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Chronology of Islam in America (2008)
By Abdus Sattar Ghazali
January 2008
CAIR launches 2008 election effort
Jan 2: The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), today launched an effort designed to increase Muslim participation in this year’s state and national elections. The initiative by CAIR includes a website and handbook intended to encourage civic participation and empower Muslims to play a more effective role in the political process. The CAIR 2008 Election website provides the latest news and opinions relating to Muslims and elections nationwide. It also includes positions of the presidential candidates on key issues, examples of anti-Muslim rhetoric from candidates for all levels of public office and links to the websites of Muslims running for public office. CAIR has also published a new Civic Participation Handbook that provides Muslim voters with best practices and step-by-step guides for everything from holding voter registration drives to making the most of a meeting with elected officials. (CAIR Bulletin)
American Muslims Boost Political Activism
Jan 4: Those seeking the White House in 2008 may want to take note of an increasingly active and growing group of voters - American Muslims. Muslims are now viewed as potential swing-voters in key battleground states such as Florida, Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. For example, more than 60 Muslim get-out-the-vote volunteers in an Ohio election center called 25,000 phone numbers of registered Muslim voters in that state in the two weeks preceding the 2004 election. In 2006, more than 1,000 new Muslim voters were registered in a single Illinois congressional district. Some 200 Muslim volunteers then turned out to knock on doors, make phone calls and participate in Election Day poll watching in that district. Political confidence of the estimated seven million Muslims in the United States also received a tremendous boost in 2004 with the election of Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), the first Muslim in Congress. But despite growing numbers and increased political activism, the American Muslim community is relatively new to presidential politics. Efforts to form a Muslim voting bloc only began within the last decade. (CAIR)
MPAC joins ACLU in urging senate majority leader to oppose warrantless wiretapping
Jan 8: This week, the Muslim Public Affairs Council joined the American Civil Liberties Union in signing onto a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), urging him to introduce to the Senate floor the Judiciary Committee's version of the FISA Amendments Act of 2007, rather than the version approved in the Intelligence Committee which would immensely diminish the privacy and constitutional rights of millions of Americans. The FISA Amendments Act of 2007 (S. 2248) amends the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA). FISA allows the federal government to physically search individuals and implement electronic surveillance procedures, and to collect intelligence information between or among foreign powers on U.S. territory. The Act was amended by the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001 in order to include terrorism on behalf of groups not supported by a foreign government. The bill passed in the Senate Judiciary Committee would restrict the investigative powers of U.S. officials into the private communications of Americans, which have until now been abused under the guise of the FISA Act. In the last seven years, Americans have watched as their Fourth Amendment right to protection against unreasonable searches and seizures has been diminished. (MPAC bulletin)
MPAC issues policy guide to the 2008 elections
Jan 8: In an effort to promote greater awareness and participation among Muslim American voters, MPAC today issued a guide to the candidates and issues in the Presidential election. "Activate 08: MPAC's Policy Guide to the 2008 Elections" examines five key issues in the election and provides Muslim Americans with the presidential candidates' position in their own words. The issues include national security, healthcare, civil rights/civil liberties, the Iraq war, and U.S.-Muslim World relations. The guide also provides campaigns with key information on engaging Muslim voters. MPAC continues to call upon the presidential candidates to publicly engage with Muslim American voters, and offers information to Muslim voters without any endorsements. The best way to gain recognition from candidates is to engage them on important issues and not provide them blanket endorsements based on their popularity. (MPAC Bulletin)
Prof. Cole criticizes "preventive paradigm" in administration's counterterrorism efforts
Jan 11: Award-winning author and Georgetown Law School Professor David Cole spoke at a special event co-sponsored by the Muslim Public Affairs Council at the UCLA School of Law entitled "Guilty Until Proven Innocent: Civil Rights Abuses Against Muslim Americans and Middle Easterners." Professor Cole discussed his latest book Less Safe, Less Free: Why America Is Losing the War on Terror. He described how the Administration has shifted towards a "preventative paradigm" since 9/11, targeting individuals or groups based on predictions of behavior rather than on evidence of what has been done. Cole cited examples such as preventive detention measures, coercive interrogations, and the war in Iraq. (MPAC Bulletin)
Imagine a world without Islam, the world would still be left with
the main forces that drive today’s conflicts, says Graham Fuller
Jan 13: Take away Islam, and the world would still be left with the main forces that drive today’s conflicts, including colonialism, cross-national ideologies, ethnic conflicts and terrorism, says Graham Fuller, a professor of history at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia (Canada) and a former Vice-Chairman of the National Intelligence Council at the CIA in charge of long-range strategic forecasting. In his article entitled A World Without Islam, published in Foreign Policy, Fuller believes that given our intense current focus on terrorism, war, and rampant anti-Americanism it’s vital to understand the true sources of these crises. He poses a question, if Islam is the source of the problem or does it tend to lie with other less obvious and deeper factors? Mr. Fuller ponders a litany of history’s major battles to drive home his message that while Islam might be a convenient culprit, but global strife, past and present, can’t be blamed on any one religion. Europeans would still have wanted the spoils of the Middle East and launched the Crusades albeit under a different banner. It is unlikely that Christian inhabitants of the Middle East would have welcomed the stream of European fleets and their merchants backed by Western guns, he says adding that Imperialism would have prospered in the region’s complex ethnic mosaic--the raw materials for the old game of divide and rule. And Europeans still would have installed the same pliable local rulers to accommodate their needs. Today, the U.S. occupation of Iraq would be no more welcome to Iraqis if they were Christian, Fuller says. The West still would have tried various ways to get control of oil-rich areas, according to Fuller. But Middle Eastern Christians would not have welcomed imperial Western oil companies, backed by their European vice-regents, diplomats, intelligence agents, and armies, any more than Muslims did. Look at the long history of Latin American reactions to American domination of their oil, economics, and politics. The Middle East would have been equally keen to create nationalist anti-colonial movements to wrest control of their own soil, markets, sovereignty, and destiny from foreign grip--just like anti-colonial struggles in Hindu India, Confucian China, Buddhist Vietnam, and a Christian and animist Africa. On the current Israeli-Palestinian problem, Fuller believes that Jews would have still sought a homeland outside Europe and the Zionist movement would still have emerged and sought a base in Palestine even if the Middle East was Christian. Why, because, he explains, it were Christians who shamelessly persecuted Jews for more than a millennium, culminating in the Holocaust. (AMP Report)
Continued on Page II
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