the Message Continues ... 6/15
Article 6
ISLAMOPHOBIA:
AMERICA'S NEW MENACE
[By Dr. Mahjabeen Islam
courtesy: The Friday Times internet edition, October 5, 2002
Don't you just hate the phrase "paradigm shift?" One feels an instant
auditory antipathy to it, an antipathy which has become even worse now that the
latest U.S. cliche proclaims all things bad and blighted come from Muslims. Yes,
Islam is America's new bogeyman.
In 2000, then vice-president Al Gore, as head of the federal anti- terrorism
committee, help ed push through the Secret Evidence law that set the stage for
ethnic profiling and stereotyping. Many Muslims were harassed and some even
detained for looking the part. On the heels of that setback came the new
"Carnivore" software that the FBI would use to snoop on anyone's
e-mail. As the anti-Muslim bureaucracy gained steam, September 11 happened and
it was suddenly "I told you so"
everywhere -- the tedious airport checks, the public harassment of women wearing
hijabs, the killing of Sikhs and others who looked like Muslims, the increasing
hate crimes.
On October 26, 2001, President Bush signed the USA Patriot Act into law, and
suddenly the Secret Evidence legislation seemed diminutive.
With the Patriot Act, sweeping new powers have been given to both domestic law
enforcement and international intelligence agencies; meanwhile, the traditional
checks and balances that previously ensured that these powers were not abused
have been done away with. Critics decrying the resulting infringement of civil
liberties argue that the Patriot Act was passed in a great rush, was not debated
in Congress, and was not scrutinized by expert witnesses outside of the law
enforcement field.
In action, the Patriot Act produced a comedy of errors in small town
America. According to the Wall Street Journal, the city commissioner
of Chester, PA -- who was an American citizen of Pakistani descent --
had the door of his house broken down by the FBI, even though his wife
was at home. The FBI held her at gunpoint whilst agents scoured the
house for clues. Apparently, neighbours became suspicious when water
used to clean a cooking pan was thrown into the backyard.
The article was appropriately headlined "Law encourages neighbours to
spy on neighbour." There is no evidence that civil liberties enjoyed
by people previous to the enactment of the Patriot Act ever hindered
or limited the normal process of tracking, catching and punishing
genuine terrorists. Now this new law also invades on-line privacy, yet
does nothing except possibly monitor individual non-violent computer
crimes.
So we in the U.S. now have quite a choir singing along to the
nauseating, repetitious drumbeat of George Bush's "war on terror"
chant. The sad fact is that many of the "choirboys" are not just
obscure cranks, but nationally known figures who have a voice and, in
some cases, quite a following.
During a graduation ceremony at Johns Hopkins University, NBC
Nightline anchor Tom Brokaw gave an entire speech with Islamophobia as
his central theme. He said that modernity was an affront to Allah and
because "young Muslims who are suicide-motivated could not be killed
or ignored, their rage had to be dealt with." Adding provocation to
alarm, he went on to add that global demographics are changing so
rapidly that in about 20 years Islam will supersede Christianity as
the world faith claiming the greatest number of followers.
Whether the Johns Hopkins administration identified itself with this
message is unclear, but despite a storm of protest, Harvard University
allowed a graduating student, Zayed Yasin, to go ahead with his
scheduled speech which was titled, "Of faith and citizenship: my
American Jihad." The speech was eloquently simple and afterwards the
detractors realized that indeed they had been protesting too much in
an atmosphere of anti-Muslim and anti-Islam paranoia.
The baton, nay the bayonet, was handed by Brokaw to Lou Dobbs of CNN's
Moneyline, who, instead of acquiring fame through the stock market,
decided to use the term "Islamist" as a synonym for all things
terrorist. The news raged across message boards and discussion groups,
with many Muslims calling CNN and e-mailing Dobbs. The only
"concession" he made was to call them "radical Islamists,"
but
terrorists all the same.
But these are only background as the Bush administration gears up to
pursue its open-ended and no-holds-barred "war on terror." All Arab
and South Asian Muslim visitors to the U.S. must now have their
fingerprints taken and their particulars stored in criminal databases.
The administration's catch-all Homeland Defence plan now concentrates
power in a few select departments. The Washington Post says the
agencies gathered under one umbrella "reach deep into American life,
doing everything from coordinating disaster relief to tracking down
foreigners working illegally in restaurants," and that the measure
"blurs the boundaries between gathering intelligence on foreigners and
doing the same with American citizens."
From Dobbs the cacophony reached the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC)
where its former president, Rev. Jerry Vines, disparaged the Prophet
Muhammad (pbuh). Despite an uproar and repeated demands for retraction
and apology, none have been forthcoming. However, the Jewish Anti-
Defamation League was swift to reminded everyone of the call made in
1999 by the same Southern Baptist Convention to pray for the mass
conversion of Jews to Christianity.
Well before the first female suicide-bomber blew herself up in Israel,
Muslim women in America were under intense scrutiny. An American-born
woman of Pakistani parentage was not just horrifically profiled at an
airport; but also forced to remove her Hijab in public, despite her
protestations that she had been checked by a female security officer
in private. There is a quiet rage within America over September 11;
President Bush's xenophobic policies and the similar bent of most of
his administration, as well as the right-leaning media chorus, make
the quiet rage increasingly raucous.
According to the Annual Report of Complaints regarding discrimination
compiled by CAIR, there was a 15 per cent increase in 2001 compared to
the previous year and the yearly increase has been steady since 1997.
It is safe to assume that 2002 will reveal an exponential rise in
these cases. Virginia leads the pack, followed by Illinois, Maryland
and New York. The Muslim features attracting most discrimination were
women's hijabs and men's beards, followed by ethnic origins.
Simple and unknowing Americans all over the country have been infected
by this sickening trend; the vilification of Islam is felt all of a
sudden to be not just fashionable, but a necessity. Paul Craig
Roberts, a columnist for the Washington Times, even questioned the
wisdom of issuing visas to young Muslims. Shannon Burke, a radio talk
show host in Florida, has called for the closure of all U.S. borders
to Muslims, because "Muslims are cruel and Islam hates education and
democracy and any new invention is a threat to Allah."
The phobia is fast turning into paranoia, and appears obviously to
have been stoked by the way the September 11 events were presented,
and continue to be. Here in the United States, our government is
formulating anti-Islam policy and the media is cheerleading it
through. Security and protective measures are necessary, for they
affect each and every citizen, but to lose balance in such a
widespread manner and use such measures to terrorize one particular
sector of the community is more than frightening. If one is not WASP
(White Anglo Saxon Protestant), he or she is subject to being
invasively profiled and, for example, ejected from an airplane, as has
happened innumerable times. Recently, five brown-skinned men were
bumped from their flight, because another passenger felt they were
acting "suspicious." Only two of the five were Arabs.
Of late, however, there has been a breath of fresh air. The University
of North Carolina has urged all incoming students to read a book
called "Approaching the Qur'an" by Michael Sells; and if they do not
wish to do so, they must write a paper on why they refused. Sells'
book does not promote Islam, yet a group of ultra-right Christians and
Jews filed for a restraining order to prevent the book from being
discussed. Surprise of surprises -- the order application was
overturned by a federal judge.
The North Carolina state assembly, however, passed a resolution
threatening to cut the university's reading money if it did not give
"equal time to all religions." The UNC action was the centrepiece on
TV news shows and the screaming-hoarse Bill O'Reilly called Islam the
"religion of our enemies." He likened the action of UNC to having
students read Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' in 1941.
America is a nation of immigrants, and strides have been made in
accommodating diversity and protecting civil rights. These advances
have led to the democratic pluralism of which we are rightfully proud.
Unfortunately, the national panic generated by September 11 has so
preoccupied the Bush administration and our media that both
institutions seem to have lost perspective. We pride ourselves in our
diversity and our tolerance, but there is now a real risk that this
great nation could be transformed into a Soviet-style police state --
a state of fear and suspicion in which, ostensibly to fight criminal
terrorism, the state itself becomes a terrorist. Fear and paranoia are
their own enemies; they can't get much worse when compounded with
Islamophobia.
(The writer is a physician practising in Toledo, Ohio, US. She can be
reached at mahjabeenislam@hotmail.com This article was slightly
abridged and edited for the Friday Bulletin.)
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