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Chronology of Islam in America (2010)
By Abdus Sattar Ghazali
September 2010
CAIR national PSA campaign challenges growing Islamophobia
Sept 1: The Council on Muslim American Relations (CAIR), America's largest Muslim civil liberties and advocacy organization today launched a nationwide public service announcement (PSA) campaign featuring Muslim 9/11 first responders. The campaign is designed to challenge the growing anti-Muslim bigotry in American society. A CAIR press release said that two of the three PSAs, which will be distributed today and tomorrow by satellite to television stations nationwide and online through social media sites, feature Muslim first responders to the 9/11 terror attacks, with the theme "9/11 happened to us all." Copies of the PSAs will also be mailed to selected television stations, with a focus on stations in New York and Florida. The third PSA features Muslim, Jewish and Christian leaders describing the "golden rule" as expressed by their respective faiths -- and ends with the phrase, "We have more in common than we think." That PSA is designed to show the commonalities between faiths and to challenge those who -- like the members of a Florida church who plan to burn Qurans on September 11 -- would divide America along religious lines.
It may be recalled that a 2005 CAIR public service announcement (PSA) rejecting terrorism and religious extremism and was seen by some 10 million television viewers nationwide. That PSA, called "Not in the Name of Islam," featured ordinary American Muslims stating "that those who commit acts of terror in the name of Islam are betraying the teachings of the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad." Other national American Muslim organizations took part in the news conference outlined each group's individual and joint initiatives designed to promote religious freedom, challenge growing anti-Muslim bigotry in American society and to mark the anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks.The other Muslim organizations that took part in today’s news conference included: Coordinating Council of Muslim Organizations in the Washington Area (CCMO), Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) and MAS Freedom. (CAIR)
Indian Muslim journalist denied U.S. visa
Sept 4: The US embassy in New Delhi has denied visa to Zia Haq, a Muslim journalist, working with the Hindustan Times, The Hindu reported today. Zia Haq was part of a a seven-member journalist delegation. All other members of the delegation were promptly granted visas. The delegation was invited to participate in a week-long technology and farm show that began on August 28 at Iowa in the United States. Zia Haq, an Assistant Editor with Hindustan Times, was quoted as saying that “I can't go the U.S., my name is Haq.” He says that what prompted visa denial was “My religion? My faith? My views?” Mr. Haq was not the only victim of religious profiling. In September 2008, fU.S. visa authorities delayed processing the application of Haider Hussain, Editor of Assam's largest daily, Asomiya Pratidin. The astonishing thing about this case is that Mr. Hussain was part of the media delegation accompanying Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to the U.S. and France. Like Mr. Haq, he was the only one from the group picked out for additional background checks. In the summer of 2009, a Muslim engineer working with a North-Eastern hydro-power PSU was the only one of a delegation of engineers on a visit to the Hoover Dam who did not get a U.S. visa. The engineer was allowed to join his team after a strong representation from the delegation. More recently, in June this year, Faiyaz Khudsar, a wildlife biologist with 15 years experience in wildlife conservation and working with Delhi University, shot off a letter to U.S. Ambassador Timothy Roemer, saying he alone was denied a visa from a group of 11 people selected from India for a training program on tiger conservation at the Smithsonian facilities in Virginia. As he told CNN-IBN: “Probably, it is my name or religion — I do not know. It was an important visit.”
The subject of U.S. visas for Muslims came up at a February 2010 meeting between Delhi's Muslim intelligentsia and U.S. Special Representative for Muslim countries, Farah Pandith. The gathering told her plainly that the Obama administration had fallen short of expectations on granting visas to Indian Muslims. Ghulam Nabi Qazi, Vice-Chancellor of the Jamia Hamdard University, said that as a scientist he would only believe the Obama administration if there was evidence of change on the ground. He said while he did not want to make a fuss, he had himself been denied a U.S visa while working as a director with the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). (The Hindu)
Quran burning stunt canceled after Pentagon calls pastor
Sept 9: Under tremendous pressure from U.S. officials all the way up to President Barack Obama, a Florida pastor today called off a Quran burning he had scheduled for September 11. The Rev. Terry Jones announced the change of plans to a media circus outside his tiny church, Dove Outreach World Center in Gainesville, Florida shortly after Secretary of Defense Robert Gates called the pastor to make a direct appeal. According to the newspaper, Gates told Jones that burning Qurans would inflame Muslim sentiment and endanger U.S. troops abroad.
The Miami Herald quoted Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell as saying that Gates had weighed concerns that making such a call could encourage copycats who want attention, but felt that "if that phone call could save the life of one man or woman in uniform, that call was worth placing."
Pastor of the 50-member Pentecostal church, Jones, made the announcement at a press conference while standing alongside Imam Muhammad Musri, the president of the Islamic Society of Central Florida. He claimed that his decision to scrap the burning of Muslims' holy book was tied to his understanding that the New York Islamic cultural center project officially named as Park51 but popularly known as the Ground Zero mosque, would be scrapped or relocated. However, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf has not agreed to such a deal. Park51 posted a Twitter feed after Jones spoke. It said that "it is untrue that Park51 is being moved. The project is moving ahead as planned." Tellingly, Jones had never invoked the New York mosque controversy as a reason for his planned protest. He cited his belief that “the Quran is evil” because it espouses something other than biblical truth and incites radical, violent behavior among Muslims.
Who is Terry Jones?
Raul DeSouza of All Voices reports that Terry Jones was kicked out of Germany for his anti-Islam preaching long before 9/11. Here is DeSouza’s take on Jones: The now internationally famous pastor of the Dove Outreach center, Rev. Terry Terry Jones Jones who got famous after his notorious plans to burn the Muslim religious book the 'Holy Koran' on the anniversary of 9/11, didn’t turned against Islam after 9/11, but in fact it turns out that the pastor was preaching Islamophobia long before 9/11 occurred, in a church in Cologne, Germany. The pastor had to leave his church in Germany because of Muslim Turkish immigrants who began to fill the local community and were hostile to his anti-Islam preaching.
This is not all but some think that the pastor is doing all this for money. He wants to get famous and he has targeted Islam to achieve his goal. The pastor has been involved in money concerning scandals as his daughter said that the pastor didn’t leave the Cologne church due to the Muslim community but he was actually kicked out of the church after he was found misusing the church funds to pay for his own luxuries and his Ebay business. Even now the pastor is living a luxurious life in the Gainesville, Florida church and because of his over spending the premises of the Dove Outreach Center are on sale for $1.1 million. So it appears that the pastor is trying to save his church and his lavish life and he is trying hard because he also just got a book published titled "Islam is of the Devil" (AMP Report)
Burned Quran Found at Michigan Mosque
Sept 12: The Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-MI) today said it has called on the FBI to launch a hate crime investigation of a burned copy of the Quran, Islam's holy text, found early yesterday at a mosque in that state. The Islamic Center of East Lansing informed CAIR that the vandals left a burned Quran at the front entrance of the mosque and threw pages from holy text in the streets surrounding center. Torn pages of the Quran appeared to be smeared with feces. An unidentified substance was also found on the floor in front of the mosque's main door. (CAIR)
The true history of the Koran in America
Sept 12: The Boston Public Library contains a copy of the Koran from the personal collection of John Adams the second president. Reports of Korans in American libraries go back at least to 1683, when an early settler of Germantown, PA., brought a German version to these shores. Despite its foreign air, Adams’s Koran had a strong New England pedigree. The first Koran published in the United States, it was printed in Springfield in 1806. Thomas Jefferson, especially, had a familiarity with Islam. Like Adams, he owned a Koran, a 1764 English edition that he bought while studying law as a young man in Williamsburg, Va. Only few years ago, that Koran became the center of a controversy, when the first Muslim ever elected to Congress, Keith Ellison, a Democrat from Minnesota, asked if he could place his hand on it while taking his oath of office — a request that elicited tremendous screeches from the talk radio extremists. There was another important group of Americans who read the Koran, not as a legal sourcebook, or a work of exoticism, but as something very different — a reminder of home. While evidence is fragmentary, as many as 20 percent of African-American slaves may have come from Islamic backgrounds. They kept their knowledge of the Koran alive through memory, or chanted suras, or, in rare cases, smuggled copies of the book itself. In the 1930s, when WPA workers were interviewing elderly African-Americans in Georgia’s Sea Islands, they were told of an ancestor named Bilali who spoke Arabic and owned a copy of the Koran — a remarkable fact when we remember that it was a crime for slaves to read. In the War of 1812, Bilali and his fellow Muslims helped to defend America from a British attack, inverting nearly all of our stereotypes in the process. (By Ted Widmer, librarian of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University - Boston Globe)
Burned, shot Quran left at Tennessee mosque
Sept 13: The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) today called for stepped up police protection at mosques nationwide after a copy of the Quran that had been burned and apparently shot, was discovered yesterday at a Tennessee mosque. The CAIR said the Quran desecration was just one of a number of similar incidents targeting American mosques in recent days. An official with the Annoor Mosque (Muslim Community of Knoxville) in Knoxville, Tenn., said worshippers discovered the desecrated Quran at the entrance to the facility around noon on Sunday. The incident has been reported to Knoxville police and to the FBI. In a similar incident on Sept 11, CAIR reported that a burned copy of the Quran was found at a Michigan mosque. In other incidents, CAIR has called for federal hate crime charges to be brought against three men who allegedly painted a racist slur on a mosque in New York. Last week, CAIR called on the FBI to investigate a possible bias motive for recent vandalism at a Phoenix mosque site.
Mosques in California, Tennessee, New York, Illinois, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Texas, and Florida have faced vocal opposition or have been targeted by hate incidents in recent months. "Because of the recent targeting of mosques nationwide, we urge local law enforcement authorities to work with Muslim community leaders in stepping up patrols near Islamic institutions," said CAIR National Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper. He said that anti-Muslim hate has reached such a disturbing level nationwide that a Maine newspaper was forced to apologize for publishing a photo of end of Ramadan prayers on the 9/11 anniversary and a Connecticut city council was compelled to withdraw an invitation to have a Muslim religious leader offer a pre-meeting prayer. (CAIR)
Paper to Readers: Sorry for portraying Muslims as human
Sept 14: The Portland Press Herald (Maine) has apologized to its readers for publishing images of Muslims celebrating the end of Ramadan, which this year coincided with the 9/11 anniversary. Among the outrageous statements that the accompanying article made: that Portland-era Muslims met to mark the end of the month-long holy fast, that they made a traditional call for charity, and that children played soccer. Noting that thousands of local Muslims marked a holy day peacefully near the anniversary of a day when a few Muslims committed a mass murder (whose victims included other Muslims) was apparently beyond the pale. The paper's editor and publisher wrote: "We erred by at least not offering balance to the story and its prominent position on the front page."
Here's where we are in America, 2010: There is now one group of Americans whose peaceful religious observance cannot be noted by decent people, unless it is "balanced" by the mention of a vile crime committed in 2001 by people, with a perverted idea of the same religion, from the other side of the world. This is a depressing statement about the state of dialogue in America. Nine years after 9/11, there is now a widespread belief that, for one religious group of law-abiding Americans, the boundaries of acceptable behavior are narrower than for everyone else. Yes, you have the right to worship. But it would be decent of you to do it somewhere else. Or on another day. Or in such a way that the rest of us don't have to know about it. So now we have a newspaper kowtowing to a national freakout, apologizing for the most innocuous kind of soft feature, because acknowledging that there are decent Muslims in America is offensive. (Time)
Arab-American agent sues the FBI
Sept 14: The FBI's highest ranking Arabic speaking agent opened his courtroom battle against his employer today in a Washington, D.C. federal court. Bassem Youssef is suing the FBI for job discrimination, saying he was denied a role in counter-terror efforts after 9/11 despite his resume – and what he claims is a crippling shortage of qualified Arabic speakers and regional specialists. Youssef, born in Cairo and raised in Egypt and California, was passed over for promotion even though he was one of the FBI's few Arabic speakers and had been lauded for infiltrating the radical Islamic group whose leader masterminded the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. He filed suit against the FBI in 2003, alleging that the FBI retaliated against him after he lodged complaints against the counterterrorism unit and met with director Robert Mueller. The FBI declined comment on Youssef's allegations of discrimination, citing the ongoing litigation. In depositions taken by the Whistleblower Center, which is representing Youssef, FBI officials have claimed that neither Arabic fluency nor regional expertise is essential to leading the FBI's counterterrorism efforts.
In testimony before Congress in 2008, Youssef said the FBI is unable to protect the United States from another major attack by al Qaeda or other Middle Eastern extremists. He noted that at the time, in the FBI section dedicated to tracking international terrorists like al Qaeda, close to four out of every 10 supervisory positions were vacant. As a result, the FBI recruited managers who had "no experience in counterterrorism and who did not even want to work in these positions," Youssef alleged. The bureau's well-publicized troubles hiring and promoting talented foreign language speakers had also crippled its counterterrorism efforts, Youssef warned. FBI managers "rely exclusively on translation services" to understand communications from Middle Eastern terrorist operations, and FBI personnel "continue to make major mistakes" because they lack expertise in Arabic, he said. (ABC News)
Burnt Quran found outside San Francisco mosque
Sept 18: Police are investigating the discovery of a burnt Quran outside San Francisco mosque. Workers discovered the charred holy book on Sept. 12 inside an emptied trash bin that was on the sidewalk outside the Islamic Society of San Francisco, according to the center’s administrator, Khaled Olaibah. Police took the remnants of the book and are reviewing the surveillance footage outside the mosque, which also serves as a community center, a banquet hall and wedding venue, Olaibah said. The center has been at 20 Jones St. for about 15 years and serves at least 800 people, he added. Burnings of the Muslim holy book have been reported across the nation around the anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks. A Florida pastor’s call to burn Qurans led to international outrage, and the planned construction of an Islamic center near the former World Trade Center set off a fury of protest. But this is the first incident to occur in the perceived tolerance of San Francisco and the Bay Area, according to outreach director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Zahra Billoo. “It’s the first incident we’ve seen in the Bay Area, and we want to make sure it’s the last,” she said. (San Francisco Examiner)
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