American Muslims continue to face discrimination, harassment and effective persecution at home, writes Abdus Sattar Ghazali* Seven years after 9/11, Muslims in America remain at the receiving end of assaults on their civil rights and their faith in the name of the "war on terror". Muslims are the prime targets of the post-9/11 reconfiguration of American laws, policies and priorities. Defending its civil rights remains the single most important challenge facing the community of seven million American Muslims as the consequences of the 9/11 terrorist attacks continue to unfold seven years after the ghastly tragedy. Government initiatives have reshaped public attitudes about racial profiling and created a harsh backlash against the Muslim community. At the same time, Muslims and Islam remain a popular bogeyman for the US media and some prominent religious and political leaders who never miss an opportunity to attack Muslims and their faith as extremist. Unfortunately, in post-9/11 America, Islamophobia is not only widespread but is also mainstream and respectable. Boston Globe columnist Derrick Jackson's article entitled "Holding Muslims at arms length" best reflects how fear-mongering and Islamophobia is being used in the 2008 US presidential election. Jackson points out that in his year-and-a-half-long run for the presidency, Senator Barack Obama has visited churches and synagogues but no mosque. Jackson answers to Obama's purposive reluctance to visit a mosque when he quotes a Newsweek poll of May that concludes that only 58 per cent of Americans think Obama is a Christian. Tellingly, in July, The New Yorker magazine published a cover cartoon depicting Obama wearing traditional Muslim dress, while his wife, Michelle, is dressed in combat trousers and carrying a machine-gun. This cover legitimises rumours regarding Obama and is not satire but rather promotes fear, stereotypes and racism. The American Muslim community was dismayed at the Islamophobic rhetoric voiced at the Republican Party Convention. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani in their speeches made bigoted remarks that equated Islam with terrorism. "For four days in Denver, the Democrats were afraid to use the words 'Islamic terrorism'," Guiliani said. "I imagine they believe it is politically incorrect to say it. I think they believe it will insult someone. Please, tell me, who are they insulting, if they say 'Islamic terrorism?' They are insulting terrorists." "Is a Supreme Court liberal or conservative that awards Guantanamo terrorists with constitution rights?" Romney said. "John McCain hit the nail on the head: radical violent Islam is evil, and he will defeat it!" These Islamophobic remarks are not surprising given that Senator McCain and his supporters have in the past used rhetoric that only serves to marginalise Muslims. In his speeches, McCain often refers to "radical Islam", "Islamic terrorism" or "Islamic extremism", rhetoric that has been questioned by the National Counterterrorism Centre and the Department of Homeland Security. Islamophobic comments in the election campaign are damaging to the Muslim American community. They are symptomatic of a culture that continues to treat Muslims as suspects and not as equal citizens. Thanks to rising Islamophobia, a Pew poll finds 45 per cent of those polled believing that Islam is more likely than other religion to encourage violence among its believers. The survey also found that public attitudes towards Muslims have grown more negative in recent years, with 35 per cent of respondents expressing an unfavourable view. Such anti-Islam and anti-Muslim feelings were fuelled by such government actions as the mock attack on a fake mosque in Illinois. In May, over 120 officials from almost 30 government agencies participated in the drill in Irving, Illinois, targeting a community facility that had been re-named the "Irving Mosque" for the purposes of the exercise. In the exercise, officers from the Illinois Law Enforcement Alarm System stormed the "mosque" using an armoured car. One "hostage" was hooked up to an explosive device and the "suspects" in the "mosque" released nerve gas. What message does that exercise convey to the American masses that are already conditioned by anti-Islam and anti-Muslim rhetoric via broadcast, electronic and print media, as well as some political and Christian right leaders in the post-9/11 America? Surely, it reinforces the anti-Islam and anti-Muslim image portrayed. Tellingly, a March Gallup survey finds only 17 per cent of Americans have a positive perception of Muslims while 23 per cent have a negative view. Some 48 per cent were reported neutral, which means susceptible to being swayed in a media environment rich with anti-Islam and anti-Muslim sentiment. Meanwhile, profiling has been institutionalised in post-9/11 America. State and federal agencies, under the guise of fighting terrorism, have expanded their use of this degrading, discriminatory and dangerous practice. The American Muslim community was alarmed by the proposed Justice Department policy change that would allow the FBI to investigate persons without evidence of wrongdoing, relying instead on a terrorist profile that could single out Muslims and Arabs. Under the new guidelines, which are expected to be implemented later this year, the FBI would be permitted to consider race and ethnicity when opening an investigation, according to an Associated Press report. Agents would also be allowed to ask open-ended questions about the activities of American Muslims and Arab-Americans, and could initiate an investigation if a person's employment or background is labelled as "suspect" by government analysts looking at public records and other information. The Justice Department profiling proposals followed a November 2007 Los Angeles Police Department programme to "map" (read profile) Muslim communities in Southern California. There are an estimated 500,000 Muslims living in the greater Los Angeles area, including Orange and Riverside counties, which make its concentration of Muslims the second largest in the United States, after New York City. After uproar by Muslim and civil rights groups the profiling plan was abandoned. Not surprisingly, in March, a UN report said that US law enforcement is guilty of discrimination in its use of racial profiling to target Arabs and Muslims since the attacks of 11 September 2001. 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 federal and state legislation and in court practice. Indeed, Muslims are virtually facing a new FBI counterintelligence programme similar to the COINTELPRO operation against African Americans during the 1960s. Harassment through the legal system was one of the methods employed by the FBI at the height of the COINTELPRO operation and the same method is being employed now with high-profile trials of Muslim leaders. Sami Al-Arian, a Palestinian political activist and former professor of the University of South Florida, released on bail in Virginia 2 September after more than five years in federal custody, faces criminal contempt charges despite a plea agreement that he would not have to testify in any other case. In 2005, a Florida jury rejected federal charges that Al-Arian operated a cell for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Al-Arian later pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and was scheduled for release and deportation in April this year. However, he was subpoenaed and jailed for refusing to testify against others. To borrow from Al-Arian's lead counsel, Professor Jonathan Turley, "having lost the case in Florida, the Justice Department has openly sought to extend [Al-Arian's] confinement by daisy-chaining grand juries". Al-Arian's trial for criminal contempt begins in December. Such trial is draining the resources of the Muslim community while giving it bad publicity. In short, seven years after 9/11, Muslims in America remain under siege. Profiled, harassed, reviled, attacked, spied on by the CIA and the FBI, interrogated and sectioned out at airports, the whole community is virtually excluded from normal American society. Muslims have experienced a large volume of negative reprisals from sectors of the American public in the form of violent hate crimes, defamatory speech, attacks on hijab -wearing Muslim women and discrimination and harassment at the workplace. In post-9/11 America Muslims find themselves on the defensive, struggling to convince at times sceptical fellow citizens that they can be both Muslims and loyal US citizens. * The writer is executive editor of the online magazine American Muslim Perspective (www.amperspective.com).
