|
Chronology of Islam in America (2008)
By Abdus Sattar Ghazali
March 2008
Muslim woman forced to leave New Orleans mall over headscarf
March 1: A Muslim housewife says her civil rights were violated when a security guard forced her to leave a shopping mall when she refused to take her religious headscarf off. The Council on American-Islamic Relations, made the incident public Friday. The group has asked the FBI and Louisiana officials to investigate the Feb. 22 incident. The woman and her family, U.S. citizens of Palestinian heritage, are considering legal action. The incident involves Muntaha Sarsour, 54, and her daughter-in-law, Sajehed Judeh, 23. The two women had just bought chicken fillet take-out at the mall food court when an Oakwood Shopping Center security guard allegedly stopped Sarsour and told her to remove her headscarf. The mall is in Gretna, a culturally diverse suburb of New Orleans. "He told her she had two options: Either she take off her headscarf or leave the mall," said Judeh, speaking on behalf of her mother-in-law, who does not speak English well. Ibrahim Hooper, a Council on American-Islamic Relations spokesman, said the case opened unprecedented legal questions about hijabs, Muslim woman's head covering. In the past, he said, Muslim women have challenged orders to remove their hijabs by employers and upon being photographed for driver's licenses. (Sun Herald)
UN accuses US of racial discrimination
March 7: US law enforcement is guilty of discrimination in its use of racial profiling to target Arabs and Muslims since the attacks of Sept 11, 2001, a United Nations report said today. The UN Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination “is deeply concerned about the increase in racial profiling against Arabs, Muslims and South Asians in the wake of the 9/11 attacks,” the report said. The report urged the US administration to “review the definition of racial discrimination used in the federal and state legislation and in court practice”. Black Americans and other minorities continue to suffer discrimination across all sections of society, from the education and justice systems to access to housing and healthcare, it said. Minorities “are disproportionately concentrated in poor residential areas characterized by sub-standard housing conditions, limited employment opportunities, inadequate access to health-care facilities, under-resourced schools and high exposure to crime and violence,” the report noted. (AFP)
Bush vetoes ban on waterboarding
March 8: US President George W. Bush vetoed a legislation today that would have prevented CIA from using waterboarding and other controversial methods to interrogate prisoners.In his weekly radio address, Mr Bush said he vetoed the measure because it would have banned interrogation techniques that prevent terrorist attacks. He described the current method for interrogating terror suspects as one of the “most valuable tools in the war on terror”. But many in the US Congress, human rights organisations and in other countries disagree. They see waterboarding, in which drowning is simulated, as a form of torture forbidden under Geneva conventions for protecting prisoner rights. In December, the House of Representatives approved legislation that would have restricted intelligence agents from using such interrogation methods. The Senate endorsed it in February despite White House warnings it would be vetoed. (Dawn)
Muslims grill FBI agents on key issues
March 17: The FBI was interrogated for a change today by members of the Muslim community at an event sponsored by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) at the Sunrise Academy in Columbus. Officials engaged in the discourse as part of the FBI’s so-called Community Relations Executive Seminar Training (CREST) program, which aims to improve relations with minority groups. Scheduled speakers at the event were special agents Kevin Bennett, Steve Flowers and Eric Thomas. The No. 1 concern in the audience was related to federal wiretapping, other forms of privacy invasion and the profiling of Muslims. Flowers said the FBI must do its job fighting not just terrorism from Islamic extremists but also domestic terrorist groups such as the Army of God and the Aryan Nation. Still, he conceded that in the shadow of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the FBI views Islamic terrorist groups as the biggest threat to national security ands the groups most likely to instigate a massive terrorist act inside the United States.(Arab News)
FBI provided flawed data for terrorism watch list: Study
March 18: A Justice Department audit has concluded that the FBI provided the government-wide terrorism watch list with incomplete, inaccurate and outdated information about suspects for almost three years. As a result, many innocent people stayed on the terrorism watch list long after they were cleared of any wrongdoing, and real threats to national security were sometimes left off the list or not added in a timely manner, according to the audit, released Monday by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine. The watch list was established by presidential directive in September 2003 so that law enforcement and intelligence officials could have a uniform database of terrorism suspects, enabling agencies to screen out those trying to get into the country and flag others domestically.The audit also found problems in the way other law enforcement agencies within the Justice Department contributed to the watch list -- primarily they did not ensure that individuals were removed once cleared of suspicion or wrongdoing. Those agencies include the Drug Enforcement Administration, the U.S. Marshals Service, the Bureau of Prisons and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Privacy advocates said that the audit was further proof that the watch list was unwieldy, inaccurate and badly mismanaged, especially when it came to taking innocent people off the list. The list has soared to more than 900,000 names by some government estimates, and it has been criticized in the past by Fine's office and other government watchdog agencies. Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, described the watch list as "Kafka-esque," saying he was aware of many individuals who could not get off the list no matter how strenuously they complained. (Los Angeles Times)
Civil rights advocates urge Justice Department to honor Al-Arian plea agreement
March 26: Civil rights advocates and community-based organizations met today with Department of Justice officials to urge the federal prosecutors to honor their plea agreement with Dr. Sami Al-Arian acquitted on terrorism-related charges in 2005. Dr. Sami Al-Arian agreed to a 2006 plea agreement with federal prosecutors on the condition that he not be required to testify against others and that he be released for deportation after the end of his current sentence.
Leaders from the Muslim Public Affairs Council, the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Muslim Advocates and AltMuslim presented a joint letter to Department of Justice (DOJ) officials during the meeting which states, in part: “After serving five years of detention in a federal penitentiary, much of it in solitary confinement, and being acquitted of all major charges, no public interest is served by continuing to detain Dr. Al-Arian. Indeed, the public interest is best served when our government follows through on its commitments, preserves its integrity, and upholds the legitimacy of our criminal justice system.We thus call on the U.S. Department of Justice to honor the terms of the plea agreement and immediately release Dr. Al-Arian for deportation on April 7, 2008 -- the day he is currently scheduled to have served his sentence.” Despite the plea agreement, the Justice Department subpoenaed Dr. Al-Arian to testify before another grand jury in 2008. Advocates are demanding that the Justice Department uphold their promise and not to seek to compel Dr. Al-Arian to testify against others. (AMP Report)
CAIR-Ohio Hosts Community Forum with FBI
March 27: The Columbus chapter of CAIR-Ohio recently hosted representatives of the FBI’s Community Relations Executive Seminar Training (CREST) program at a town hall meeting with the local Muslim community. The CREST program event was designed to improve understanding between the FBI and the Muslim community through the exchange of information. CREST also offers an opportunity to “learn about the mission, goals, history, and internal workings of the FBI."Keith Bennett, FBI Special Agent in Charge for the Southern District of Ohio, explained how the priorities of the FBI have shifted since the 9/11 attacks, with terrorism investigations now taking center stage. (CAIR)
Dutch Jewish group: Anti-Islam film is 'counterproductive'
March 28: Dutch legislator Geert Wilders drew condemnations from the Netherlands' Central Jewish Board, which today called the film's focus on anti-Jewish preaching by Muslims "counterproductive" and "generalizing." In keeping with Wilders' belief in a Judeo-Christian partnership in the face of "the threat of Islam," the 15-minute film, entitled "Fitna" - Arabic for strife - shows clerics calling to behead Jews, Koran passages equating Jews to "apes and swines" and photos of demonstrators promising "another Holocaust" and praising Adolf Hitler. In a statement following the film's online release, the board said that Wilders - the leader of the Party for Freedom - was guilty of serious generalizations. (Haaretz)
Muslims outnumber Catholics
March 30: Islam has overtaken Roman Catholicism as the biggest single religious denomination in the world, the Vatican said today. Monsignor Vittorio Formenti, who compiled the Vatican's newly-released 2008 yearbook of statistics, said Muslims made up 19.2 percent of the world's population and Catholics 17.4 percent. "For the first time in history we are no longer at the top: the Muslims have overtaken us," Formenti told Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano in an interview, saying the data referred to 2006. He said that if all Christian groups were considered, including Orthodox churches, Anglicans and Protestants, then Christians made up 33 percent of the world's population -- or about 2 billion people. The Vatican recently put the number of Catholics in the world at 1.13 billion people. It did not provide a figure for Muslims, generally estimated at around 1.3 billion. (Reuters)
“Ex-terrorist” speaker exposed as fraud
March 30: When he was 16, says Walid Shoebat, he was recruited by a PLO operative by the name of Mahmoud al-Mughrabi to carry out an attack on a branch of Bank Leumi in Bethlehem. At six in the evening he was supposed to detonate a bomb in the doorway of the bank. But when he saw a group of Arab children playing nearby, he says, his conscience was pricked and he threw the bomb onto the roof of the bank instead, where it exploded causing no fatalities. This is the story that Shoebat, who converted from Islam to Christianity in 1993 and has lived in the United States since the late 1970s, has told on tours around the US and Europe since 9/11. However, Shoebat's claim to have bombed Bank Leumi in Bethlehem is rejected by members of his family who still live in the area, and Bank Leumi says it has no record of such an attack ever taking place. Shoebat's claim to have been a terrorist rests on his account of the purported bombing of Bank Leumi. But after checking its files, the bank said it had no record of an attack on its Bethlehem branch anywhere in the relevant 1977-79 period. (Jerusalem Post)
Muslim leaders visit Al-Arian in Virginia prison
March 31: Representatives of several American Muslim civil right groups visited Dr. Sami Al-Arian, a former Florida professor currently on his second hunger strike in federal detention to protest unjust treatment by the U.S. authorities. Dr. Al-Arian began refusing food and water on March 3rd to protest a third attempt by prosecutors to compel his testimony in court. He was transferred to a medical facility in North Carolina, but has since been returned to Northern Neck Regional Jail in Warsaw, Va. Those taking part in today's visit included representatives of American Muslim Alliance (AMA), Muslim American Society (MAS), Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), and American Muslim Taskforce on Civil Rights and Elections (AMT), a national coalition of major American Muslim organizations. Dr. Sami Al-Arian has lost 32 pounds in a month-long hunger strike, Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said after the visit. (AMP Report)
2008 January February March April May June
July August Sept. Oct. Nov. Dec.
|
