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Chronology of Islam in America (2011)
By Abdus Sattar Ghazali
September 2011
A Muslim school marks the tenth anniversary with memories of bias
Sept 1: According to Louis Cristollo, a research assistant and lecturer at Columbia University’s Teachers College who was an instructor at Al-Noor (a private Islamic school in the Sunset Park section of Brooklyn) in 1999, about 85 percent of the student-teacher contact time is devoted to secular instruction –- requirements set by the New York Department of Education. The remainder of instruction time is used to practice the teachings of Islam, which is a major selling point for many of the immigrant parents of Al-Noor students, including Eldomyati’s father. “Al-Noor students are left with the burden of having to defend their American-ness because they are more visible targets, especially the girls,” said Cristollo. “If you take a look at Muslim-American students in public schools, they have the opportunity to pass themselves off as another race or ethnicity. Al-Noor students cannot.” Cristollo believes that after 9/11 schools like Al-Noor were forced to look at themselves through their community and dispel the mystique of these private Islamic schools. “These are not places where training takes place for an army of militant radicals,” he said. He added that organizations like the debate team help students build a firm stance of religious identity that they can take onto college and eventually to the workplace. [The Brooklyn Ink]
The CIA and the NYPD are worrisome bedfellows
Sept 2: In an editorial - titled the CIA and the NYPD are worrisome bedfellows - Salt Lake Today said an extensive relationship between the Central Intelligence Agency and the New York Police Department, recently revealed by the Associated Press, might be an appropriate and effective counter-terrorism partnership or it might be illegal government interference in Americans' religious freedoms, an abuse of police power and a violation of laws forbidding the CIA from conducting intelligence activities on American soil. The AP investigation suggested that cooperation between the NYPD and the CIA already had blurred legal lines, lacked sufficient oversight and flouted rules of police conduct, charges the department and the agency have denied. It's not yet clear where the truth lies, the paper said adding:
“History offers many cautionary tales. In the 1960s and '70s — and again in the mid 2000s — the NYPD abused its powers by targeting student and anti-war groups, as well as protesters at political conventions, without legitimate reasons to believe they were breaking any laws. The CIA's illegal domestic spying activities during the 1960s and '70s are legendary in scale and scope and were the subject of countless damning hearings.” Salt Lake Today pointed out that successful counter-terrorism does not require violating the law and rules that protect people of all faiths and backgrounds in the United States. No one benefits if robust intelligence operations go rogue. The U.S. Justice Department should investigate the arrangement and determine which side of the line the NYPD and the CIA are on. [Salt Lake Today Editorial]
Link between 9/11, Muslim religion must stop
Sept 8: The head of a local Islamic-American organization says that after this year, except for remembering its victims, it’s time for America to move on from the 9/11 terrorist attacks. As WBBM Newsradio’s Bernie Tafoya reports, Ahmet Rehab of the Chicago chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations says many people still are under the false impression that Islam is a radical religion, and that its believers want to change the U.S. into an Islamic state. Rehab says the United States needs to move on from that. “It was always a gang of criminals, called al-Qaeda, who happened to be Muslim, who are trying to justify their acts through faith and through religion,” Rehab said. Rehab says the American people should not allow politicians, right-wingers and TV networks make them fear fellow Americans who are Muslim. He says the way to defeat fear is through hope, and the way to defeat terrorism is through American values and principles. [CBS Chicago]
Detroit billboards trumpet service of Muslims
Sept 8: Hours following the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, Dr. Ali Taqi headed to New York City with a group of Troy firefighters to help out at ground zero. "We were there for two days doing bucket brigade and search and rescue," said Taqi, 35, who is Muslim. "We helped out in any way we could." His role that day and in the community since have earned him a spot on billboards around Metro Detroit highlighting contributions American Muslims have made to society. The "Remember Through Service" billboard campaign comes just days before the nation marks the 10th anniversary of the terror attacks. The billboards sponsored by the Council on American-Islamic Relations-Michigan are up in Wayne and Oakland counties. "As we reflect on the 10th anniversary of the national tragedy of 9/11, it is important for all Americans to recognize the positive contributions that Muslims have always made to our society," said Dawud Walid, CAIR-Michigan executive director. "Our fellow Americans need to know that we are first-responders, law enforcement officers and military veterans who serve and protect our nation like citizens of other faiths." In addition to Taqi, the billboards feature a Detroit police officer, a Wayne County assistant prosecutor, an assistant principal at Canton Township public schools, a Vietnam veteran and a volunteer doctor at a free medical clinic in Wayne. "Muslims lost their lives and Muslims tried to help," said Taqi. Abdul Khaaliq Shabazz, a Detroit police officer, said he wanted to be part of the billboard campaign to show Muslims are not to be feared. [The Detroit News]
Obama’s unprecedented use of state secrets to defend religious profiling
Sept 8: The Bush administration infamously expanded the use of the state secrets doctrine, frequently invoking it to have entire lawsuits dismissed, rather than employing it to have individual pieces of evidence excluded from court, as it had been used in the past. As a candidate, President Obama criticized his predecessor’s repeated use of the privilege “to get cases thrown out of civil court.” Since taking office, however, Obama’s Justice Department has done the exact same thing. The Obama administration has continued to assert the state secrets privilege in lawsuits still pending from the Bush years, on cases involving warrantless wiretapping, detention, torture and rendition of terrorism suspects at CIA black sites. And the administration has been successful in getting lawsuits dismissed on those grounds. The Obama Justice Department has also asserted the privilege in a lawsuit over the government’s right to target and kill suspected terrorists, including U.S. citizens, outside a war zone and absent an imminent threat to national security.
Both administrations’ use of the privilege to cover up questionable government behavior is not unprecedented. Indeed, in the landmark 1953 Supreme Court case United States v. Reynolds, the government invoked the state secrets privilege to circumvent the disclosure of an accident report in a wrongful death action involving the military. The court bought the government’s argument, but when the document was declassified in 2004, it was found to contain no sensitive information about national security whatsoever. Rather, it contained information proving government negligence. The Obama administration’s invocation of the state secrets privilege, however, is unprecedented, transparency advocates assert. In previous and ongoing suits where the doctrine has been invoked, plaintiffs were seeking damages for a past violation of rights; the constitutional violations described in the Fazaga v. FBI are ongoing.
“The biggest difference is that here we have an ongoing constitutional violation against American citizens on American soil, and if courts can dismiss challenges to such ongoing violations on the grounds that…the program is secret, then that’s fundamentally inconsistent with very basic structural protections we have in our democratic function of government,” said Ahilan Arulanantham, deputy legal director of ACLU in southern California and a lead attorney on the case. “Our system virtually never allows the courthouse doors to be closed to an ongoing violation of the Constitution.” Arulanantham also argues the government’s claim that sensitive national security information is at risk doesn’t hold up, given how widely reported Monteilh’s informant activities in “Operation Flex” have been. “There is nothing secret about the fact that the FBI was employing Craig Monteilh and that he surveiled hundreds or thousands of Muslims and gathered information on them.”
Since the lawsuit was filed, further evidence has emerged of similarly indiscriminate surveillance practices. When the northern California chapter of the ACLU and the Asian Law Caucus filed a Freedom of Information Act request about government surveillance of American Muslim communities, they obtained a PowerPoint presentation used by the FBI to train new recruits. The presentation included estimates of the number of mosques in America, and listed states with the largest Muslim populations. It also presented a troubling and simplistic depiction of Muslims and Arabs, and highlighted the work of career Islamophobe Robert Spencer in its recommended reading list. [by Asraa Musufa - Colorlines]
Pearl Harbor and September 11: Japanese internment and Islamophobia
Sept 9: In the aftermath of 9/11 the Japanese American Citizens League was the first to speak out against the blanket condemnation of Muslims. Their families knew very well the suffering and humiliation caused by blaming every member of a religious or ethnic group for the crimes of a few. The Council on American Islamic Relations and the Nikkei for Civil Rights and Redress currently special classes for 70 Japanese and Muslim students in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle. Spokeswoman Patty Wada said that the discrimination against Muslims is “sad and disappointing. This mentality just keeps repeating itself.” Today Japanese and Muslim Americans share many achievements in common. They have higher incomes than the average American and they both value education very much. Muslim American women have more college degrees than their male peers, and Japanese American students have the best showing in advanced placement than any other ethnic group.
We Idahoans are most familiar with the internment camp in Jerome County where 9,000 Japanese were imprisoned from 1942-45. After their release some residents of the camp went on to be become notable writers, composers, artists, attorneys, and businessmen. One was an Oregon State football player who was prevented from finishing the season, and another was an optometrist who was instrumental in introducing contact lenses. Less known even for those of us who live in Northern Idaho is the Kooskia Work Camp where 256 Japanese men were housed and helped construct parts of State Highway 12. These men volunteered for this assignment and received wages for their work. State highway officials were impressed with the engineering prowess of their Asian workers. The men came from all over the Western Hemisphere: one had worked for Charlie Chaplin, another had set up the Buddhist Temple in New York, and several came from Latin America where they had been kidnapped by U.S. agents. Today we call this “extraordinary rendition.” The Kooskia prisoners were the only Japanese Americans who were governed by the 1929 Geneva Convention, which gave them more rights than their compatriots in the other camps. University of Idaho archaeologists have uncovered hundreds of artifacts from their daily lives and there is evidence that people in the surrounding communities came to respect the peaceful, hard-working Asians in their midst.
Returning to the first Jew in America, it is worth noting that our Puritan Fathers did give Solomon Franco a small living allowance. This gesture fulfilled a portion of the Middle Eastern law of hospitality, which requires that you feed and house even your enemies. They, however, violated it quite dramatically by banning Franco for no good reason. The name of the God to whom both Jesus and Muslims pray is the same: allah in Arabic and alalah in Jesus’ Western Aramaic. According to Jesus the sin of the residents of Sodom and Gomorrah was not homosexual rape but brutal inhospitality (Matt. 10: 5-15). Earlier in the story Abraham had welcomed the same divine visitors by laying out a fine meal of bread and veal (Gen.18) The literal meaning of the word “Hebrew” is “one who crosses over from one land to another,” and the ancient Hebrews were always dependent on the kindness of strangers. The Hittites were kind enough to give “the resident alien” Abraham a plot of land for Sarah’s tomb (Gen. 23:4), and in Exodus we find the injunction: “Do not oppress the alien because you were aliens in the land of Egypt” (23:9). How did our Puritan Fathers and today’s Islamophobs, all close readers of the Bible, miss this fundamental moral message? [Nick Gier – www.pocatelloshops.com]
Muslim & Arab groups fight bias
Sept 9: Prior to Sept. 11, 2001, the American Arab Anti-Discrimination handled about 200-300 cases per year mostly on employment-related discrimination issues, according to Imad Hamad, the ADC executive director of the Michigan chapter. That figure ballooned to more than 600 cases in the years following Sept. 11, 2001, and the scope of the issues became more diverse.When it came to the discrimination, Hamad said, the attitude became “So what?” “Before 9/11, people that we approached about discrimination issues usually were unaware and they wanted to try to fix the problem, but after it just kind of became something that people would openly admit,” he said. It’s a struggle that continues today for Arabs and Arab-Muslims, but one that is evolving.
Dawud Walid was named executive director of the Council on American Islamic Relations-Michigan at almost the halfway-point of the decade since Sept. 11, 2001. “Muslims have been de facto discriminated against because of actors like this (the subway bombers) and we have been put into a position of defending ourselves against things we have no connection to,” Walid said.Pre-Sept. 11, 2001, both Walid and Hamad said the cases their organizations dealt with were primarily involving discrimination by private organizations and individuals. Since then, there has been a big shift toward governmental discrimination.
National security agencies became a fixture in Middle Eastern communities throughout the country, and in heavily Arab Dearborn, the effects were myriad. Paid informants infiltrated mosques, Arabs and Muslims were detained only to have cases thrown out, and general distrust of the government among Middle Easterners became rampant. “There was definitely a chilling effect in mosques, in schools, and in the community as a whole,” Walid said of the government surveillance. ADC and CAIR have made inroads with these federal agencies, said Walid and Hamad, with things like stakeholder forums and discussion groups. FBI spokeswoman Sandra Berchtold acknowledged the unease, but said it seems to be getting better. “They (Muslims/Arabs) are not hesitant to call us anymore and tell us their concerns,” she said. “And Special Agent (Andrew) Arena (leader of the FBI Detroit field office) has met tirelessly with leaders of the community to hear their concerns, going to dinners and forums and things like that.”
Politicized Islamophobia
And while the governmental relations have made strides there is a new battle to fight, said the Arab and Muslim civil rights leaders: politicized Islamophobia. Starting largely in 2008, there has been a growing trend of Republican politicians questioning Muslim loyalty to the United States and the focus has often turned back to Dearborn. A U.S. Senate candidate from Nevada said during a campaign stop in 2010 that Dearborn was under Shari’a law. a notion that parroted by GOP presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich, the former U.S. House speaker. “What we’re seeing is a mainstreaming of Islamophobia,” Walid said. “It poses a difficult challenge when you have people that are leaders making these kinds of statements.” Hamad echoed Walid’s assessment. “The struggle definitely isn’t over,” he said. “In fact, I only see it becoming more difficult.” [Press & Guide Newspapers]
Muslim American leaders say community has gone into hiding after 9/11
Sept 9: Many Muslim Americans have kept a low profile in the decade since 9/11. Terrorism has cast a shadow of fear over their communities and places of worship--fear of being suspected, accused or harassed.In the Philadelphia region, Muslim leaders say their community has become quiet and subdued. On Sept. 11, 2001, college freshman Moein Khawaja was watching the attacks unfold on television, and the same thought kept popping into his head. "I kept thinking 'Please, please don't let it be Muslims, because if it is, this changes everything.' And sure enough, it did,'" remembers Khawaja. Today, Khawaja is the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations' Philadelphia chapter. He says the initial shock, pain and anger he felt when the terrorists turned out to be Muslim extremists has stayed with him. "To this day, I feel like al-Qaida attacked me twice, once by murdering so many fellow citizens, but the second time by smearing my faith," he said. Khawaja wanted to explain to people what his faith meant to him, how it guided him in being a good son, and good citizen. But many fellow Muslims wanted to retreat, and wait for the storm to pass.
Prejudice, suspicion, and the fear of being associated with radicals also have silenced certain conversations within the Muslim community, says Moein Khawaja. "Mosque leadership doesn't want to be associated with anybody who expresses anything extreme," said Khawaja. "So whenever someone expresses something out of the ordinary, they are asked to leave. Where there might be an opportunity to talk to somebody, get them to calm down, but instead, they are asked to leave." He says Muslim American leaders are working hard to reach out, educate, and connect. They are encouraging members in their community to speak up, be active citizens, and describe who they are and what they stand for, rather than being defined by a culture of fear.
Marwan Kreidie is the executive director of the Philadelphia Arab American Development Corp. In 2001, he was working for the city and immediately started to develop a plan to protect mosques and stores owned by Muslims in case of backlash. He says he disagreed with members of the Muslim community who wanted to keep a low profile. He felt it was important to show that they were Americans who didn't support radicals.Immediately following the attacks, Kreidie says there was an outpouring of support. Philadelphians stopped by Muslim-owned stores or mosques to embrace their Muslim neighbors. In the decade since, Kreidie said, many members of the Muslim American community have become scared. They have experienced prejudice and discrimination, yet they won't speak up. For example, said Kreidie, many kids are bullied in their schools. "The problem is, it's very difficult for me to get one of these students, or their parents, to confront or change the situation," Kreidie said. "They feel like they are going to be deported, or they are going to lose their rights for this or that, which they won't, but their feeling is 'I don't want to bug the system.'" But that very attitude, says Kreidie, is at the heart of the problem. "The great thing about America is it works if everybody is active and participating as citizens, what's not great is when people withdraw from society," he said. "I think you see people doing that and being quiet and not bringing up their points of view." [Newsworks.org]
Texas Muslims profess love for their country
Sept 9: In the years after the terrorist attacks, some Muslims say they have been treated shabbily by a minority of Americans and by news media that cannot seem to separate the words Muslim and terrorist. But Dr. Nizam Peerwani, the Tarrant County medical examiner and a Muslim, said Muslims love America, a point also made by Jamal Qaddura, a Muslim community spokesman and former president of the DFW Islamic Educational Center in Arlington. Muslims living in America, Qaddura said, have religious, civil and political privileges that people living in predominantly Muslim countries do not enjoy. A recent poll underscores that view.
Love for America is deep and widespread among the Muslims living in the United States, according to a recent Pew Research Center poll. About 8 in 10 Muslims say they are satisfied with their lives and have positive views of their communities. And a majority of Muslims (56 percent) felt that the United States is headed in the right direction, while only 23 percent of the general public agreed, according to the poll. About 7 in 10 Muslims surveyed said life is better in the United States than in most Muslim countries, and only 16 percent of the Muslims surveyed said other Americans have been unfriendly to them. But other polls suggest that nearly a third of Americans do not think that Muslims should enjoy the same freedoms as other Americans. And more than 55 percent of Muslims interviewed by Pew said life became more difficult after the collapse of the towers.
Adrian Murray, director of the Fort Worth chapter of Act for America, a self-described network of organizations designed to inform people about ‘radical’ Islam, said that even if only a small percentage of Muslims are radicalized, they represent an enormous threat to the United States. It is that threat within Islam that Act for America is trying to warn America about, Murray said. But local Muslims say that Act for America is among several echo chambers where people can hear that Islam serves as a breeding ground for those who would harm America. That makes Muslims the target of hatred and suspicion, Qaddura said.
Strains of racism and xenophobia have been inserted into anti-Muslim rhetoric for the past 10 years, said Sahar Aziz, an associate professor of law at Texas Wesleyan University in Fort Worth. Those negative attitudes became apparent during the discussions about the ground zero mosque in New York, which was not a mosque and was not at ground zero, Aziz said. Stereotyping and misinformation are also apparent in the push by lawmakers in some states to prohibit judges and courts from using Shariah law, she said. Oklahoma has passed such legislation, and in Texas, state Rep. Leo Berman, R-Tyler, introduced a bill in this year's legislative session to ban state courts from considering religious or cultural laws like Shariah. The bill died in the Senate. Shariah is a system of personal beliefs and practices that some, not all, Muslims subscribe to, but the outgrowth of anti-Shariah legislation is a response to fears that Muslims are cultural imperialists, Aziz said. "Propagating false and exaggerated claims about Muslims has become a political asset, a means of garnering political votes," Aziz said. "If it were not Shariah, it would be something else." She said it is fear-mongering by politicians. "It reflects poorly on us as a society," she said. [Star-Telegram]
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