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American Muslims ten years after 9/11 - Page Two
It's guilty until proven innocent for American Muslim charities
One area of major concern to American Muslims is the treatment of Muslim charities in the post-9/11 era. In the name of “anti-terror financing campaign,” the government has launched a systematic campaign against the Muslim American charities. Soon after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. government shut down three major U.S.-based charities - Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, Global Relief Foundation and Benevolence International Foundation - for allegedly funneling support to terrorists.
Since 2001, Islamic charities have struggled to deal with the uncertainty caused by the material support provision. According to the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, “Muslims fulfilling their obligation to contribute to [charity]…risk inadvertently supporting a current or future [Foreign Terrorist Organization]. In 2004, in order to avoid this, Muslim leaders asked the DOJ for a list of acceptable charities. The DOJ responded that their request was ‘impossible to fulfill’ and that it was ‘not in a position to put out lists of any kind, particularly of any organizations that are good or bad.’" Several people have already been jailed in the United States for their charitable activities in the Islamic world. [11]
On September 1, 2011, the US 5th Circuit Appeals Court was scheduled to hear arguments on behalf of five convicted Holy Land Foundation (HLF) principles: HLF Co-founder, President and CEO Shukri Abu Baker received 65 years in prison; Co-founder, Chairman and former Executive Director Ghassan Elashi also got 65 years; Mohammed el-Mezain, former Chairman, Head of California Operation 15 years; Top fundraiser Mufid Abdulqader 20 years, and Abdulrahman Odeh, Director of HLF East (New Jersey) 15 years.
The U.S. Bureau of Prisons (BOP) has created at least two CMUs, or Communications Management Units, (Terre Haute in Indiana and Marion in Illinois) where overwhelmingly inmates are Muslim which include Ghassan Elashi, co-founder of Holy Land Foundation and Rafil Dhafir, an American doctor born in Iraq who was sentenced in 2005 to 22 years in prison for violating sanctions against Iraq by sending money to a charity he had founded there, as well as for fraud, money laundering, tax evasion and a variety of other nonviolent crimes. He had no terrorism convictions or charges.
In the CMUs the “management” part consists of denying inmates virtually all communication with their families and the outside world. In its Terre Haute, Ind., facility, the BOP is concentrating Arab and Muslim inmates and limiting them to mailing one six-page letter per week, making one 15-minute phone call per month, and receiving only one 60-minute visit per month.
Prisoners in the two CMUs are not being punished because of any terrorist acts. “The vast majority of these folks are there due to entrapment or material support convictions,” says CCR attorney Rachel Meeropol, who has communicated with most of them.
Little information is available about the secretive facilities and the prisoners housed there. One secret unit came to light when supporters of an Iraqi-born American physician, Dr. Rafil Dhafir, made public a letter he had written describing his harrowing transfer to the new prison unit in Terre Haute. Dr. Dhafir called it “a nationwide operation to put Muslims/Arabs in one place so that we can be closely monitored regarding our communications.”
In a special report [12] - Gitmo in the Heartland - published by the Nation, Alia Malik quoted Dr. Dhafir’s letter as saying that at the time there were sixteen men in the CMU, fourteen of whom were Muslims and all but one of those were Arab. They had been told by prison officials that the unit was an experiment. Written material they received informed them that they would be entitled to one fifteen-minute call a week, that their communications had to be in English only and that their visits would all be non-contact.
Conclusion
It will not be too much to say that on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, the American Muslims find themselves in a hostile environment similar to the era of immediately after 9/11. The fear is constantly whipped and hysteria is perpetuated by politicians and media.
Shockingly, ten years after 9/11, 80 percent of Jews, 59 percent of Catholics, 56 percent of Protestants and 56 percent of Mormons believe that American Muslims are not loyal to their country, according to Gallup (Middle East) poll released on August 2.
Fifty two percent of Muslim Americans say their community is singled out by government for terrorist surveillance, according to a PEW survey released on August 30 which also found that 43 percent said they had personally experienced harassment in the past year.
These two surveys reflect the dilemma of the seven-million American Muslim community. In the post-9/11 America they find themselves on the defensive and struggling to convince at times skeptical fellow citizens that they can be both Muslims and loyal U.S. citizens.
To borrow Stephen Lendman, post-9/11, in fact, Muslims are perceived as barbaric, violent, uncivilized, gun-toting terrorists, easily targeted, accused, prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned – not for wrongdoing, but for their faith in America at the wrong time. As a result, it’s no surprise that when (Muslim) suspects are named, media reports automatically convict them in the court of public opinion. [13]
No matter that Islamic tenets teach love, not hate; peace, not violence; charity, not selfishness; tolerance, not terrorism; or that Islam, Christianity and Judaism have common roots. You’d never know it in today’s climate of hate and fear at a time America wages global wars on Islam, including at home. [14]
Despite all these odds American Muslims remain confident in the principles freedom, liberty and equality on which this great nation was founded. As reflected in the August 2011 Gallup Poll, ten years after the 9/11 attacks, an extensive survey of Muslims finds them as optimistic as other Americans. American Muslims’ perceptions of their own well-being increased more in the past three years than those of any other religious group, according to the Gallup report.
The community has responded to odd circumstances with political and social activism. It is now more proactive as it believes that the best way to protect its eroding civil rights is to become more active politically and socially. Muslims believe that they have to participate in the elections, more than any other time.
With anti-Muslim rhetoric reaching epic proportions in broader U.S. society — largely tolerated, rarely condemned – the American Muslim community remains sanguine that the current campaign will eventually subside since the religious freedom is a founding principle of this country and the main catalyst for its origins in the early seventeenth century. This principle was emphatically reiterated by President George Washington in his 1790 letter to the Jews of Rhode Island who built the Touro Synagogue:
“The citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy — a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship….The Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.”
When President Washington wrote this letter 220 years back, he must have been aware of the effect it would have on the fledgling nation.
Muslims join the nation in commemorating the 10th anniversary of this ghastly tragedy with an optimism that the state of present anti-Muslim campaign in the name of war on terrorism will recede in due course of time as happened during the Second World War with the Japanese Americans who also endured similar national intolerance, social prejudice and legal injustice.
References
[1] GOP Debate: Newt Gingrich's Comparison of Muslims and Nazis Sparks Outrage -
ABC NEWS June 14, 2011]
[2] 2010 another hard year for American Muslims by Abdus Sattar Ghazali
[3] Islam-baiting doesn’t work - It failed in campaign 2010 and will do worse in 2012 by Stephan Salisbury
[4] Peter King’s hearings stoke Islamophobia – American Muslim Perspective, March 13, 2011
[5] The CAIR/UC Berkeley report on Islamophobia, titled “Same Hate, New Target” – June 24, 2011
[6] The Tennessean, October 24, 2010.
[7] New York Times – July 24, 2011
[8] Islamophobia – now in American children’s textbooks - American Muslim Perspective – April 12, 2010]
[9] The Right Wing playbook on anti-Muslim extremism by People For the American Way (PFAW) - July 25, 2011
[10] With CIA help, NYPD built secret effort to monitor mosques, daily life of Muslim neighborhoods by Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman - Washington Post – August 24, 2011]
[11] How Easy Is It for Peaceful People to Violate the Patriot Act? By Joshua Holland
[12] Gitmo in the Heartland by Alia Malek – The Nation, March 10, 2011
[13] Vilifying Muslims in America by Stephen Lendman - Indybay – August 7th, 2011]
[14] Ibid.
Abdus Sattar Ghazali is the Chief Editor of the Journal of America.
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