15: A New Jersey Muslim woman has slapped The New School with a lawsuit alleging she had to quit her job there in March after being routinely bombarded with racist slurs by co-workers — and was even ordered not to wear her Hijab to work. Jamilah Moudiab filed a civil-rights lawsuit in Manhattan federal court that also alleges her supervisor, Monique Ngozi Nri, told her shortly after she was hired in 2011 that the Manhattan university is a “religious free zone” and that “if [she] wants to stay at The New School, [she] must not wear a headdress.” Moudiab, who quit her job as an international student advisor in March, claims mischievous co-workers even anonymously placed a Christian cross and Rosary beads on her desk to “further castigate” her Muslim beliefs. Among the other complaints in the suit is that the Clifton, NJ-resident was harassed by co-workers for putting up photos of Trayvon Martin after he was shot to death by cops. She claims she was scolded by Nri for expressing her belief to co-workers that Martin was “murdered for walking,” adding Nri felt the Florida teen was the “aggressor” with authorities in the high-profile shooting. [New York Post]
Glenn Greenwald: Groups who question his ties to CAIR are helping government erode freedom
Nov 16: Glenn Greenwald, the civil rights attorney and journalist who helped reveal evidence that the U.S. was spying on its citizens and allies, said it’s crucial to safeguard the civil liberties of American Muslims to ensure the rights of all Americans. Greenwald, who published a series of articles based on documents provided by former National Security Administration contractor Edward Snowden, served as the keynote speaker Nov. 16 at the annual “Faith in Freedom” banquet hosted by the Los Angeles chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. He spoke to the group by video, rather than in person, citing concerns about possible attempts by American officials to prosecute him for his journalistic work. Greenwald also noted reports, columns and statement issued by groups who questioned his ties to CAIR, portraying his speech as a “propaganda coup” for a group that some right-wing critics have described as having ties to terrorist organizations. Other critics have called for Greenwald’s arrest and questioned whether he hated America. “What really makes me genuinely, in all seriousness, happy about those kind of reactions is that it just underscores for me the kind of demonization that American Muslims are routinely subjected to, even to this day,” Greenwald said. He said CAIR protects the foundational political values of the United States by standing up for Muslims who are singled out for persecution, saying that each period in history where rights have been eroded had a specific group targeted as a threat to security. “Always, certain marginalized groups are targeted for these abuses in the first instance, whether they be Native Americans or African-Americans or women or communists in the 1950s or Latinos in the immigration debate, and now American Muslims in the wake of 9/11,” Greenwald said. He said totalitarian states rely on indifference to continue civil rights abuses. “They want people to believe that as long as these abuses stay confined to one specific, marginalized minority group, then there’s no reason to object to them and there’s lots of reasons to support these abuses,” Greenwald said. That’s not just morally twisted, he said, but it endangers everyone’s freedoms. “Abuses of liberties never stay confined to the single group to which they’re originally applied,” Greenwald said. “They always spread far beyond the original application, and by allowing it to happen to American Muslims, now we allow civil liberties of all Americans to be degraded and threatened and jeopardized.” [By Travis Gettys - Raw Story]
Montgomery schools take no action on Muslim holidays
Nov 16: Montgomery County (Virginia) school leaders adopted a calendar for next school year without voting on the broader question of giving a day off to students for one of the major Muslim holy days. But members of the Montgomery County Board of Education also signaled that they would continue to study the issue and asked that school staff look into creating fixed standards for granting such requests. The decision to adopt the calendar, in a 5 to 2 vote, followed a strong push by Muslim community leaders in recent months to request that schools be closed for the Islamic holiday of Eid al-Adha, which fell on Oct. 15 this year. Muslim leaders pointed out that Montgomery schools are closed for Christian and Jewish holidays, arguing that it was a matter of fairness. But as the issue was considered last week, school leaders noted that Islamic holidays will fall on non-school days in 2014. Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of Ramadan, will be celebrated in July. Eid al-Adha, known as the festival of the sacrifice, falls on Oct. 4, a Saturday. [Washington Post]
Fla. School Board resists censorship of textbook on Islam
Nov 18: A Florida school board rejected calls by Islamophobes to drop a textbook offering basic historical information about Islam. Today members of the Democratic Party and moderate Republicans at a school board meeting in Deltona, Fla., to counter an organized protest against the textbook. Local students presented the board with a petition signed by some 500 classmates rejecting the call for censorship. Most of those who spoke at the school board meeting spoke for religious tolerance and against censoring textbooks. The school board has issued a fact sheet refuting the false claims of the anti-Islam protesters, while one Republican school board member has ridiculed the anti-Islam hysteria promoted by the book's opponents. On Novemberr 6, 2013,, Orlando Sentinel reported: Rick Sarmiento, a 49-year-old self-proclaimed "full-time" activist, is behind an effort to get Volusia school officials to review and possibly change its "World History" textbook because he and other protesters say it focuses too much on Islam. The book contains a 32-page chapter on "Muslim Civilizations," according to the school district, but references Christianity in seven other chapters. His anti-textbook effort came to a head on Nov 5 evening with dozens of protesters gathering before a School Board meeting with some brandishing anti-Islamic signs. School officials then received news from the U.S. Department of Justice that raised "substantial security concerns" and opted to reschedule the meeting. [AMP Report]
Court documents reveal NSA disregard for privacy restrictions
Nov 19: Newly declassified court documents indicate that the National Security Agency shared its trove of American bulk email and internet data with other government agencies in violation of specific court-ordered procedures to protect Americans’ privacy. The dissemination of the sensitive data transgressed both the NSA’s affirmations to the secret surveillance court about the extent of the access it provided, and prompted incensed Fisa court judges to question both the NSA’s truthfulness and the value of the now-cancelled program to counter-terrorism. While the NSA over the past several months has portrayed its previous violations of Fisa court orders as “technical” violations or inadvertent errors, the oversharing of internet data is described in the documents as apparent widespread and unexplained procedural violations.
“NSA’s record of compliance with these rules has been poor,” wrote judge John Bates in an opinion released on Monday night in which the date is redacted. “Most notably, NSA generally disregarded the special rules for disseminating United States person information outside of NSA until it was ordered to report such disseminations and to certify to the [Fisa court] that the required approval had been obtained.” In addition to improperly permitting access to the email and internet data – intended to include information such as the “to” “from” and “BCC” lines of an email – Bates found that the NSA engaged in “systemic overcollection”, suggesting that content of Americans’ communications was collected as well. Privacy experts have long noted that email metadata is inherently content-rich, as it will show interactions with businesses; or political affiliations such as listserv membership. [The Guardian]
Discrimination charges filed for Muslim woman ejected from event
Nov 19: The Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-MN) today filed charges of discrimination with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights on behalf of Rania Elsweisy, a Muslim woman who was physically escorted out of a public event in Chisholm, Minnesota because of her religion. On September 28, 2013, Elsweisy, who wears the religious headscarf, was physically escorted out of the Annual Hibbing Area Women’s Retreat at the request of event speaker, Cynthia Khan. Khan is the Director of the Human Care and Community Development at People of the Book Ministries. Elsweisy was initially welcomed to the event by organizers. Prior to her arrival, she called a phone number listed as a contact for the Annual Hibbing Area Women’s Retreat informing them that she was driving to the event from Minneapolis. She was given directions and told that event organizers looked forward to her arrival. Elsweisy completed the registration, paid the entrance fee and was given a nametag. As she was entering the auditorium, Khan approached event volunteers and asked that they remove the Muslim woman from the premises. When Elsweisy explained that she was only there to listen and would not interrupt the speech or disrupt the event, Khan said she did not want a Muslim in the audience. Khan told her that videos and materials “offensive” to Muslims will be shown and distributed during her talk. Despite her objections to the unfair treatment due to her religion, Elsweisy was physically escorted outside by event volunteers. [CAIR]
Training Cops to Fear Somalis and Muslims
Nov 21: A law enforcement training on terrorism was offered in Minnesota today. This training was organized by former Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher of the controversial new Center for Somali History Studies. Yes, terrorism is a real threat to our nation and law enforcement needs to be educated about that threat. As an educator and a concerned citizen wishing for the safety and well-being of every civilian, I support educational trainings. Yet, I am concerned about this training. Is the training meant to strengthen our law enforcement or is it meant to selectively create a circle within our nation that hardens our deep-seated prejudices and biases to keep the Muslim community marginalized and outside this circle? American Muslim leaders and leading organizations have been very vocal and firm in unequivocally condemning terrorism and terrorist organizations, including Al Shabab. Last month, Minnesota imams were the first to collectively condemn the horrific attack on the Westgate shopping mall in Kenya. The Council on American Islamic Relations, a leading civil rights organization, has repeatedly stated that “any action that harms innocent civilians is reprehensible and deserves condemnation.” Muslim organizations and scholars are quite vocal condemning terrorism whenever it happens, wherever it happens, and whoever commits it......Fletcher has organized controversial trainings for law enforcement in the past. Concerned community members felt the trainings did not distinguish between terrorists and mainstream Muslims and Somalis. The training flyer referred to the terrorist organization Al Shabaab as an "Islamic" organization. It included pictures of Somali men with AK-47s on it with the headline, "Understanding the People of Somalia."..... CAIR-MN reported today that a Muslim contacted the civil rights organization to report that he was barred from this controversial law enforcement training seminar on terrorism. The man reported that he approached the registration table, registered his name and email address, and was provided with a folder containing training materials and the agenda. However, he said that Bob Fletcher then approached him and asked him to leave. Fletcher allegedly told him that the training was by invitation only, mostly for law enforcement and for Fletcher’s Somali friends. Yet, this appears to be pretext. The event was publicized in public venues, including the main page of the organization’s website. The website includes an online registration page open to the community, along with a link to Paypal. This raises a serious red flag: Omission and suppression of alternative voices, hence the arguments are not complete or sound......When sources and experts are biased or have a self-interest, chances are numbers and arguments are being used to manipulate instead of educate the audience. This is not within the interest of our nation. We must stand against such trainings. Profiling, misrepresenting and alienating an entire community does not help combat terrorism. [By Fedwa Wazwaz Star Tribune]
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