The Rise of Islamophobia

By Arsalan Iftikhar, TomPaine.com. Posted May 23, 2005.

Nearly four years after from the 9/11 terror attacks—the greatest tragedy to befall our nation in modern history—our country has learned certain lessons regarding our role in the global community.  But we have more to learn about treatment of our own citizens—lessons that will hopefully lead us to a stronger, safer and more vibrant society for people of all races, faiths and cultures.

Since the 9/11 attacks, the most disturbing legal trend in America has been the growing disparity in how American Muslims are treated under the law.

Recently, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest American Muslim civil rights group, reported  that it processed a total of 1,522 incident reports of civil rights cases last year—a 49 percent increase in cases of harassment, violence and discriminatory treatment from 2003. That's the highest number of Muslim civil rights cases ever reported to CAIR.

In addition, CAIR received 141 reports of actual and potential violent anti-Muslim hate crimes, a 52 percent increase from 2003.

Overall, 10 states alone accounted for almost 79 percent of all reported incidents of discrimination. These states include California, New York, Arizona, Virginia, Texas, Florida, Ohio, Maryland, New Jersey and Illinois.

By far the greatest increase from last year occurred in the area of unreasonable arrests, detentions, unlawful searches/seizures and interrogations. In 2003, complaints concerning suspect law enforcement techniques accounted for only 7 percent of all reported incidents. In 2004, however, these reports rose to almost 26 percent of all reported cases to CAIR.

In the months after 9/11, Attorney General John Ashcroft, using his powers under section 412 of the now infamous USA PATRIOT Act, rounded up and imprisoned well over 1,200 Muslim and Arab men based solely on pretextual immigration violations. The most disturbing fact about these mass roundups was the fact that the Justice Department refused to disclose the detainees’ identities, give them access to lawyers or allow them to have contact with their families. The inspector general conceded in his official report that they stopped counting the detainees after 1,200 because the “statistics became too confusing.”

Georgetown University law professor and civil liberties expert David Cole has said that, “Thousands were detained in this blind search for terrorists without any real evidence of terrorism, and ultimately without netting virtually any terrorists of any kind.”

In June 2002, Ashcroft instituted the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, more commonly referred to as NSEERS. One of the most ambiguous and publicly debated aspects of NSEERS was known as “Special Registration.” Special Registration required all male nationals over the age of 14 from 25 countries to report to the government to be registered and fingerprinted. With the sole exception of North Korea, every single one of the 25 countries on the Special Registration bulletin was Muslim or Arab. The ACLU denounced the plan as “a thinly veiled effort to trigger massive and discriminatory deportations of certain immigrants.”

In one year alone, the Special Registration program registered 83,310 foreign nationals, placing 13,740 into deportation proceedings.

The Justice Department also found it prudent to create high-profile terrorism cases based on the flimsiest evidence. For example, after spending 76 days in solitary confinement and being labeled a ‘spy’ in most media circles by government leaks based on sealed evidence, where can Army chaplain and West Point graduate Captain James Yee go to regain his respectability? Yee was falsely accused of treasonous crimes that could have resulted in the death penalty. Why was it that after the West Point graduate was cleared of all ‘espionage’ allegations, the Army still saw fit to charge him with pornography and adultery charges? Of course, these charges were eventually dropped as well, and Captain Yee is a free man seeking to reclaim the good name that was tarnished by overzealous federal authorities.

On March 11, 2004, 10 bombs exploded on four trains in Madrid, Spain. The death toll exceeded 190 people, and at least 1,800 were injured. A partial fingerprint found on a bag containing detonators was analyzed by the FBI, and officials proclaimed the match to be a “100 percent identification” of American lawyer Brandon Mayfield—a white convert to Islam who was subsequently arrested and jailed as a ‘material witness’ in the 3/11 Madrid bombings.

Of course, all of the evidence was sealed by the government. But it was still conveniently leaked to the press that the FBI may have caught the "American Connection" to the Madrid Bombings.

Despite the fact that a Scotland Yard fingerprint expert found any claim of a fingerprint match "horrendous," part of the evidence used to detain Mayfield for two weeks included "miscellaneous Spanish documents" that the FBI found in the home of Mayfield and his Egyptian-American wife. The absurdity of the Justice Department’s case was revealed when The New York Times reported that these "documents" were later identified as nothing more than his children's Spanish homework.

Unfortunately, since the story had already been leaked to the media and many major news outlets were carrying the breaking story of the “American Connection” to the Madrid bombings. The damage to Mr. Mayfield and the American Muslim community had already been done.

In addition to the ongoing Iraqi occupation, this upward trend in civil rights violations against American Muslims can also be attributed to Islamophobic rhetoric coming from certain right-wing circles. For instance, when Ann Coulter says that there should be a ‘forced conversion of Muslims’ to Christianity or Pat Robertson states that he would never allow Muslim or Hindu judges on the federal bench, they betray our nation's pluralistic origins. Such seething hatred expressed in mainstream media outlets breeds prejudice and fosters the perpetuation of stereotypes.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said that, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Although much of our government’s focus today is on ‘spreading democracy’ and ‘winning the hearts and minds’ of people abroad, it is high time that the Bush administration try spreading a little American democracy here — while winning the hearts and minds of Americans by treating all people equally under the law.

Arsalan Iftikhar is national legal director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest American Muslim civil rights and advocacy group. CAIR is based in Washington, D.C.

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