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Chronology of Islam in America (2012)
By Abdus Sattar Ghazali
March 2012 - Page Three
California mosque sues city over expansion denial
March 21: A Southern California mosque filed a federal lawsuit today alleging that the small suburban city of Lomita engaged in religious discrimination when it rejected an application to rebuild and expand the worship facility. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, seeks an injunction ordering the city to approve the proposal by the Islamic Center of the South Bay, damages and reimbursement for costs incurred during a planning process that has lasted more than three years and included multiple revisions to satisfy residents' concerns. The mosque has operated in the city since 1985 and owns eight aging and dilapidated buildings on several different parcels it bought up over the years, said Ameena Qazi, an attorney for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which is representing the mosque. It wants to build a two-story, 14,320-square-foot mosque to replace the current buildings and add a prayer center for the 200 Muslims who worship there, according to court papers. The city's planning commission recommended that the City Council approve the plans after extensive revisions, including shortening the mosque's minaret by more than 4 feet. The City Council rejected the plan last year, however, citing concerns over increased traffic and parking problems. Qazi believes anti-Islam sentiment is behind the refusal and said a resident who attended a mosque outreach luncheon said he and others were worried the expanded facility would increase the Muslim population in Lomita from 1 percent to 30 percent. The U.S. Department of Justice launched an inquiry last year to determine whether the city of Lomita violated a federal law known as the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act when they rejected the proposal. That inquiry is ongoing, Qazi said.
The 20,000-person city 20 miles south of Los Angeles is not the first Southern California city to grapple with opposition to a mosque. The Islamic Center of the Temecula Valley sparked protests last year over plans to build a 25,000-square-foot, two-story mosque in the city about 90 miles southeast of Los Angeles. Work on that mosque coincided with the debate over plans to build a mosque and cultural center two blocks from the site of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. Temecula's planning commission approved the mosque and the City Council denied an appeal from opponents last January. [Associated Press]
Big Brother On Campus
March 23: From breaking up Occupy protests to spying on Muslim students, homeland security is targeting college kids. Campus spies. Pepper spray. SWAT teams. Twitter trackers. Biometrics. Student security consultants. Professors of homeland security studies. Welcome to Repress U, class of 2012. Since 9/11, the homeland security state has come to campus just as it has come to America’s towns and cities, its places of work and its houses of worship, its public space and its cyberspace. But the age of (in)security had announced its arrival on campus with considerably less fanfare than elsewhere — until, that is, the “less lethal” weapons were unleashed in the fall of 2011. Today, from the City University of New York to the University of California, students increasingly find themselves on the frontlines, not of a war on terror, but of a war on “radicalism” and “extremism.” Just about everyone from college administrators and educators to law enforcement personnel and corporate executives seems to have enlisted in this war effort. Increasingly, American students are in their sights.
Spy on Muslims
The long arm of Repress U stretches far beyond the bounds of any one campus or college town. As reported by the Associated Press this winter, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) and its hitherto secret “Demographics Unit” sent undercover operatives to spy on members of the Muslim Students Association at more than 20 universities in four states across the Northeast beginning in 2006. None of the organizations or persons of interest were ever accused of any wrongdoing, but that didn’t stop NYPD detectives from tracking Muslim students through a “Cyber Intelligence Unit,” issuing weekly “MSA Reports” on local chapters of the Muslim Students Association, attending campus meetings and seminars, noting how many times students prayed, or even serving as chaperones for what they described as “militant paintball trips.” The targeted institutions ran the gamut from community colleges to Columbia and Yale. According to the AP’s investigation, the intelligence units in question worked closely not only with agencies in other cities, but with an agent on the payroll of the CIA. Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, facing mounting calls to resign, has issued a spirited defense of the campus surveillance program, as has Mayor Michael Bloomberg. “If terrorists aren’t limited by borders and boundaries, we can’t be either,” Kelly said in a speech at Fordham Law School. The NYPD was hardly the only agency conducting covert surveillance of Muslim students on campus. The FBI has been engaging in such tactics for years. In 2007, UC Irvine student Yasser Ahmed was assaulted by FBI agents, who followed him as he was on his way to a campus “free speech zone.” In 2010, Yasir Afifi, a student at Mission College in Santa Clara, California, found a secret GPS tracking device affixed to his car. A half-dozen agents later knocked on his door to ask for it back.
Keep the undocumented out
Foreign students are followed closely by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) through its Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS). As of 2011, the agency was keeping tabs on 1.2 million students and their dependents. Most recently, as part of a transition to the paperless SEVIS II — which aims to “unify records” — ICE has been linking student files to biometric and employer data collected by DHS and other agencies. “That information stays forever,” notes Louis Farrell, director of the ICE program. “And every activity that’s ever been associated with that person will come up. That’s something that has been asked for by the national security community… [and] the academic community.” Then there are the more than 360,000 undocumented students and high-school graduates who would qualify for permanent resident status and college admission, were the DREAM Act ever passed. It would grant conditional permanent residency to undocumented students who were brought to the U.S. as children. When such students started “coming out” as part of an “undocumented and unafraid” campaign, many received DHS notices to appear for removal proceedings. Take 24-year old Uriel Alberto, of Lees-McRae College, who recently went on hunger strike in North Carolina’s Wake County jail; he now faces deportation (and separation from his U.S.-born son) for taking part in a protest at the state capitol. Since 2010, the homeland security campus has been enlisted by the state of Arizona to enforce everything from bans on ethnic studies programs to laws like S.B. 1070, which makes it a crime to appear in public without proof of legal residency and is considered a mandate for police to detain anyone suspected of being undocumented. Many undocumented students have turned down offers of admission to the University of Arizona since the passage of the law, while others have stopped attending class for fear of being detained and deported.
Keep an eye on student spaces and social media
While Muslim and undocumented students are particular targets of surveillance, they are not alone. Electronic surveillance has expanded beyond traditional closed-circuit TV cameras to next-generation technologies like IQeye HD megapixel cameras, so-called edge devices (cameras that can do their own analytics), and Perceptrak’s video analytics software, which “analyzes video from security cameras 24×7 for events of interest,” and which recently made its debut at Johns Hopkins University and Mount Holyoke College. At the same time, students’ social media accounts have become a favorite destination for everyone from campus police officers to analysts at the Department of Homeland Security. In 2010, the DHS National Operations Center established a Media Monitoring Capability (MMC). According to an internal agency document, MMC is tasked with “leveraging news stories, media reports and postings on social media sites… for operationally relevant data, information, analysis, and imagery.” The definition of operationally relevant data includes “media reports that reflect adversely on DHS and response activities,” “partisan or agenda-driven sites,” and a final category ambiguously labeled “research/studies, etc.” With the Occupy movement coming to campus, even university police departments have gotten in on the action. According to a how-to guide called “Essential Ingredients to Working with Campus Protests” by UC Santa Barbara police chief Dustin Olson, the first step to take is to “monitor social media sites continuously,” both for intelligence about the “leadership and agenda” and “for any messages that speak to violent or criminal behavior.”
Coopt the classroom and the laboratory
At a time when entire departments and disciplines are facing the chopping block at America’s universities, the Department of Homeland Security has proven to be the best-funded department of all. Homeland security studies has become a major growth sector in higher education and now has more than 340 certificate- and degree-granting programs. Many colleges have joined the Homeland Security and Defense Education Consortium, a spinoff of the U.S. Northern Command (the Department of Defense’s “homeland defense” division), which offers a model curriculum to its members. This emerging discipline has been directed and funded to the tune of $4 billion over the last five years by DHS. The goal, according to Dr. Tara O’Toole, DHS Undersecretary of Science & Technology, is to “leverag[e] the investment and expertise of academia… to meet the needs of the department.” Additional funding is being made available from the Pentagon through its blue-skies research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the “intelligence community” through its analogous Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity. At the core of the homeland security-university partnership are DHS’s 12 centers of excellence. (A number that has doubled since I first reported on the initiative in 2008.) The DHS Office of University Programs advertises the centers of excellence as an “extended consortium of hundreds of universities” which work together “to develop customer-driven research solutions” and “to provide essential training to the next generation of homeland security experts.” But what kind of research is being carried out at these centers of excellence, with the support of tens of millions of taxpayer dollars each year? Among the 41 “knowledge products” currently in use by DHS or being evaluated in pilot studies, we find an “extremist crime database,” a “Minorities at Risk for Organizational Behavior” dataset, analytics for aerial surveillance systems along the border, and social media monitoring technologies. Other research focuses include biometrics, “suspicious behavior detection,” and “violent radicalization.”
Privatize, subsidize and capitalize
Repress U has not only proven a boon to hundreds of cash-starved universities, but also to big corporations as higher education morphs into hired education. While a majority of the $184 billion in homeland security funding in 2011 came from government agencies like DHS and the Pentagon, private sector funding is expected to make up an increasing share of the total in the coming years, according to the Homeland Security Research Corporation, a consulting firm serving the homeland security industry. Each DHS Center of Excellence has been founded on private-public partnerships, corporate co-sponsorships, and the leadership of “industry advisory boards” which give big business a direct stake and say in its operations. Corporate giants allied with DHS Centers of Excellence include: *Lockheed Martin at the Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), based at the University of Maryland at College Park. *Alcatel-Lucent and AT&T at the Rutgers University-based Command, Control, and Interoperability Center for Advanced Data Analysis (CICADA). *ExxonMobil and Con Edison at the Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events (CREATE), based at the University of Southern California. *Motorola, Boeing and Bank of America at the Purdue University-based Center for Visual Analytics for Command, Control, and Interoperability Environments (VACCINE). *Wal-Mart, Cargill, Kraft and McDonald’s at the National Center for Food Protection and Defense (NCFPD), based at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. What’s more, universities have struck multimillion-dollar deals with multinational private security firms like Securitas, deploying unsworn, underpaid, often untrained “protection officers” on campus as “extra eyes and ears.” The University of Wisconsin-Madison, in one report, boasts that police and private partners have been “seamlessly integrated.”
Elsewhere, even students have gotten into the business of security. The private intelligence firm STRATFOR, for example, recently partnered with the University of Texas to use its students to “essentially parallel the work of… outside consultants” but on campus, offering information on activist groups like the Yes Men. Step by step, at school after school, the homeland security campus has executed a silent coup in the decade since September 11th. The university, thus usurped, has increasingly become an instrument not of higher learning, but of intelligence gathering and paramilitary training, of profit-taking on behalf of America’s increasingly embattled “1 percent.” Yet the next generation may be otherwise occupied. Since September 2011, a new student movement has swept across the country, making itself felt most recently on March 1st with a national day of action to defend the right to education. This Occupy-inspired wave of on-campus activism is making visible what was once invisible, calling into question what was once beyond question, and counteracting the logic of Repress U with the logic of nonviolence and education for democracy. For many, the rise of the homeland security campus has provoked some basic questions about the aims and principles of a higher education: Whom does the university serve? Whom does it protect? Who is to speak? Who is to be silenced? To whom does the future belong? The guardians of Repress U are uninterested in such inquiry. Instead, they cock their weapons. They lock the gates. And they prepare to take the next step. [By Michael Gould-Wartofsky - Tom Dispatch]
Sad tragedy of Trayvon Martin’s death exposes ongoing racial challenges
March 23: This week, the case of Trayvon Martin has sparked a critical national conversation about ongoing challenges around race, fear and fairness in the criminal justice system. On Feb. 26, Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old black teenager from Florida, was fatally shot while walking home from the convenience store by George Zimmerman, a self-appointed neighborhood watch captain. Zimmerman said he approached and began following the teenager because he looked “real suspicious.” To date, Zimmerman has not been charged or arrested for the crime. Initial reports and 911 tapes indicate the following: a brief scuffle, a racial slur made by Zimmerman, a shout for help from Martin, and a shot fired. After one month of silence by local authorities, federal and state investigators have intervened and launched their own investigation. The grand jury is convening soon to examine the case. This tragedy brings up many questions including “Why did it take law enforcement so long to conduct a thorough investigation?” “This tragic and senseless death simply should not have happened,” said Salam Al-Marayati, Muslim Public Affairs Council President. “Now is the time for us to re-examine our color divide. No person should feel unsafe to walk in his or her neighborhood as a result of skin color or for any other reason.” President Barack Obama is right. This is a time for us “to do some soul searching to figure out how does something like this happen.” It has been more than 60 years since America grappled with segregation and the civil rights movement. In 1955, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy, was killed by two community members for allegedly flirting with a white woman. What this did to our nation was awaken the notion that racism needed to be confronted. Sadly, the struggle for equality in our society and before the law is unfinished. [MPAC]
Muslim woman dies after beating; threatening note found nearby
March 24: Shaima Alawadi, 32-year-old Iraqi immigrant, died today, three days after being found beaten into unconsciousness in her home in El Cajon, California, with a note near her body warning her to go back to Iraq. Alawadi was attacked at her El Cajon, CA, home on March 21 morning, while her husband was taking their children to school. The victim’s 17-year-old daughter, Fatima Al Himidi, found her mother laying in a pool of blood with a note next to her severely beaten body suggesting a potential hate crime. Alawadi died a day later on March 24. The victim’s family said that note was the second one left at the home in the last week. Al Himidi said, "A week ago they left a letter saying this is our country not yours you terrorist, and so my mom ignored that thinking it was just kids playing a prank. But the day they hit her, they left another note again, and it said the same thing." The note read in part, “go back to your own country, you’re a terrorist.” The suburbs east of San Diego have been a popular destination for Iraqi immigrants, particularly Iraqi Christians. El Cajon, northeast of downtown San Diego, is home to some 40,000 Iraqi immigrants, the second largest such community in the U.S. after Detroit. The victim has lived in the United States for almost 20 years. The family had lived in the house in San Diego County for only a few weeks, after moving from Michigan, Alzaidy said. Alzaidy told the newspaper her father and Alawadi's husband had previously worked together in San Diego as private contractors for the U.S. Army, serving as cultural advisers to train soldiers who were going to be deployed to the Middle East. [AMP Report]
Bias probe urged of Sacramento mosque vandalism
March 24: The Sacramento Valley office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-SV) today called on the FBI and local law enforcement authorities to investigate a possible bias motive for vandalism targeting a West Sacramento mosque. Vandals reportedly threw three rocks through a window of the almost-completed Masjid Aisha (formerly the West Sacramento Islamic Community Center) last night as two worshippers prayed inside. "Whenever a house of worship is targeted in this manner, the possibility of a bias motive must be considered," said CAIR-SV Executive Director Basim Elkarra. In 2009, vandals broke into the back door of the previous mosque on the site and damaged religious wall hangings and a bookshelf that held Qurans. The vandals also stole items from the mosque. [CAIR]
FBI's friendly visits to mosques were for spying
March 27: For several years, the FBI’s San Francisco office conducted a “Mosque Outreach” program through which it collected and illegally stored intelligence about American Muslims’ First Amendment-protected beliefs and religious practices, according to government documents released today by the American Civil Liberties Union from a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the ACLU of Northern California, Asian Law Caucus and the San Francisco Bay Guardian. The San Francisco FBI’s own documents show that it recorded Muslim religious leaders’ and congregants’ identities, personal information and religious views and practices. The documents also show that the FBI labeled this information as “positive intelligence” and disseminated it to other government agencies, placing the people and organizations involved at risk of greater law enforcement scrutiny as potential national security threats. None of the documents indicate that the FBI told individuals interviewed that their information and views were being collected as intelligence and would be recorded and disseminated. “Everyone understands that the FBI has a job to do, but it is wrong and counterproductive for the bureau to target American Muslim religious groups for secret intelligence gathering and place innocents at risk of investigation as national security threats,” said Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project. “The FBI is casting a cloud of suspicion on American Muslim religious organizations based on their faith alone, which raises grave constitutional concerns. The bureau’s documentation of religious leaders’ and congregants’ beliefs and practices violates the Privacy Act, which Congress passed to protect Americans’ First Amendment rights.”
The “Mosque Outreach” documents, from between 2004 and 2008, detail information and activities including: FBI visits to the Seaside Mosque five times in 2005, documenting the subject of a particular sermon and congregants’ discussions regarding a property purchase for a new mosque. Despite an apparent lack of information related to crime or terrorism, the FBI’s records of these discussions show they were classified as “secret,” marked “positive intelligence” and disseminated outside the FBI. FBI meetings with members of the South Bay Islamic Association four times from 2004 to 2007, documenting discussions about the Hajj pilgrimage and “Islam in general.” FBI documents show this information was classified as “secret,” marked “positive intelligence” and disseminated outside the FBI. FBI contacts with representatives of the Bay Area Cultural Connections (formerly the Turkish Center Musalla), describing the group’s mission and activities, as well as the ethnicity of its members. A memo indicates the FBI used a meeting participant’s cell phone number to search LexisNexis and Department of Motor Vehicle records and obtained and recorded detailed information about him, including his date of birth, social security number, address and home telephone number. FBI documents show this information was classified as “secret.” [ACLU]
Younger, U.S.-born Inland imams emerging
March 27: Mohamed Mabrouk wears the traditional white robe of an imam. But instead of the foreign-accented English that for decades has been the norm among American Muslim religious leaders, the new 21-year-old leader of a Murrieta mosque speaks with the Detroit accent he has carried with him from childhood. Mabrouk was born and raised in Detroit, then went to an Islamic boarding school in Canada where, between ages 12 and 16, he received the religious training that prepared him to become an imam. After boarding school, Mabrouk attended most of his high school and university time in Arizona. Temecula is his first posting as an imam. Mabrouk’s appointment last month as imam of the Islamic Center of Temecula Valley is a sign of a changing Inland Muslim community that is shifting from being almost entirely immigrant-led to one in which young, U.S.-born people are increasingly taking leadership roles. Last year, the Islamic Center of Corona-Norco selected then-29-year-old U.S.-born Osman Umarji as imam. The membership of mosques is also becoming more American-born, as the children of Muslim immigrants who arrived in the United States in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s make up a rising percentage of worshippers.
When Sudanese-born Mustafa Kuko became imam of the Islamic Center of Riverside in 1998, only about 2 percent of those attending the mosque were born in the United States. Today, Kuko said, about 15 percent are, and the number continues to rise. Kuko, 63, welcomes the trend toward more U.S.-born imams. He freely acknowledges that young, U.S.-born Muslims often can relate better to an imam who grew up in the United States than to a foreign-born man like himself. “These are the people who know the culture, who know how to eat hamburgers and know baseball,” Kuko said with a laugh.
The new imams also can help guide youths through the post-9/11 era, when Muslims have faced prejudice and misunderstandings, said Munira Syeda, spokeswoman for the greater Los Angeles office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Syeda said she is buoyed as the growing U.S.-born population in Muslim congregations is producing imams immersed in American culture. “It helps young people develop a Muslim-American identity — not just a Muslim identity and not just an American identity, but a Muslim-American identity,” she said. Many foreign-born imams in the United States were recruited directly from abroad and had little knowledge of U.S. culture, said Muhamad Ali, an assistant professor of religious studies at UC Riverside. In Islam, imams are not ordained and they are not considered clergy, so their degree of training varies. [The Press Enterprise]
Another attempt to undermine mainstream American Muslim advocacy groups
March 28: In the post-9/11 America, there have been persistent efforts to undermine well established and vocal American Muslim civil advocacy organizations while promoting fringe compliant Muslim groups. The latest effort comes in the shape of the appointment of Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, founder president of one-man organization, the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD) as a commissioner of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom which advises the president, Congress and State Department on religious rights abuses internationally. [While writing this article we checked AIFD website that doesn’t have names of any board members while Jasser is described as chairman of the board of directors. This gives credence to the assumption that the AIFD is a one-man organization.] Dr. Zuhdi Jasser has amassed a reputation as a prominent Islamophobia-enabler and ally of anti-Muslim organizations and individuals, well known for their attempts to diminish civil and religious liberties of American Muslims or make the practice of Islam a punishable offense. Mother Jones recently quoted Jasser as saying that his group has received a one-time, unsolicited donation of $10,000 from the Clarion Fund, which is associated with Aish HaTorah, a right-wing Israeli group described by Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic as “just about the most fundamentalist movement in Judaism today.” In 2008 Jasser narrated an anti-Islam and anti-Muslims film bankrolled by the Clarion Fund called The Third Jihad, that was shown to thousands of NYPD officers as part of their counterterrorism training, which the police department later apologized for. Not surprisingly, Zuhdi Jasser lauded New York City police surveillance program that targeted Muslims and helped lead the opposition to construction of the Park51 Islamic and cultural center in Manhattan, known as the Ground Zero mosque. He also supports the profiling of Muslims based solely on their religion, and calls for increasing the illegal surveillance of Muslims in their places of worship, businesses and universities. It will not be too much to say that the appointment of Jasser contradicts the purported goals of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom to review “the facts and circumstances of violations of religious freedom internationally and to make policy recommendations to the President, the Secretary of State and Congress.” It also gives a message to the seven-million strong American Muslim community that its established civil advocacy organizations are being marginalized and disenfranchised. [AMP Comment]
FBI taught agents they could ‘bend or suspend the law’
March 28: The FBI taught its agents that they could sometimes “bend or suspend the law” in their hunt for terrorists and criminals. Other FBI instructional material, discovered during a months-long review of FBI counterterrorism training, warned agents against shaking hands with “Asians” and said Arabs were prone to “Jekyll & Hyde temper tantrums.” These are just some of the disturbing results of the FBI’s six-month review into how the Bureau trained its counterterrorism agents. That review, now complete, did not result in a single disciplinary action for any instructor. Nor did it mandate the retraining of any FBI agent exposed to what the Bureau concedes was inappropriate material. Nor did it look at any intelligence reports that might have been influenced by the training. All that has a powerful senator saying that the review represents a “failure to adequately address” the problem. “This is not an effective way to protect the United States,” Sen. Richard Durbin, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee overseeing the FBI, tells Danger Room about the inappropriate FBI counterterrorism training. “It’s stunning that these things could be said to members of our FBI in training. It will not make them more effective in their work and won’t make America safer.” One FBI PowerPoint — disclosed in a letter Durbin sent to FBI Director Robert Mueller this week and shared with Danger Room — stated: “Under certain circumstances, the FBI has the ability to bend or suspend the law to impinge on the freedom of others.” An incredulous Durbin told Danger Room, “Time and time again when that is done, it has not made us safer.” Like other excerpts from FBI documents Danger Room reviewed for this story, it was not dated and did not include additional context explaining what those “circumstances” might be. [Spencer Ackerman - Wired.com]
No Muslims Need Apply
March 29: The Tennessee Eagle Forum wants a bill passed that limits employment of legal immigrants in charter schools to 3.5 percent. LEGAL immigrants! We all know that they want no Muslims near the children, since they were behind the anti-Shariah bill, but they are targeting people in this country legally, including Europeans, South Americans, Central Americans, Asians and Africans, no matter what religion they practice. Maybe we should break out the “No Irish Need Apply” signs again. Welcome to the land of the free and the home of the bigot. [Carolyn DiGiambattista, Nashville - The Tennessean]
NY law firm drops anti-Islam speaker Robert Spencer
March 29: The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) today thanked a prominent New York law firm for its decision to cancel an event featuring Robert Spencer, the leader of one of the nation's most extreme anti-Islam hate groups. Earlier today, CAIR expressed concerns about the April 18 event at the law offices of Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel (Kramer Levin) in New York City. The event, sponsored by the right-wing Middle East Forum (MEF), would have promoted Spencer's claim that Islam's Prophet Muhammad may never have existed. MEF is headed by Daniel Pipes, who is viewed by many Muslims as one of the nation's leading Islamophobes. In a statement sent to CAIR, Kramer Levin Executive Director Nicholas J. Tortorella wrote: "From time to time we receive requests from not for profit or community organizations to use our conference rooms for meetings or other events. While we permit our facilities to be used occasionally for these purposes, Kramer Levin can take no responsibility for the content of these events and in no way endorses any opinions that may be expressed during them. In this instance, we were not aware of the controversy surrounding the speaker at the April 18th event. Now having been alerted to the situation, we have withdrawn permission for the event to take place at our offices."
"We thank Kramer Levin for taking swift and appropriate action to disassociate itself from Robert Spencer's extremist views," said CAIR National Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper. "The firm's actions demonstrate a commitment to religious tolerance and diversity." Hooper said "Fear, Inc.," a recent report by the Center for American Progress, revealed that "[Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik] cited Robert Spencer, one of the anti-Muslim misinformation scholars we profile in this report, and his blog, Jihad Watch, 162 times in his manifesto." Spencer is co-founder of Stop the Islamization of America (SIOA), which has been designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Spencer's "Jihad Watch" organization is also listed as a hate group by the SPLC. The SPLC named Spencer as part of the nation's "Anti-Muslim Inner Circle." SIOA, which led the Islamophobic challenge to New York's Park51 Islamic Community Center, is an outgrowth of a similar group in Europe that seeks to block the construction of mosques on that continent. Stop the Islamization of Europe, SIOA's sister organization, "considers Islamophobia to be the height of common sense." The independent national media watch group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) identified Spencer as one of "Islamophobia's Dirty Dozen" who systematically "spread fear, bigotry, and misinformation." In its report, FAIR said, "By selectively ignoring inconvenient Islamic texts and commentaries, Spencer concludes that Islam is innately extremist and violent." [CAIR]
The Right Wing’s Election-Year Islamophobia
March 29: A succession of Republican candidates have attempted to run to the right of party favorite Mitt Romney by asserting that only a true conservative can defeat Obama in November. Most of them boasted of the same powerful backer. Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Rick Perry, and Rick Santorum all declared that God asked them to run for higher office. Together with Newt Gingrich, they have deployed various methods of appealing to their constituencies, but none is more potent than religion. …..ugly Islamophobia has already insinuated itself into the 2012 elections in a potentially more damaging way than did the overt disparagement of Obama’s religious bona fides back in 2008. The 2010 midterm elections witnessed a sharp uptick in anti-Islamic sentiment. In addition to the concocted “Ground Zero mosque” controversy, Florida preacher Terry Jones threatened to burn the Qur’an in front of the world’s cameras; a group called Stop Islamization of America bought anti-Islamic ads on buses in major cities; and a movement to pass anti-Sharia legislation at a state level began in Oklahoma. In response to this brushfire of hatred, Time magazine devoted a cover story to Islamophobia that year. On the right at least, Islam seemed on the way to becoming a litmus test in the way communism was during the Cold War. Two years later, the hysteria seems to have subsided. The Islamophobes haven’t gone into hiding. They tried to organize an advertising boycott of the TV show All-American Muslim; they campaigned against halal meats. But these efforts didn’t get much traction.
Meanwhile, Park51-- the real name of the cultural center inaccurately dubbed the “Ground Zero mosque” -- opened in its original Park Street location with an exhibition by a Jewish photographer. Terry Jones is pursuing a quixotic bid for the presidency far from the media spotlight. Time has returned several times to the topic of Islamophobia, particularly after Anders Breivik’s bombing and shooting rampage in Norway in July 2011, but with none of the intensity of the summer of 2010. The anti-Sharia campaign has passed legislation in several states, and laws are pending in more than a dozen more. But the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the Oklahoma anti-Sharia statute unconstitutional, and the anti-Sharia crowd has been unable to provide a single piece of evidence that Islamic law poses any challenge to the U.S. legal system. ….. A disconnect between accusation and reality hardly matters in American politics these days. Obama the “socialist” somehow manages to work hand in hand with Wall Street financiers. Obama the “Nazi” courts AIPAC. Obama the “peacenik” has been very much a war president. And Obama the “Muslim” gets a big thumbs-down from the Muslim world. The president makes a lousy Muslim Manchurian candidate, for he has disappointed his imagined Muslim handlers at virtually every turn. In an election in which racist slogans are off the table, however, the Islamophobic accusation of “acting Muslim” remains a politically acceptable chauvinism. Given the deep anti-Islamic currents in American culture, such accusations might unfortunately prove effective as well. [By John Feffer is the author of the just-published Crusade 2.0: The West’s Resurgent War on Islam (City Lights Books) – Tomdispatch.com]
A separate justice system for U.S. Muslims?
March 30: Since the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, genuine concerns about national security as well as politicking and fear have led to a shift in the balance between civil liberties and law enforcement. That much is indisputable, and widely discussed. Yet it’s rarely acknowledged that the attacks have also led to what’s essentially a separate justice system for Muslims. In this system, the principle of due process is twisted and selectively applied, if it is applied at all. Examples of the Muslims-only legal system abound, even though politicians and the press shy away from calling it that: Special detention centers for Muslims (Guantanamo Bay and the network of secret C.I.A. lockups, now said to be closed, where prisoners were almost routinely tortured); special detention and trial procedures for Muslim prisoners (military tribunals); special allowances for agents dealing with Muslim suspects (extraordinary rendition, i.e. officially sanctioned kidnapping of foreigners). The New York Police Department, we now know, conducted indiscriminate surveillance of Muslim workplaces, sites of worship and social gatherings. The sense of impunity in dealing with Muslims is so strong that New York officials won’t even tolerate any real discussion about the program, and certainly no oversight. You could argue, I suppose, that these examples don’t amount to a separate system for Muslims, per se, but for people who commit acts of terrorism and just happen to be Muslims. But the N.Y.P.D. case seems to counter that argument.
Here is an even more blatant example of how law enforcement has blurred the difference between a Muslim and a terrorist: Late last year, Wired magazine reported on F.B.I. training materials containing what Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois has called “crude stereotypes of American Muslims and Arab Americans.” That’s an understatement. Agents learned that “Islam is a highly violent radical religion,” that “mainstream American Muslims are likely to be terrorist sympathizers,” and that Arabs have “Jekyll and Hyde” personalities. They also learned that “under certain circumstances, the F.B.I. has the ability to bend or suspend the law and impinge on the freedom of others.” Mr. Durbin grilled Attorney General Eric Holder on this appalling lapse in standards last November, and Mr. Holder acknowledged that the training materials contained “misinformation.” But this is about much more that that. This is a sign of prejudice deeply ingrained in counter-terrorism and law-enforcement policies. As the Times’s Charlie Savage reported, the F.B.I. told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the offending material had been removed. But Mr. Durbin has expressed alarm that there were 876 pages and 392 presentations “that included offensive materials” and that the F.B.I. had shared only “a handful” with Senate staff members, who were required to return the pages. The F.B.I., Mr. Durbin said, plans no written report, nor will it make the training material available to Congress or the public. No one, of course, will be held accountable. This is typical. When confronted with abuses and misbehavior in the so-called “war on terror,” government agencies start with denial, followed by grudging admission of some missteps, followed by a cover up and the refusal to hold anyone accountable. Those who buy into the line that we have to surrender some of our liberties and some of our democratic values to combat terrorism, and believe they are safe from the abuse of power because they are not Muslims, would do well to remember that the government has singled out other minority groups in the past, and may single out new groups in the future. Once, it was enough to be of Japanese descent to earn you transport to an internment camp. [Andrew Rosenthal - New York Times]
US anti-terrorism law curbs free speech and activist work, court told
March 30: A group political activists and journalists has launched a legal challenge to stop an American law they say allows the US military to arrest civilians anywhere in the world and detain them without trial as accused supporters of terrorism. The seven figures, who include ex-New York Times reporter Chris Hedges, professor Noam Chomsky and Icelandic politician and WikiLeaks campaigner Birgitta Jonsdottir, testified to a Manhattan judge that the law – dubbed the NDAA or Homeland Battlefield Bill – would cripple free speech around the world. They said that various provisions written into the National Defense Authorization Bill, which was signed by President Barack Obama at the end of 2011, effectively broadened the definition of "supporter of terrorism" to include peaceful activists, authors, academics and even journalists interviewing members of radical groups. Controversy centers on the loose definition of key words in the bill, in particular who might be "associated forces" of the law's named terrorist groups al-Qaida and the Taliban and what "substantial support" to those groups might get defined as. Whereas White House officials have denied the wording extends any sort of blanket coverage to civilians, rather than active enemy combatants, or actions involved in free speech, some civil rights experts have said the lack of precise definition leaves it open to massive potential abuse.
Hedges, who is a Pulitzer Prize-winner and longtime writer on the Middle East, told New York judge Katherine Forrest that he feared he might be subject to arrest under the terms of NDAA if interviewing or meeting Islamic radicals could constitute giving them "substantial support" under the terms of the law. Testifying alongside Hedges was Kai Wargalla, a German organizer behind Occupy London, and a supporter of WikiLeaks, which has extensively published secret US government documents. Wargalla said that since British police had included Occupy London alongside al-Qaida on a terrorism warning notice, she was afraid of the implications of NDAA. She said that after NDAA was signed she was no longer willing to invite an Islamic group like Hamas to speak on discussion panels for fear of being implicated a supporter of terrorism. "We are on a terrorism list just under al-Qaida and this is what the section of the NDAA is talking about under 'associated forces'," she said. Author and campaigner Naomi Wolf read testimony in court from Jonsdottir, who has been a prominent supporter of WikiLeaks and a proponent of free speech laws. Jonsdottir's testimony said she was now afraid of arrest and detention because so many US political figures had labeled WikiLeaks as a terrorist group. “I am now no longer able to travel to the US for fear of being taken into custody as having 'substantially supported' groups that are considered as either terrorist groups or their associates," said Jonsdottir in the statement read by Wolf, who is also a Guardian commentator. [The Guardian]
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