History > 2006 > USA > Arab-Americans / Muslim Americans

Congressman Criticizes

Election of Muslim

December 21, 2006
The New York Times
By RACHEL L. SWARNS

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 — In a letter sent to hundreds of voters this month, Representative Virgil H. Goode Jr., Republican of Virginia, warned that the recent election of the first Muslim to Congress posed a serious threat to the nation’s traditional values.

Mr. Goode was referring to Keith Ellison, the Minnesota Democrat and criminal defense lawyer who converted to Islam as a college student and was elected to the House in November. Mr. Ellison’s plan to use the Koran during his private swearing-in ceremony in January had outraged some Virginia voters, prompting Mr. Goode to issue a written response to them, a spokesman for Mr. Goode said.

In his letter, which was dated Dec. 5, Mr. Goode said that Americans needed to “wake up” or else there would “likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran.”

“I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America and to prevent our resources from being swamped,” said Mr. Goode, who vowed to use the Bible when taking his own oath of office.

Mr. Goode declined Wednesday to comment on his letter, which quickly stirred a furor among some Congressional Democrats and Muslim Americans, who accused him of bigotry and intolerance.

They noted that the Constitution specifically bars any religious screening of members of Congress and that the actual swearing in of those lawmakers occurs without any religious texts. The use of the Bible or Koran occurs only in private ceremonial events that take place after lawmakers have officially sworn to uphold the Constitution.

Mr. Ellison dismissed Mr. Goode’s comments, saying they seemed ill informed about his personal origins as well as about Constitutional protections of religious freedom. “I’m not an immigrant,” added Mr. Ellison, who traces his American ancestors back to 1742. “I’m an African-American.”

Since the November election, Mr. Ellison said, he has received hostile phone calls and e-mail messages along with some death threats. But in an interview on Wednesday, he emphasized that members of Congress and ordinary citizens had been overwhelmingly supportive and said he was focusing on setting up his Congressional office, getting phone lines hooked up and staff members hired, not on negative comments.

“I’m not a religious scholar, I’m a politician, and I do what politicians do, which is hopefully pass legislation to help the nation,” said Mr. Ellison, who said he planned to focus on secular issues like increasing the federal minimum wage and getting health insurance for the uninsured.

“I’m looking forward to making friends with Representative Goode, or at least getting to know him,” Mr. Ellison said, speaking by telephone from Minneapolis. “I want to let him know that there’s nothing to fear. The fact that there are many different faiths, many different colors and many different cultures in America is a great strength.”

In Washington, Brendan Daly, a spokesman for the incoming House speaker, Nancy Pelosi of California, called Mr. Goode’s letter “offensive.” Corey Saylor, legislative director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, criticized what he described as Mr. Goode’s “message of intolerance.”

Representative Bill Pascrell Jr., Democrat of New Jersey, urged Mr. Goode to reach out to Muslims in Virginia and learn “to dispel misconceptions instead of promoting them.”

“Keith Ellison serves as a great example of Muslim Americans in our nation, and he does not have to answer to you, to me or anyone else in regards to questions about his faith,” said Mr. Pascrell, whose district includes many Arab-Americans.

The fracas over Mr. Ellison’s decision to use the Koran during his personal swearing-in ceremony began last month when Dennis Prager, a conservative columnist and radio host, condemned the decision as one that would undermine American civilization.

“Ellison’s doing so will embolden Islamic extremists and make new ones, as Islamists, rightly or wrongly, see the first sign of the realization of their greatest goal — the Islamicization of America,” said Mr. Prager, who said the Bible was the only relevant religious text in the United States.

“If you are incapable of taking an oath on that book, don’t serve in Congress,” Mr. Prager said.

In his letter, Mr. Goode echoed that view, saying that he did not “subscribe to using the Koran in any way.” He also called for ending illegal immigration and reducing legal immigration.

Linwood Duncan, a spokesman for Mr. Goode, said the Virginia lawmaker had no intention of backing down, despite the furor.

“He stands by the letter,” Mr. Duncan said. “He has no intention of apologizing.”

    Congressman Criticizes Election of Muslim, NYT, 21.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/21/us/21koran.html

Faith and War

From Head Scarf to Army Cap, Making a New Life

December 15, 2006
The New York Times
By ANDREA ELLIOTT

LACKLAND AIR FORCE BASE, Tex. — Stomping her boots and swinging her bony arms, Fadwa Hamdan led a column of troops through this bleak Texas base.

Only six months earlier, she wore the head scarf of a pious Muslim woman and dropped her eyes in the presence of men. Now she was marching them to dinner.

“I’m gonna be a shooting man, a shooting man!” she cried, her Jordanian accent lost in the chanting voices. “The best I can for Uncle Sam, for Uncle Sam!”

The United States military has long prided itself on molding raw recruits into hardened soldiers. Perhaps none have undergone a transformation quite like that of Ms. Hamdan.

Forbidden by her husband to work, she raised five children behind the drawn curtains of their home in Saudi Arabia. She was not allowed to drive. On the rare occasions when she set foot outside, she wore a full-face veil.

Then her world unraveled. Separated from her husband, who had taken a second wife, and torn from her children, she moved to Queens to start over. Struggling to survive on her own, she answered a recruiting advertisement for the Army and enlisted in May.

Ms. Hamdan’s passage through the military is a remarkable act of reinvention. It required courage and sacrifice. She had to remove her hijab, a sacred symbol of the faith she holds deeply. She had to embrace, at the age of 39, an arduous and unfamiliar life.

In return, she sought what the military has always promised new soldiers: a stable home, an adoptive family, a remade identity. She left one male-dominated culture for another, she said, in the hope of finding new strength along the way.

“Always, I dream I have power on the inside, and one day it’s going to come out,” said Ms. Hamdan, a small woman with delicate hands and sad, almond eyes.

She belongs to the rare class of Muslim women who have signed up to become soldiers trained in Arabic translation. Such female linguists play a crucial role for the American armed forces in Iraq, where civilian women often feel uncomfortable interacting with male troops.

Finding Arabic-speaking women willing to serve in the military has proved daunting. Of the 317 soldiers who have completed training in the Army linguist program since 2003, just 23 are women, 13 of them Muslim.

Ms. Hamdan wrestled with the decision for two years. Only in the Army, she decided, would she be able to save money to hire a lawyer and finally divorce her husband. She yearned to regain custody of her children and support them on her own. She thought of going to graduate school one day.

But when Ms. Hamdan finally enlisted, she was filled with as much fear as determination. There was no guarantee, with her broken English and frail physique, that she could meet the military’s standards or survive its rigors.

“This is different world for me,” she said at the time.

‘This Is the Army’

It was around midnight on May 31 when a yellow school bus brought Ms. Hamdan and 16 other new soldiers to Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, a spread of parched grass and drab, low-lying buildings.

Ms. Hamdan had not scored high enough on the required English examination to go directly to basic training, so she was sent here for intensive language instruction.

At Lackland, soldiers enlisted in the Army linguist program known as 09-Lima have 24 weeks to improve their English and pass the exam. In that time, they follow a strict military regimen. They rise at 5 a.m. for physical training. They march to class. They drop to the ground for punitive push-ups.

When the bus arrived at the barracks that evening, Ms. Hamdan said, she hopped out first, her camouflage cap pulled low on her head.

Standing by the metal stairs was Sgt. First Class Willie Brannon, an imposing 48-year-old man with a stern jaw and a leveling stare. He ordered the soldiers to change into shorts. Ms. Hamdan explained softly that she was Muslim and could not do this.

“This is the Army,” he replied. “Everybody’s the same.”

Ms. Hamdan burst into tears.

The issue had arisen at the base before, and some of the Muslim women had been permitted to wear sweat pants instead of shorts. Officially, it would be Ms. Hamdan’s choice.

But from the sidelines came two opposing directives, one in English and the other in Arabic. The drill sergeants wanted Ms. Hamdan to get used to wearing shorts, while several of the male Muslim soldiers tried to shame her into refusing.

“You’re not supposed to show your legs,” they told her.

For three weeks, she wore the blue nylon shorts, hitching up her white socks. Then she switched to sweat pants, even as the summer heat surpassed 100 degrees.

It helped, Ms. Hamdan thought, that there were so many similarities between Islam and the Army.

The command “Attention!” reminded her of the first step in the daily Muslim prayer, when one must stand completely still.

Soldiers, like Muslims, were instructed to eat with one hand. The women ate by themselves, and always walked with an escort, as Muslim women traditionally traveled.

The Army taught soldiers to live with order. They folded their fatigues as women folded their hijabs, and woke before sunrise as Ms. Hamdan had done all her life. They always marched behind a flag, as Muslims did in the days of the Prophet.

Nothing felt more familiar than the military’s emphasis on respect. Soldiers learned to tuck their hands behind their backs when speaking to superiors.

When Ms. Hamdan tried this with Sergeant Brannon, she thought of her father. Her eyes automatically dropped to the floor, with customary Muslim modesty.

“Look me in the eye,” the sergeant said. It was a command he had learned to deliver with care.

Sergeant Brannon, an African-American Baptist from North Carolina, had never met a Muslim before coming to Lackland. He soon concluded that the Muslim women in his charge had survived greater struggles outside the military than anything they would face inside it.

“They’ve been through a lot,” he said.

Life Before the Service

Fadwa Hamdan was always a touch rebellious.

One of seven children, she was raised by her Palestinian parents in Amman, Jordan. Her father worked as a government irrigation official while her mother stayed at home with the children. They expected the same of their daughters.

But as a teenager, Ms. Hamdan rejected her many suitors. She wanted to see the world. At 19, she said, she secretly volunteered as a nurse with the Jordanian police, infuriating her parents. That same year, a visiting Palestinian doctor who lived in New York spotted her in the street.

He tracked down her home address, and spoke to her father. The next day, Ms. Hamdan learned she was engaged.

“Your dream has come true,” Ms. Hamdan recalls her mother saying. “You’re leaving Jordan.”

Ms. Hamdan joined her husband in Staten Island in 1987. She felt nothing for him. He was 10 years her senior, and she found him stiff and dictatorial. He only let her leave the house with him, she said. If she upset him, he refused to speak to her for months.

She had children to fill the void. She became more religious, and began wearing the face veil known as a niqab. Eventually, the family moved to Saudi Arabia.

Weeks after Ms. Hamdan delivered her fifth child in 2000, she learned from her mother-in-law that her husband was taking a second wife in the West Bank city of Ramallah. Ms. Hamdan was shocked.

“I couldn’t talk,” she said.

The next summer, on a family vacation in Amman, her husband disappeared one evening with three of their children, she said. Days later she located two of her boys in Saudi Arabia, and learned that the new wife would be joining them.

Ms. Hamdan’s 8-year-old girl had been left with her grandparents in Ramallah. She tried to get the girl back, but her husband had kept the child’s passport, she said.

When reached by telephone in Saudi Arabia, a man answering to her husband’s name said, “This is her choice and I don’t have anything to do with it,” apparently referring to her decision to join the Army. Then he hung up.

It never occurred to Ms. Hamdan to seek a divorce. She feared that it would bring shame to her family. From Jordan, she fought for legal custody of the children. In 2002, a judge ruled that she could keep the three youngest children, but allotted her a meager alimony, not enough to cover their schooling. Reluctantly, she returned them to their father.

Alone in Amman, she felt like an outcast.

“The neighbors, they look at me,” she said.

In September 2002, she moved to Queens to live with her brother and his wife. She returned to wearing a regular head scarf, or hijab, and started classes at a local community college. One night she came home late, she said, and her brother told her to leave. “She did not follow the rules of the house,” the brother, Sam Saeed, said in an interview.

Ms. Hamdan did not know where to turn. Her father had refused to speak to her since she left Jordan. Over the next 10 days, she rode the subway at night and slept on a park bench in Queens. Finally, she walked into a hair salon in Brooklyn and approached a Lebanese Muslim woman.

“She was hysterical crying,” said the woman, Helena Buiduon.

Ms. Hamdan stayed with Ms. Buiduon until she found her own apartment. She taught the Koran to children and worked in a doctor’s office while earning an associate’s degree in medical assistance.

Her life remained a struggle. She lived in a small, drafty apartment in the Bronx. Other Muslim immigrants found her puzzling.

Some people suggested that she was a “loose woman,” she recalled, a notion that amused her given how little she wanted another relationship.

“I can’t feel anything for anybody,” she said. “I lived like jail. Just imagine you have a bird and the door is open. You think he will go back to this jail again? Never. He’s just flying.”

In 2003, she spotted an ad for the Army in an Arabic-language magazine. She met with a recruiter but cut the conversation short after learning she would have to remove her head scarf before enlisting.

Secretly, though, she kept imagining a new, military life. In March, she made up her mind.

“I broke the law with God,” she said of her decision to remove her hijab. “I had to.”

She put her belongings in storage. She began lifting 20-pound weights. She slipped off her veil in public a few times. She felt naked.

Two days before she left, she stopped by her brother’s video shop in Queens to say goodbye.

Mr. Saeed was kneeling in prayer, as a Spanish rap video blasted from a television set. He stiffened at the sight of Ms. Hamdan, then kissed her on the cheek. They had not seen each other all year. Within minutes, an argument began.

“She’ll never make it,” Mr. Saeed said, looking away from his sister.

“Oh yeah?” she replied, her eyes widening.

“A Muslim woman is not allowed to travel alone,” he said.

“What about working?” she said, her voice quivering. “Look at your wife, she works!”

“She likes to spend time here,” he said.

Ms. Hamdan ran from the store crying.

“She won’t make it,” Mr. Saeed told a reporter after she left. “Woman always weak. She need a man to protect her.”

Later, when Ms. Hamdan heard what her brother had said, she was silent.

“Why didn’t he protect me?” she said.

What Happens Next

Life at Lackland — where soldiers cannot chew gum, wear makeup or leave the base — reminded Ms. Hamdan of her marriage.

“Sometimes, when I’m by myself, I wonder how I have stayed here for six months,” she said as she sat outside her barracks one recent evening. “But I did it.”

She was among 39 men and women in the Army linguist program, in a company of 119 soldiers. The rest were immigrants from around the globe, there to improve their English in the hopes of entering boot camp.

Everyone, it seemed, had a sad story.

The women talked quietly after the lights went out. A Sudanese woman had come to the United States after most of her family died in a bombing in Khartoum. A 23-year-old woman had lost her Iranian mother in an honor killing.

A teenage Iraqi girl cried herself to sleep every night. She, like many other soldiers, began referring to Ms. Hamdan as “Mom.”

“They come into my arms,” said Ms. Hamdan, who was older than most of the others.

She missed being a mother, yet she rarely talked about her own children. She was learning not to cry, and that was a subject that broke her down. Privately, she called them in Saudi Arabia twice a week with 20-minute phone cards, four minutes per child.

As the summer wore on, it became clear that Ms. Hamdan was floundering in her English studies. She failed the exam repeatedly.

Physically, though, she was growing stronger. Push-ups and sit-ups no longer scared her. She found she was a fast runner.

On Aug. 10, she won the one-mile race for female soldiers in seven minutes flat, in sweat pants. The next week, she became a squad leader and bay commander, directing a column of soldiers during marches and keeping order in the female barracks.

Days later, she decided to wear the shorts again.

“What, we have a new soldier here?” Sergeant Brannon called out as she walked deliberately down the stairs.

“I am going to show the men I’m like them,” she told him later. “I’m a man now.”

“No, you’re not a man” he said.

“Yes, I’m a man.”

“No,” he said. “You’re a strong-willed woman.”

That became his nickname for her: strong-willed woman.

As Ms. Hamdan’s status rose with the drill sergeants, so did her standing among the soldiers.

“Sometimes I’m tough on them,” she said one recent weekday as she patrolled her floor. The women smiled from their bunk beds. “I like everything clean.”

Another morning, she sat in the mess hall, eating her daily breakfast of Froot Loops followed by nacho-cheese Doritos. A drill sergeant called out that the group had three minutes to finish, just as a clean-shaven soldier walked past Ms. Hamdan with a tray full of food. She shot him a hard look.

“Three minutes,” she repeated. “You hear that?”

The greatest shift for Ms. Hamdan came in her relationship with the male soldiers. They stopped taunting her about wearing shorts. When she gave orders, they listened.

“It seems like a heavy burden has been lifted from her,” Sergeant Brannon said.

Yet even as she felt herself changing, she remained steady in her faith. She never stopped praying five times a day. She attended the base’s mosque each Friday and fasted through the holy month of Ramadan.

On a recent Friday, she sat with her eyes closed on the mosque’s embroidered carpet, wearing a white veil and skirt over her Army fatigues.

“Staying on the straight path is not an easy matter, except for those who Allah helps to do so,” the Egyptian imam said in Arabic over a loudspeaker.

In November, Ms. Hamdan’s English score was still too low, by 11 points, even though she was performing better on the weekly quizzes. She was given a one-month extension, and one more chance.

She took her last exam in December, and failed again. She ran from her classroom.

“Don’t come looking for me,” she recalled telling a startled drill sergeant.

By herself, Ms. Hamdan began walking across the base. Tears streamed down her face as she reached the two-story, concrete building that had long been her refuge.

She climbed the stairs of the mosque. Alone, she knelt on the carpet and prayed. Finally, she sat in silence. She felt at peace.

Ms. Hamdan will be discharged on Dec. 15. She is unsure of what the future holds. She may stay in Texas and look for a job. She may no longer wear a hijab in public. All she knows is that she is different now, and no less a Muslim for it.

“I can face men,” she said. “I can fight. I can talk. I don’t keep it inside.”

She thought for a moment.

“I changed myself,” she said. “I’m a new Fadwa. Strong female. I like this.”

    From Head Scarf to Army Cap, Making a New Life, NYT, 15.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/15/nyregion/15muslim.html?hp&ex=1166245200&en=df3797451d863131&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Fear 'as bad as after 9/11'

Updated 12/12/2006 11:33 PM ET
USA Today
By Rick Hampson

DEARBORN, Mich. — The Arab Muslims who came here eight decades ago to work on Henry Ford's new assembly line believed their American future was limitless. But after five years on the home front in America's war on terrorism, many of their descendants are hunkering down, covering up and staying put.

In this and similar enclaves, like those in northern New Jersey and Brooklyn, many Arab Muslims say their community is turning in on itself — shying away from a society increasingly inclined to equate Islam with terrorism.

"It's as bad as after 9/11," says Rana Abbas-Chami of the Michigan American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. "A lot of people are scared. They've changed how they do things."

Some stay put. They don't like to fly, cross the border with Canada or shop at malls outside the city. "It's a feeling that if you go too far outside Dearborn, anything can happen," says Osama Siblani, a local newspaper publisher.

Some blend in. They Anglicize their names (Osama Nimer, electrician, is now Samuel Nimer) or change them (Mohammad Bazzi, nurse, is Alex Goldsmith). They trim their beards. In public, they speak English instead of Arabic. They display the flag. They wear the Tigers cap.

Some lie low. They won't contribute to a Muslim charity, at least not by check, and not if it works overseas. They watch what they say, especially on the phone. They think twice before trying to rent a truck, get a hunting license or take a flying lesson.

Some regard Dearborn, center of the nation's largest Arab Muslim community, as an island of security; others see it as a potential trap.

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, fears of domestic sabotage led to the internment of Japanese-Americans. Some Arab Muslims wonder if it could happen again — especially if there's another domestic terror attack. People here speculate about spies and informers in their midst; government eavesdropping and surveillance; and, if there's another 9/11, concentration camps.

These themes emerged repeatedly in USA TODAY interviews with about two dozen Arab Muslims around the nation.

After the terror attacks in 2001 — the work of 19 Arab Muslims who'd moved around the country — Arab Muslims living here hoped things would slowly return to normal. Then came prolonged, messy wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; post-Sept. 11 security initiatives such as the Patriot Act; al-Qaeda train bombings in London and Madrid; war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Michael Suleiman, a Kansas State University political scientist, says that discrimination against Arab Muslims is virtually inevitable given a government determined to prevent another 9/11 and a populace barraged by images of violence in Iraq and denunciations of what President Bush has called "Islamic fascism."

Now Arab Muslims — even those never questioned by the FBI, hassled by the boss or heckled by the jerk in a passing car — feel more vulnerable than ever.

"Each crisis makes it more difficult. They're always insecure," Suleiman says. "They ask, 'When is it we actually become Americans? When is the hyphen dropped?' "

Reports of anti-Muslim incidents in the nation jumped 30% last year, according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which blames a "negative and politically charged" environment on the Internet and talk radio. The 1,972 complaints of harassment, violence and discrimination were the most since CAIR began totaling incidents in 1995.

Americans seem unsympathetic. Thirty-nine percent say they harbor at least some prejudice against Muslims, according to a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll earlier this year. The same percentage favor requiring U.S. Muslims — citizens included — to carry special IDs. About a third say U.S. Muslims sympathize with al-Qaeda.

Political leaders have given voice to such worries. In a campaign letter this fall, Rep. Peter King from Long Island — generally viewed as a moderate Republican — accused American Muslim leaders of insufficiently denouncing the 9/11 attacks. In the past, he has said that 85% of U.S. mosques have "extremist leadership."

Everyone has a story

In heavily Arab east Dearborn, almost everyone — from the greenest immigrants to fourth-generation Americans who've never been to the Middle East — has a story, or knows someone who does.

Stories like that of Farooq Al-Fatlawi, a bus passenger en route to Chicago, who was put off with his bags in Toledo after he told the driver he was from Iraq.

Other cases this year have attracted national attention:

Bay Area civil rights activist Raed Jarrar was barred from a plane for wearing a T-shirt that said "We will not be silent" in Arabic and English.

Six imams seen praying in a Minneapolis airport terminal were later removed from their flight after a passenger passed a note to a flight attendant saying that the men acted suspiciously on board.

The imams, who were handcuffed, questioned and released, have denied the accusations; five are seeking an out-of-court settlement with US Airways. The airline says the crew acted properly in having the imams removed from the flight.

Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, has been vilified for planning to take a ceremonial oath of office on a Quran.

Arab Muslims interviewed by USA TODAY say other Americans must understand that they pray five times a day, if necessary at work or on the road; they must give alms to the poor and are hard-pressed to do so when the government closes Islamic charities; women's head scarves and men's beards are signs of religious fidelity, not defiance of American custom.

And this: No one has more to lose from another terror attack than Arab Muslims.

What intimidates some galvanizes others — to vote, to speak out and to demand the American freedoms extolled by Franklin Roosevelt and Norman Rockwell. The result is a communal split personality, says Imad Hamad of the Anti-Discrimination Committee: "We are in limbo."

Daniel Sutherland, head of the civil rights division of the Department of Homeland Security, acknowledges the complaints from Arab Muslims. He says fighting terrorism while respecting civil rights involves "difficult challenges."

But Sutherland says the government needs the help of U.S. Arab Muslims to fight terrorism at home: "Homeland security isn't gonna be won by people sitting in a building inside the Beltway."

Contributing: Tamara Audi of the Detroit Free Press

    Fear 'as bad as after 9/11', UT, 12.12.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-12-12-arab-americans-cover_x.htm

Muslim Charity Sues Treasury Dept. and Seeks Dismissal of Charges of Terrorism

December 12, 2006
The New York Times
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 11 — In a new challenge to Washington over its closing several American Muslim charities that it has accused of aiding terrorism, the largest such group sued on Monday seeking dismissal of many of the charges.

Lawyers for the group, the Holy Land Foundation of Richardson, Tex., filed suit in Federal District Court in Dallas two weeks after a federal judge in California called into question a crucial provision in designating terrorist supporters. Since December 2001, the Treasury Department has designated Holy Land and five other Muslim charities in the United States as terrorist supporters, seizing millions of dollars in assets and halting their activities.

No accused charity or any senior officer have been convicted on a charge of terrorism. Some charities have faced no criminal charges.

In a separate case against a Georgia man whom the prosecution identified as a fund-raiser for Holy Land, the defendant pleaded guilty this year to sending money to Hamas, the Islamist Palestinian political party that Washington first designated as a terrorist organization in 1995.

The foundation denies that the man had an official post.

The government has accused the foundation of having been the American fund-raising arm of Hamas. The charity and five officers are expected to go on trial in July on charges of financing a foreign terrorist organization, money laundering and tax fraud.

In October, Ghassan Elashi, a founder and former chairman of the charity, was sentenced to more than six years in prison after he and four brothers were convicted of violating export laws by shipping computers to Syria and Libya, both once on the United States list of terrorism sponsors. Libya was removed this year.

Last year, Mr. Elashi and two brothers were convicted of helping a Hamas leader launder money.

The Treasury Department’s repeated refusal to unfreeze charities’ assets so they can be sent abroad has provoked alarm and frustration in the philanthropic world.

“The question is not whether the individual nonprofits are guilty as organizations,” said Kay Guinane of OMB Watch, a Washington group advocating government transparency.

“The issue is whether there is a fair process to determine that and how to protect the charitable dollars so they are used for the intended purposes,” Ms. Guinane said. “What Treasury has done is treat charities the same way they treat the criminal process. It has really hurt the U.S. image in the places where the aid was expected and where people were depending on it.”

Early last month, philanthropic groups from across the nation sent Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulsen Jr. a letter asking that he find a way to release the assets to their intended recipients. Mr. Paulsen has not responded, Ms. Guinane said.

A spokeswoman for the department, Molly Millerwise, said courts, citing national security, had repeatedly upheld the government’s use of secret evidence to freeze assets of charitable organizations.

“These institutions have been designated because they are financing terrorism,” Ms. Millerwise said. “We have to make sure that the money is kept in place and does not go to illicit ends.”

Critics say the law prevents the airing of secret evidence in such cases. “When Treasury says the courts have upheld its action, they are saying the courts found its action was not arbitrary and capricious,” Ms. Guinane said. “Not that the court made any kind of independent determination of the merits or factual accuracy.”

A spokesman for the Justice Department, Bryan Sierra, said he could not comment on the Holy Land motion because it was too new. As a matter of procedure, Mr. Sierra said, prosecution does not automatically follow the designation of a charity as a terrorist organization.

“Not every case is a criminal case,” he said. “It’s a question of can you come up with enough evidence to prosecute based on a violation of the statutes of material support for terrorism.”

Charitable giving is one of the five pillars of Islam, and the closing of Muslim charities has become a major source of American Muslims’ distrust of the federal government.

Many American Muslims accuse the government of, at best, acting out of fear and ignorance to tamp contributions. At worst, they say the Bush administration focuses on Arab and Muslim groups critical of United States policy in the Middle East, particularly charities that aid poor Palestinians in the territories occupied by Israel.

“That was a valve that does not put the Palestinian population under pressure,” Hatem Bazian, a professor of Near Eastern studies at the University of California, Berkeley, said. “If you starve them, they will take the deal the least acceptable to them.”

The government says just Muslim charities have been designated because they are the ones that terrorist groups have penetrated.

“The sad truth is that we have seen groups like Hamas and Al Qaeda infiltrate the charitable community, and specifically the Arab and Muslim charitable community,” Ms. Millerwise said. “When we do find evidence that any group is providing material or financial support, we have a responsibility to act against them and designate them and put the world on notice that this group is facilitating terrorists.”

Holy Land was once the largest American Muslim charity, receiving more than $57 million in contributions, gifts and grants from 1992 to 2001, the indictment says. It seeks to have more than half the charges in the 42-count indictment dismissed, based on the ruling last month by Judge Audrey B. Collins in Federal District Court in Los Angeles.

Judge Collins said an executive order used to identify organizations and individuals as “specially designated global terrorists” violated the Constitution because it was too vague. Other districts are not bound by the ruling. Congress has largely ignored the question.

Lawyers for two other charities said they expected to file similar motions. Lawyers for two others said they were defunct, left bankrupt by challenging terrorism designations.

American Muslim organizations acknowledge that Islamic charities overseas funneled money and arms to support Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. But they say guilt by association rather than hard evidence has become a judicial standard for them in the United States.

“The government’s claim of national security is a way to conceal government misconduct rather than state secrets,” said Matthew J. Piers, the lawyer for the Benevolence International Foundation, a defunct charity that had been in Illinois.

Charity officials say the United States is shooting itself in the foot. Rather than spending millions on failed advertising to improve its image, the officials say, Washington should let the charities work where it is not welcome.

“People are saying that this is not about this or that charity, it’s about Islam,” said Khalil Jassemm, who helped found Life for Relief and Development, a charity in Michigan. “We could be a humanitarian bridge to the Muslim world, but nobody thinks about that.”

    Muslim Charity Sues Treasury Dept. and Seeks Dismissal of Charges of Terrorism, NYT, 12.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/12/washington/12charity.html

In U.S., fear and distrust of Muslims runs deep

Fri Dec 1, 2006 9:35 AM ET
Reuters
By Bernd Debusmann, Special Correspondent

WASHINGTON (Reuters)- When radio host Jerry Klein suggested that all Muslims in the United States should be identified with a crescent-shape tattoo or a distinctive arm band, the phone lines jammed instantly.

The first caller to the station in Washington said that Klein must be "off his rocker." The second congratulated him and added: "Not only do you tattoo them in the middle of their forehead but you ship them out of this country ... they are here to kill us."

Another said that tattoos, armbands and other identifying markers such as crescent marks on driver's licenses, passports and birth certificates did not go far enough. "What good is identifying them?" he asked. "You have to set up encampments like during World War Two with the Japanese and Germans."

At the end of the one-hour show, rich with arguments on why visual identification of "the threat in our midst" would alleviate the public's fears, Klein revealed that he had staged a hoax. It drew out reactions that are not uncommon in post-9/11 America.

"I can't believe any of you are sick enough to have agreed for one second with anything I said," he told his audience on the AM station 630 WMAL (http://www.wmal.com/), which covers Washington, Northern Virginia and Maryland

"For me to suggest to tattoo marks on people's bodies, have them wear armbands, put a crescent moon on their driver's license on their passport or birth certificate is disgusting. It's beyond disgusting.

"Because basically what you just did was show me how the German people allowed what happened to the Jews to happen ... We need to separate them, we need to tattoo their arms, we need to make them wear the yellow Star of David, we need to put them in concentration camps, we basically just need to kill them all because they are dangerous."

The show aired on November 26, the Sunday after the Thanksgiving holiday, and Klein said in an interview afterwards he had been surprised by the response.

"The switchboard went from empty to totally jammed within minutes," said Klein. "There were plenty of callers angry with me, but there were plenty who agreed."

POLLS SHOW WIDESPREAD ANTI-MUSLIM SENTIMENT

Those in agreement are not a fringe minority: A Gallup poll this summer of more than 1,000 Americans showed that 39 percent were in favor of requiring Muslims in the United States, including American citizens, to carry special identification.

Roughly a quarter of those polled said they would not want to live next door to a Muslim and a third thought that Muslims in the United States sympathized with al Qaeda, the extremist group behind the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington.

A poll carried out by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), an advocacy group, found that for one in three Americans, the word Islam triggers negative connotations such as "war," "hatred" and "terrorist." The war in Iraq has contributed to such perceptions.

Klein's show followed a week of heated discussions on talk radio, including his own, and online forums over an incident on November 22 involving six Muslim clerics. They were handcuffed and taken off a US Airways flight after passengers reported "suspicious behavior" that included praying in the departure gate area.

The clerics, on their way to a meeting of the North American Imams Federation, were detained in a holding cell, questioned by police and FBI agents, and released. Muslim community leaders saw the incident as yet more evidence of anti-Muslim prejudice.

IGNORANCE SEEN AS KEY PROBLEM

Several American Muslims interviewed on the subject of prejudice over the past few weeks said ignorance was at the core of the problem.

"The level of knowledge is very, very low," said Mohamed Esa, a U.S. Muslim of Arab descent who teaches a course on Islam at McDaniel College in Maryland. "There are 1.3 billion Muslims in the world and some people think they are all terrorists."

Hossam Ahmed, a retired Air Force Reserve colonel who occasionally leads prayer meetings for the small Muslim congregation at the Pentagon, agreed. "Ignorance is the number one problem. Education is of the essence."

There are no hard figures on how many Muslims have been subject to harassment or prejudice and community leaders say that ugly incidents can prompt spontaneous expressions of support. Such as the e-mail a Minneapolis woman sent to CAIR after the imams were taken off their flight.

"I would like to ... help," the e-mail said. "While I cannot offer plane tickets, I would be happy to drive at least 2 or 3 of them. My car is small, but at least some of our hearts in this land of the free are large."

And optimists saw signs of change in the November 4 election of the first Muslim to the U.S. House of Representatives, which has 435 members.

Democrat Keith Ellison, a 43-year-old African-American lawyer, did not stress his religion during his campaign for a Minnesota seat, but said his victory would "signal to people who are not Muslims that Muslims have a lot to offer to the United States and the improvement of our country."

    In U.S., fear and distrust of Muslims runs deep, R, 1.12.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-12-01T142541Z_01_N30158201_RTRUKOC_0_US-USA-MUSLIMS-FEAR.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-domesticNews-2

Muslim’s Election Is Celebrated Here and in Mideast

November 10, 2006
The New York Times
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 9 — Keith Ellison wore his religion lightly on the campaign trail, mentioning it only when asked.

But Muslims across America, and even overseas, celebrated his election Tuesday as the first Muslim in Congress, representing Minnesota’s Fifth District in the House of Representatives, as a sign of acceptance and a welcome antidote to their faith’s sinister image.

“It’s a step forward; it gives the Muslims a little bit of a sense of belonging,” said Osama A. Siblani, the publisher of The Arab American News, a weekly in Dearborn, Mich., a state with one of the heaviest concentrations of Muslims. “It is also a signal to the rest of the world that America has nothing against Muslims. If we did, he wouldn’t have been elected.”

Mr. Ellison’s success was front-page news in several of the Arab world’s largest newspapers and high in the lineup on television news programs.

Few of his supporters expect Mr. Ellison, a 43-year-old criminal defense lawyer who converted to Islam as a 19-year-old college student, to effect any policy shifts in areas of concern to Muslim Americans, particularly when it comes to foreign policy and civil rights.

Mr. Siblani joked that even if all 28 new Democrats were Muslims, it is unlikely they would be able to sway the way Congress invariably votes in support of Israel. But many Muslims believe that just having a Muslim perspective around can make some difference.

“Congress needs to reflect the diversity of America, and that means its vibrant religious diversity as well,” said Farhana Khera, the executive director of the National Association of Muslim Lawyers and a former senior Senate staff member. “It’s good to have diverse voices on the House floor, in committees and caucus meetings. It is good for the country to have different views aired, especially when the primary national issues relate to Islam and affect Muslims in this country and Muslims overseas.”

In a telephone interview, Mr. Ellison, who will also be the first black to represent Minnesota in the House, said his faith was particularly helpful in galvanizing the large community of Somali immigrants in his district, but the overall impact was difficult to assess. “For some people, it might have been a problem and other people it was a bonus,” Mr. Ellison said, noting that the campaign had received a fair amount of nasty e-mail and telephone calls denigrating Islam.

He said that his priority was to represent his district, but that he hoped to do it in a way that touched a wider swath of Americans.

“I think a lot of Muslims feel highly vulnerable and feel that they are under a tremendous amount of scrutiny,” he said when asked if he felt he was wearing a particular mantle, of representing Muslim interests. “I am going to do it from a standpoint of improving the quality of civil and human rights for all people in America.”

Many Muslim American activists hope Mr. Ellison will inspire other Muslims to run for office, some even comparing his candidacy to John F. Kennedy’s breaking the taboo against a Roman Catholic’s being president.

“I think it has inspired American Muslims,” said Adeeba Al-Zaman, 23, who flew from her home in Philadelphia to Minneapolis to volunteer to work in the last few days of Mr. Ellison’s campaign. “The fact that he won will probably motivate other Muslims that we have a shot and we matter and we are a part of the fabric of this society and we should be engaged because we have a chance.”

Ms. Al-Zaman also noted that with Mr. Ellison in office, Muslims would seem more normal, and that Congress and all Americans would see that “we care about things like health care and education and everything else that all Americans care about.”

The sense of vindication is even stronger because Mr. Ellison was attacked on religious grounds by his Republican opponent, Alan Fine. In September, Mr. Fine said that as a Jew he was personally offended by Mr. Ellison’s past support for Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the radical group Nation of Islam.

Mr. Ellison denied any link to Mr. Farrakhan and reached out to Jews, eventually gaining some endorsements from Jewish groups.

In the end, Mr. Ellison won 56 percent of the vote in his district, a Democratic stronghold that covers much of downtown Minneapolis and its immediate suburbs. Mr. Fine took 21 percent, as did Tammy Lee of the Independence Party. The incumbent, Martin Olav Sabo, is retiring

Attacks on Mr. Ellison’s religion helped galvanize Muslim Americans nationally, with supporters raising money from Florida to Michigan to California. His supporters were quick to point out that they backed Mr. Ellison not simply because he was a Muslim, but also because of his progressive platform, which included calls for universal health insurance and a withdrawal of forces from Iraq, and because he was running a positive campaign.

Mr. Ellison’s victory was widely noted in the larger Muslim world. The day after the election, it was the third headline mentioned on Al Jazeera, the most popular satellite news channel in the Middle East, right after a report that 18 Palestinian civilians had been killed by Israeli artillery in the Gaza Strip and a report on the overall Democratic sweep in the elections.

The news garnered a rich variety of comments from Arab readers on the Web site of Al Arabiya, a satellite news channel based in Dubai. “God willing in the next election, half of Congress will be from the rational Muslims,” wrote one reader, while another said, “May God make this the beginning of victory for Muslims on the very ground of the despots.”

A third wrote, “We pray to God that you will be successful and will move forward in improving the image of Islam and the Muslims.”

Arab news reports highlighted the fact that Mr. Ellison would probably take the oath of office on the Koran, something which also upset Muslim-bashers in the blogosphere. Some suggested it meant he would pledge allegiance to Islamic law rather than to upholding the Constitution.

Mr. Ellison said he had not really thought about the swearing-in ceremony and had tried to keep the campaign focused on issues rather than his religion.

Mona el Naggar contributed reporting from Cairo.

    Muslim’s Election Is Celebrated Here and in Mideast, NYT, 10.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/10/us/politics/10muslims.html?hp&ex=1163221200&en=7cf3f29c52b67637&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Fears of Inquiry Dampen Giving by U.S. Muslims

October 30, 2006
The New York Times
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

DEARBORN, Mich. — By the end of Ramadan last year, Najah Bazzy remembers having more than $10,000 in cash donations to distribute to the needy, and a vast auditorium ringed with tables groaning with enough free food for 400 poor families to celebrate the holiday.

This year, Mrs. Bazzy formalized the good works she had been doing for a decade among the tens of thousands of Muslims who live in the Dearborn area by establishing a charity, Zaman International.

But by the end of the holiday, charitable contributions were meager. She said cash donations amounted to less than $4,000, and for the first time since she began her charity work she bought food to feed about 85 needy families instead of counting on gifts.

There are similar stories in Muslim communities across the country. Fearful that donations to an Islamic charity could bring unwanted attention from federal agents looking into potential ties to terrorism, many Muslim Americans have become reluctant to donate to Islamic causes, including charities.

“We can’t stop giving because it’s a pillar of Islam — it’s a must,” said Mrs. Bazzy, an animated 46-year-old nurse who veils her hair with a headscarf in keeping with Muslim traditions of modest dress. “It’s a real moral dilemma. Do you forget about the rest of the world out of fear? My family has been here for 101 years, and as an American I’m offended.”

The holy month of Ramadan is supposed to be a time of giving, particularly for the Muslim faithful, for whom charity, or zakat, is one of the five main tenets of their religion. The meaning of “zakat” is rooted in the Arabic word for purification, and sacred texts even define the amount — at least 2.5 percent of net annual earnings.

But recently, fear has often trumped faith.

When Mrs. Bazzy calls people to solicit contributions, they quickly beg off and hang up, telling her later in the grocery store or the bank not to ask them for money on the phone because the government is probably eavesdropping.

Nobody wants to write a check for any amount, and they look at her in horror when she offers a receipt — some of the largest donations she still receives have been anonymous wads of $100 bills stuffed into envelopes.

The developer of the new building that had volunteered office space for her charity begged off, saying that even the potential for a raid might drive away other tenants and bring down rents. The irony, she points out, is that she deliberately avoided any connection with a religious institution, even taking out a loan on her house to finance her longstanding dream of starting the charity. But given her headscarf, many people assume it is a faith-based organization.

Seemingly no individual or organization trying to collect funds is immune.

The imam at the Islamic Center of America, Sayyid Hassan Qazwini, is a favorite of the American government for publicly standing behind President Bush, both literally and figuratively, over the invasion of Iraq.

Imam Qazwini, by his own account, has been invited to the White House four or five times, with the president even photographed kissing the turbaned cleric on the cheek. Imam Qazwini delivered the opening benediction in Congress on Oct. 1, 2003, the first Muslim religious figure accorded that honor after Sept. 11.

Yet, his gleaming new $15 million mosque here, a handsome white structure with a gold dome and soaring twin minarets that is billed as the largest in America, remains $6 million in debt. Contributions dropped sharply this summer after the war in Lebanon, the imam said, when the Bush administration expressed its unreserved support for Israel. Other mosques report similar difficulties. The general sentiment is that the American government’s tilt toward Israel extends to hounding anyone supporting Arab causes.

Much of the fear comes from federal actions that many Muslim Americans view as unnecessarily invasive.

The Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence at the Treasury Department has shuttered five major Muslim charities in the United States since 2001, seizing millions of dollars in assets, yet not a single officer or organization has been convicted of anything connected to terrorism. Muslim charities operating overseas have been directly linked to terrorist operations, but if such evidence exists in the United States it has remained secret.

“The sad fact is that there are some Islamic charities involved in terrorist financing,” said Daniel L. Glaser, the deputy assistant secretary for terrorist financing and financial crimes. “We can’t close our eyes to that. We have to find ways to deal with that.”

Imam Qazwini, the descendant of a long line of prominent Iraqi Shiite Muslim clerics, points out that many Muslim Americans, particularly those from the Arab world, fled the region to escape repressive regimes, expecting the United States to provide both freedom and opportunity. Instead they find themselves facing similar problems.

“Many people who came from the Middle East still live with the psyche of being chased by the intelligence forces,” he said in an interview. “Having these same forces acting here intensifies the sense of fear in these communities.”

Ahmad Chebbani, 46, served as the president of the American Arab Chamber of Commerce for eight years until this June. His accounting firm, Omnex Accounting and Tax Service, occupies a neat two-story building on Warren Avenue, the heart of the community, where most of the shop signs are in both English and Arabic.

Arab-Americans make up more than a third of Dearborn’s population of 100,000, and Michigan has one of the country’s largest concentrations of Muslim Americans. The sentiments expressed here are echoed in Muslim communities across the United States.

Between himself and his company, Mr. Chebbani says he used to contribute some $50,000 annually to charity, the bulk of it to religious organizations. He still gives, but directly either to needy families, business groups or secular institutions like the Arab American National Museum.

As one of the community’s most successful accountants — in his office is a picture of him with former Vice President Al Gore — he also sees the tax returns of some of the most affluent families in Dearborn. Some have stopped giving entirely, and some give but decline to claim any deductions. His rough estimate indicates that community giving is down by about half.

“Contributions across the board have been drastically reduced because of the fear; people associate contributions with risk and they don’t want that,” he said. “There’s a lack of trust in the U.S. judicial system, with just an accusation you could end up in jail with secret evidence used as a means of prosecution.”

Religious scholars say that compromises made over who gets charity might conflict with Islam’s precepts. Verse 60 in Chapter 9 of the Koran, the Sura of Repentance, specifies eight religiously sanctified beneficiaries of zakat. All eight dictate giving to the poor or those who help them. Other charity is considered a blessing but does not fulfill the religious obligation in the same way, they argue.

“There are eight categories; you cannot invent a ninth,” said Khalil Jassemm, a professor and lay prayer leader who helped found Life for Relief and Development, a charity based in Michigan started to help Iraqis living under sanctions that now works across the Muslim world. “You can’t give money to the animal shelter and call this your zakat.”

The offices of Life for Relief and Development were raided in September on the basis of a sealed affidavit. The government has said that the raid was not terrorism-related, although agents of the Joint Terrorism Task Force were along on the raid. The hanging questions put a damper on fund-raising.

Events like that have left some Muslim organizations across the country pondering whether to sue the federal government for denying them their First Amendment rights to practice their religion freely.

Like most Muslims interviewed for this article, Imam Qazwini emphasized that he fully supported a crackdown on any real terrorist financing, but that he thought the government was blindly casting far too wide a net. In a speech by Mr Bush immediately after Sept. 11, 2001, the imam noted, the president said terrorists might be able to destroy a few buildings in this country but could not harm its foundations.

“I hope he’s right, but I’m afraid he’s not,” the imam said after being the host of a Ramadan banquet for a cross-section of Michigan’s political and religious leaders. “It seems like the terrorists have been able to touch our foundations — our civil liberties are being compromised, our religious freedoms are being compromised.”

    Fears of Inquiry Dampen Giving by U.S. Muslims, NYT, 30.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/30/us/30CHARITY.html?hp&ex=1162270800&en=b7e2277c4942f32c&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Cabbies, culture clash at Minn. airport

Updated 10/11/2006 10:35 AM ET
USA Today
By Oren Dorell

Scores of Muslim cabdrivers in Minneapolis who say their faith prohibits them from driving passengers with alcohol have sparked a debate over how far a government must go to accommodate Islamic law.

Muslim cabdrivers at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport have been refusing to take passengers who carry wine or spirits from duty-free stores or who are loaded down with bottles after visiting wine country.

They've also asked dispatchers not to call them to pick up passengers heading to liquor stores and bars.

The drivers, whose beliefs are not shared by all Muslims, say the airport should accommodate a deeply held religious tenet. Others say the Muslims are discriminating against people of other faiths and attempting to impose Islamic law.

"These taxi cab drivers basically think they're living in they're own countries where it's OK to impose your religious beliefs upon others," says Kamal Nawash, president of the Free Muslims Coalition, which advocates separation of religion and government.

For two years the Metropolitan Airports Commission, which regulates taxi service at the airport, had been in discussions with drivers about how to accommodate them.

The commission said it had agreed to let cabbies use lights on top of the cabs to identify drivers who won't transport alcohol so airport employees could direct passengers with alcohol to a willing driver.

The proposal created a public "backlash," says Patrick Hogan, spokesman for the commission. The commission received 400 e-mails and phone calls, almost all of them opposed to the proposal, he said.

On Tuesday, the commission rejected the proposal. That means the current policy stays. The policy says drivers who will not transport alcohol must go to the back of the taxi line.

That can force a cabbie to wait another three hours for a fare, says Abdisalam Hashim, a Muslim from Somalia who manages Bloomington Taxi.

"When I'm American, I have freedom to practice my religion and freedom to work anyplace I want to work," Hashim says. "This is the way we address Islam. ... We have the right to say this is how we do it."

More than half the airport's taxi drivers are Somali Muslims, and customers have reported being turned away by four taxis before finding a ride.

Not all Muslims agree that cab drivers are prohibited from transporting alcohol. Mahmoud Ayoub, an Islamic scholar at Temple University, says the main ban is against drinking.

"I know many Muslims who own gas stations (where beer is sold) and sell ham sandwiches," even though pork is also prohibited, Ayoub says.

"They justify it and I think rightly so (saying) that they have to make a living."

One driving force behind the move to accommodate the drivers' beliefs is the Minnesota Chapter of the Muslim American Society.

MAS was founded by U.S. members of the Muslim Brotherhood, which promotes the spread of Islamic influence through political parties and militant groups in the Middle East. MAS members say they do not promote violence.

Hassan Mohamud, vice president of MAS of Minnesota says the Airports Commission decision will not help customers or taxi drivers.

"More than half the taxi drivers are Muslim and ignoring the sensibilities of that community at the airport I think is not fair," he says.

    Cabbies, culture clash at Minn. airport, NYT, 11.10.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-10-10-cabbies-culture_x.htm

It’s Muslim Boy Meets Girl, Yes, but Please Don’t Call It Dating

September 19, 2006
The New York Times
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

CHICAGO — So here’s the thing about speed dating for Muslims.

Many American Muslims — or at least those bent on maintaining certain conservative traditions — equate anything labeled “dating” with hellfire, no matter how short a time is involved. Hence the wildly popular speed dating sessions at the largest annual Muslim conference in North America were given an entirely more respectable label. They were called the “matrimonial banquet.”

“If we called it speed dating, it will end up with real dating,” said Shamshad Hussain, one of the organizers, grimacing.

Both the banquet earlier this month and various related seminars underscored the difficulty that some American Muslim families face in grappling with an issue on which many prefer not to assimilate. One seminar, called “Dating,” promised attendees helpful hints for “Muslim families struggling to save their children from it.”

The couple of hundred people attending the dating seminar burst out laughing when Imam Muhamed Magid of the Adams Center, a collective of seven mosques in Virginia, summed up the basic instructions that Muslim American parents give their adolescent children, particularly males: “Don’t talk to the Muslim girls, ever, but you are going to marry them. As for the non-Muslim girls, talk to them, but don’t ever bring one home.”

“These kids grew up in America, where the social norm is that it is O.K. to date, that it is O.K. to have sex before marriage,” Imam Magid said in an interview. “So the kids are caught between the ideal of their parents and the openness of the culture on this issue.”

The questions raised at the seminar reflected just how pained many American Muslims are by the subject. One middle-aged man wondered if there was anything he could do now that his 32-year-old son had declared his intention of marrying a (shudder) Roman Catholic. A young man asked what might be considered going too far when courting a Muslim woman.

Panelists warned that even seemingly innocuous e-mail exchanges or online dating could topple one off the Islamic path if one lacked vigilance. “All of these are traps of the Devil to pull us in and we have no idea we are even going that way,” said Ameena Jandali, the moderator of the dating seminar.

Hence the need to come up with acceptable alternatives in North America, particularly for families from Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, where there is a long tradition of arranged marriages.

One panelist, Yasmeen Qadri, suggested that Muslim mothers across the continent band together in an organization called “Mothers Against Dating,” modeled on Mothers Against Drunk Driving. If the term “arranged marriage” is too distasteful to the next generation, she said, then perhaps the practice could be Americanized simply by renaming it “assisted marriage,” just like assisted living for the elderly.

“In the United States we can play with words however we want, but we are not trying to set aside our cultural values,” said Mrs. Qadri, a professor of education.

Basically, for conservative Muslims, dating is a euphemism for premarital sex. Anyone who partakes risks being considered morally louche, with their marriage prospects dimming accordingly, particularly young women.

Mrs. Qadri and other panelists see a kind of hybrid version emerging in the United States, where the young do choose their own mates, but the parents are at least partly involved in the process in something like half the cases.

Having the families involved can help reduce the divorce rate, Imam Majid said, citing a recent informal study that indicated that one third of Muslim marriages in the United States end in divorce. It was still far too high, he noted, but lower than the overall American average. Intermarriages outside Islam occur, but remain relatively rare, he said.

Scores of parents showed up at the marriage banquet to chaperone their children. Many had gone through arranged marriages — meeting the bride or groom chosen by their parents sometimes as late as their wedding day and hoping for the best. They recognize that the tradition is untenable in the United States, but still want to influence the process.

The banquet is considered one preferable alternative to going online, although that too is becoming more common. The event was unquestionably one of the big draws at the Islamic Society of North America’s annual convention, which attracted thousands of Muslims to Chicago over Labor Day weekend, with many participants bemoaning the relatively small pool of eligible candidates even in large cities.

There were two banquets, with a maximum 150 men and 150 women participating each day for $55 apiece. They sat 10 per table and the men rotated every seven minutes.

At the end there was an hourlong social hour that allowed participants time to collect e-mail addresses and telephone numbers over a pasta dinner with sodas. (Given the Muslim ban on alcohol, no one could soothe jumpy nerves with a drink.) Organizers said many of the women still asked men to approach their families first. Some families accept that the couple can then meet in public, some do not.

A few years ago the organizers were forced to establish a limit of one parent per participant and bar them from the tables until the social hour because so many interfered. Parents are now corralled along one edge of the reception hall, where they alternate between craning their necks to see who their adult children are meeting or horse-trading bios, photographs and telephone numbers among themselves.

Talking to the mothers — and participants with a parent usually take a mother — is like surveying members of the varsity suddenly confined to the bleachers.

“To know someone for seven minutes is not enough,” scoffed Awila Siddique, 46, convinced she was making better contacts via the other mothers.

Mrs. Siddique said her shy, 20-year-old daughter spent the hours leading up to the banquet crying that her father was forcing her to do something weird. “Back home in Pakistan, the families meet first,’’ she said. “You are not marrying the guy only, but his whole family.”

Samia Abbas, 59 and originally from Alexandria, Egypt, bustled out to the tables as soon as social hour was called to see whom her daughter Alia, 29, had met.

“I’m her mother so of course I’m looking for her husband,” said Mrs. Abbas, ticking off the qualities she was looking for, including a good heart, handsome, as highly educated as her daughter and a good Muslim.

Did he have to be Egyptian?

“She’s desperate for anyone!” laughed Alia, a vivacious technology manager for a New York firm, noting that the “Made in Egypt” stipulation had long since been cast overboard.

“Her cousin who is younger has babies now!” exclaimed the mother, dialing relatives on her cellphone to handicap potential candidates.

For doubters, organizers produced a success story, a strikingly good-looking pair of Chicago doctors who met at the banquet two years ago. Organizers boast of at least 25 marriages over the past six years.

Fatima Alim, 50, was disappointed when her son Suehaib, a 26-year-old pharmacist, did not meet anyone special on the first day. They had flown up from Houston especially for the event, and she figured chances were 50-50 that he would find a bride.

When she arrived in Texas as a 23-year-old in an arranged marriage, Mrs. Alim envied the girls around her, enthralled by their discussions about all the fun they were having with their boyfriends, she said, even if she was eventually shocked to learn how quickly they moved from one to the next and how easily they divorced. Still, she was determined that her children would chose their own spouses.

“We want a good, moderate Muslim girl, not a very, very modern girl,” she said. “The family values are the one thing I like better back home. Divorces are high here because of the corruption, the intermingling with other men and other women.”

For his part, Mr. Alim was resisting the strong suggestion from his parents that they switch tactics and start looking for a nice girl back in Pakistan. Many of the participants reject that approach, describing themselves as too Americanized — plus the visas required are far harder to obtain in the post-Sept. 11 world.

Mr. Alim said he still believed what he had been taught as a child, that sex outside marriage was among the gravest sins, but he wants to marry a fellow American Muslim no matter how hard she is to find.

“I think I can hold out a couple more years,” he said in his soft Texas drawl with a boyish smile. “The sooner the better, but I think I can wait. By 30, hopefully, even if that is kind of late.”

    It’s Muslim Boy Meets Girl, Yes, but Please Don’t Call It Dating, NYT, 19.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/19/us/19dating.html?hp&ex=1158724800&en=4e6b539890209d13&ei=5094&partner=homepage

More Muslims Arrive in U.S., After 9/11 Dip
 

September 10, 2006
The New York Times
By ANDREA ELLIOTT

America’s newest Muslims arrive in the afternoon crunch at John F. Kennedy International Airport. Their planes land from Dubai, Casablanca and Karachi. They stand in line, clasping documents. They emerge, sometimes hours later, steering their carts toward a flock of relatives, a stream of cabs, a new life.

This was the path for Nur Fatima, a Pakistani woman who moved to Brooklyn six months ago and promptly shed her hijab. Through the same doors walked Nora Elhainy, a Moroccan who sells electronics in Queens, and Ahmed Youssef, an Egyptian who settled in Jersey City, where he gives the call to prayer at a palatial mosque.

“I got freedom in this country,” said Ms. Fatima, 25. “Freedom of everything. Freedom of thought.”

The events of Sept. 11 transformed life for Muslims in the United States, and the flow of immigrants from countries like Egypt, Pakistan and Morocco thinned dramatically.

But five years later, as the United States wrestles with questions of terrorism, civil liberties and immigration control, Muslims appear to be moving here again in surprising numbers, according to statistics compiled by the Department of Homeland Security and the Census Bureau.

Immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries in the Middle East, North Africa and Asia are planting new roots in states from Virginia to Texas to California.

In 2005, more people from Muslim countries became legal permanent United States residents — nearly 96,000 — than in any year in the previous two decades. More than 40,000 of them were admitted last year, the highest annual number since the terrorist attacks, according to data on 22 countries provided by the Department of Homeland Security.

Many have made the journey unbowed by tales of immigrant hardship, and despite their own opposition to American policy in the Middle East. They come seeking the same promise that has drawn foreigners to the United States for many decades, according to a range of experts and immigrants: economic opportunity and political freedom.

Those lures, both powerful and familiar, have been enough to conquer fears that America is an inhospitable place for Muslims.

“America has always been the promised land for Muslims and non-Muslims,” said Behzad Yaghmaian, an Iranian exile and author of “Embracing the Infidel: Stories of Muslim Migrants on the Journey West.” “Despite Muslims’ opposition to America’s foreign policy, they still come here because the United States offers what they’re missing at home.”

For Ms. Fatima, it was the freedom to dress as she chose and work as a security guard. For Mr. Youssef, it was the chance to earn a master’s degree.

He came in spite of the deep misgivings that he and many other Egyptians have about the war in Iraq and the Bush administration. In America, he said, one needs to distinguish between the government and the people.

“Who am I dealing with, Bush or the American public?” he said. “Am I dealing with my future in Egypt or my future here?”

Muslims have been settling in the United States in significant numbers since the mid-1960’s, after immigration quotas that favored Eastern Europeans were lifted. Spacious mosques opened in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York as a new, highly educated Muslim population took hold.

Over the next three decades, the story of Muslim migration to the United States was marked by growth and prosperity. A larger percentage of immigrants from Muslim countries have graduate degrees than other American residents, and their average salary is about 20 percent higher, according to Census Bureau data.

But Sept. 11 altered the course of Muslim life in America. Mosques were vandalized. Hate crimes rose. Deportation proceedings were begun against thousands of men, and others were arrested in an array of terrorism cases.

Some Muslims changed their names to avoid job discrimination, making Mohammed “Moe,” and Osama “Sam.” Scores of families left for Canada or returned to their native countries.

Yet this period also produced something strikingly positive, in the eyes of many Muslims: they began to mobilize politically and socially. Across the country, grass-roots organizations expanded to educate Muslims on civil rights, register them to vote and lobby against new federal policies such as the Patriot Act.

“There was the option of becoming introverted or extroverted,” said Agha Saeed, national chairman of the American Muslim Task Force on Civil Rights and Elections, an umbrella organization in Newark, Calif., created in 2003. “We became extroverted.”

In some ways, new Muslim immigrants may be better off in the post-9/11 America they encounter today, say Muslim leaders and academics: Islamic centers are more organized, and resources like English instruction and free legal assistance are more accessible.

But outside these newly organized mosques, life remains strained for many Muslims.

To avoid taunts, women are often warned not to wear head scarves in public, as was Rubab Razvi, 21, a Pakistani who arrived in Brooklyn nine months ago. (She ignored the advice, even though people stare at her on the bus, she said.) Muslims continue to endure long waits at airports, where they are often tagged for questioning because of their names or dress.

To some longtime immigrants, the life embraced by newcomers will never compare to the peaceful era that came before.

“They haven’t seen the America pre-9/11,” said Khwaja Mizan Hassan, 42, who left Bangladesh 30 years ago. He rose to become the president of Jamaica Muslim Center, a mosque in Queens, and has a comfortable job with the New York City Department of Probation.

But after Sept. 11, he was stopped at Kennedy Airport because his name matched another on a watch list.

A Drop, Then a Surge

Up to six million Muslims live in the United States, by some estimates. While the Census Bureau and the Department of Homeland Security do not track religion, both provide statistics on immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries. It is presumed that many of these immigrants are Muslim, but people of other faiths, such as Iraqi Chaldeans and Egyptian Copts, have also come in appreciable numbers.

Immigration from these regions slowed considerably after Sept. 11. Fewer people were issued green cards and nonimmigrant visas. By 2003, the number of immigrants arriving from 22 Muslim countries had declined by more than a third. For students, tourists and others from these countries who were designated as nonimmigrants, the drop was even more dramatic, with total visits down by nearly half.

The falloff affected immigrants from across the post-9/11 world as America tightened its borders, but it was most pronounced among those moving here from Pakistan, Morocco, Iran and other Muslim nations.

Several factors might explain the drop: more visa applications were rejected due to heightened security procedures, said officials at the State Department and Department of Homeland Security; and fewer people applied for visas.

But starting in 2004, the numbers rebounded. The tally of people coming to live in the United States from Bangladesh, Turkey, Algeria and other Muslim countries rose by 20 percent, according to an analysis of Census Bureau data.

The uptick was also notable among foreigners with nonimmigrant visas. More than 55,000 Indonesians, for instance, were issued those visas last year, compared with roughly 36,000 in 2002.

The rise does not reflect relaxed security measures, but a higher number of visa applications and greater efficiency in processing them, said Chris Bentley, a spokesman for United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, part of Homeland Security.

Like other immigrants, Muslims find their way to the United States in myriad ways: they come as refugees, or as students and tourists who sometimes overstay their welcome. Others arrive with immigrant visas secured by relatives here. A lucky few win the green-card lottery.

Ahmed Youssef, 29, never thought he would be among the winners. But in 2003, Mr. Youssef, who taught Arabic in Egypt, was one of 50,000 people randomly chosen from 9.5 million applicants around the world.

As he prepared to leave Benha, a city north of Cairo, some friends asked him how he could move to a country that is “killing people in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he recalled. But others who had been to the United States encouraged him to go.

It was the same for Nora Elhainy, another lottery winner, who left Casablanca in 2004 to join her husband in Queens. “They think I am lucky because I am here,” she said of her Moroccan friends.

When Mr. Youssef arrived in May 2005, he found work in Manhattan loading hot dog carts from sunrise to sundown. He shared an apartment in Washington Heights with other Egyptians, but for the first month, he never saw his neighborhood in daylight.

“I joked to my roommates, ‘When am I going to see America?’ ” said Mr. Youssef, a slight man with thinning black hair and an easy smile.

Only three months later, when he began selling hot dogs on Seventh Avenue, did Mr. Youssef discover his new country.

He missed hearing the call to prayer, and thought nothing of unrolling his prayer rug beside his cart until other vendors warned him against it. He could be mistaken for an extremist, they told him.

Eventually, Mr. Youssef found a job as the secretary of the Islamic Center of Jersey City. He plans to apply to a master’s program at Columbia University, specializing in Arabic.

For now, he lives in a spare room above the mosque. Near his bed, he keeps a daily log of his prayers. If he makes them on time, he writes “Correct” in Arabic.

“I am much better off here than selling hot dogs,” he said.

Awash in American Flags

Nur Fatima landed in Midwood, Brooklyn, at a propitious time. Had she come three years earlier, she would have seen a neighborhood in crisis.

Hundreds of Pakistani immigrants disappeared after being asked to register with the government. Thirty shops closed along a stretch of Coney Island Avenue known as Little Pakistan. The number of new Urdu-speaking students at the local elementary school, Public School 217, dropped by half in the 2002-3 school year, according to the New York City Department of Education.

But then Little Pakistan got organized. A local businessman, Moe Razvi, converted a former antique store into a community center offering legal advice, computer classes and English instruction. Local Muslim leaders began meeting with federal agents to soothe relations.

The annual Pakistan Independence Day parade is now awash in American flags.

It is a transformation seen in Muslim immigrant communities around the nation.

“They have to prove that they are living here as Muslim Americans rather than living as Pakistanis and Egyptians and other nationalities,” said Zahid H. Bukhari, the director of the American Muslim Studies Program at Georgetown University.

Ms. Fatima arrived in Brooklyn from Pakistan in March after her father, who has lived here for six years, successfully petitioned for a green card on her behalf. Her goal was to become an interpreter and eventually practice law. She began by taking English classes at Mr. Razvi’s center, the Council of Peoples Organization.

She has heard stories of the neighborhood’s former plight but sees a different picture.

“This is a land of opportunity,” Ms. Fatima said. “There is equality for everyone.”

Five days after she came to Brooklyn, Ms. Fatima removed her head scarf, which she had been wearing since she was 10.

She began to change her thinking, she said: She liked living in a country where people respected the privacy of others and did not interfere with their religious or social choices.

“I came to the United States because I want to improve myself,” she said. “This is a second birth for me.”

    More Muslims Arrive in U.S., After 9/11 Dip, NYT, 10.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/nyregion/10muslims.html?hp&ex=1157860800&en=a1703d031d2a4f73&ei=5094&partner=homepage

U.S. Muslims Warn of Threat From Within

August 31, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:17 p.m. ET
The New York Times

After the Sept. 11 suicide hijackings, distraught U.S. Muslim leaders feared the next casualty would be their religion.

Islam teaches peace, they told anyone who would listen in news conferences, at interfaith services and, most famously, standing in a mosque with President Bush.

But five years later, the target audience for their pleas has shifted. Now the faith's American leaders are starting to warn fellow Muslims about a threat from within.

The 2005 subway attacks in London that investigators say were committed by British-born and -raised Muslims, and the relentless Muslim-engineered sectarian assaults on Iraqi civilians, are among the events that have convinced some U.S. Muslims to change focus.

''This sentiment of denial, that sort of came as a fever to the Muslim community after 9-11, is fading away,'' said Muqtedar Khan, a political scientist at the University of Delaware and author of ''American Muslims.'' ''They realize that there are Muslims who use terrorism, and the community is beginning to stand up to this.''

Muslim leaders point to two stark examples of the new mind-set:

--A Canadian-born Muslim man worked with police for months investigating a group of Islamic men and youths accused in June of plotting terrorist attacks in Ontario. Mubin Shaikh said he feared any violence would ultimately hurt Islam and Canadian Muslims.

--In England, it's been widely reported that a tip from a British Muslim helped lead investigators to uncover what they said was a plan by homegrown extremists to use liquid explosives to destroy U.S.-bound planes.

Cooperation isn't emotionally easy, as Western governments enact security policies that critics say have criminalized Islam itself.

Safiyyah Ally, a graduate student in political science at the University of Toronto, wrote recently on altmuslim.com that Shaikh, the Canadian informer, went too far.

She said the North American Muslim community ''is fragile enough as is'' without members ''spying'' on each other. Leaders should counsel Muslims against violence and report suspicious activity to police -- but nothing more, she argued.

''We cannot have communities wherein individuals are paranoid of each other and turned against one another,'' Ally wrote.

Yet some leaders say keeping watch for extremists protects all Muslims and their civil rights.

Salam al-Marayati, executive director of Muslim Public Affairs Council, an advocacy group based in Los Angeles, says working closely with authorities underscores that Muslims are not outsiders to be feared. It also gives Muslims a way to directly air their concerns about how they're treated by the government.

''We're not on opposite teams,'' al-Marayati said. ''We're all trying to protect our country from another terrorist attack.''

In 2004, his group started the ''National Anti-Terrorism Campaign,'' urging Muslims to monitor their own communities, speak out more boldly against violence and work with law enforcement. Hundreds of U.S. mosques have signed on, al-Marayati said.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a civil rights group, ran a TV ad campaign and a petition-drive called ''Not in the Name of Islam,'' which repudiates terrorism. Hundreds of thousands of people have endorsed it, according to Ibrahim Hooper, the group's spokesman.

After the London subway bombings, the Fiqh Council of North America, which advises Muslims on Islamic law, issued a fatwa -- or edict -- declaring that nothing in Islam justifies terrorism. The council said Muslims were obligated to help law enforcement protect civilians from attacks.

''I think everyone now agrees that silence isn't an option,'' Hooper said. ''You have to speak out in defense of civil liberties, but you also have to speak out against any kind of extremism or violence that's carried out in the name of Islam.''

But many Muslims say they're being asked to look out for something that even the U.S. government struggles to define: What constitutes an imminent threat?

Khan said he has heard of cases in American mosques where imams have expressed extreme views in sermons and worshippers have confronted the prayer leaders about it.

''But beyond that what else can we do?'' Khan said. ''Do we need to hire a private detective to put on this guy? If five guys came to me and said, `Muqtedar, let's get together. Let's blow up this and that,' then I would call the police. But the community does not understand surveillance.''

Imam Muhammad Musri, head of the Islamic Society of Central Florida, said he has tried to address this problem in the eight mosques he oversees in the Orlando area.

He regularly invites law enforcement officials to speak with local Muslims and encourages mosque members to come to him with any suspicions, even if they overhear something said in jest. Musri says he also speaks regularly with local FBI and police to establish a relationship in case a real threat emerges.

''Here in Central Florida, talking to most people, they are literally upset by the actions of Muslims -- or so-called Muslims -- overseas in Europe and the Middle East, because they say, `We wish they would come and see how we're doing here,''' Musri said. ''We know who the real enemy is -- someone who might come from the outside and try to infiltrate us. Everybody is on the lookout.''

On the Net:

Muslim Public Affairs Council: http://www.mpac.org/

    U.S. Muslims Warn of Threat From Within, NYT, 31.8.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Muslims-Threat-Within.html

USA's Muslims under a cloud

Updated 8/9/2006 9:53 PM ET
USA Today
By Marilyn Elias

Motaz Elshafi, 28, a software engineer, casually opened an internal e-mail at work last month. The message began, "Dear Terrorist."

The note from a co-worker was sent to Muslims working at Cisco Systems in Research Triangle Park, N.C., a few days after train bombings in India that killed 207. The e-mail warned that such violent acts wouldn't intimidate people, but only make them stronger.

"I was furious," says Elshafi, who is New Jersey-born and bred. "What did I have to do with this violence?"

Reports of such harassment and discrimination against Muslims are rising, advocacy groups say. A USA TODAY/Gallup Poll of 1,007 Americans shows strong anti-Muslim feeling. And the hard feelings are damaging the mental health of U.S. Muslims, suggest new studies to be released at the American Psychological Association meeting starting Thursday in New Orleans.

Thirty-nine percent of respondents to the USA TODAY/Gallup Poll said they felt at least some prejudice against Muslims. The same percentage favored requiring Muslims, including U.S. citizens, to carry a special ID "as a means of preventing terrorist attacks in the United States." About one-third said U.S. Muslims were sympathetic to al-Qaeda, and 22% said they wouldn't want Muslims as neighbors.

Verbal harassment and discrimination correlate with worse mental health in studies of Muslims and Arab-Americans since 9/11, says psychologist Mona Amer of Yale University School of Medicine.

In her new study of 611 adults, thought to be the largest ever done on Arab-Americans, they had much worse mental health than Americans overall. About half had symptoms of clinical depression, compared with 20% in an average U.S. group, Amer says.

Muslims, who made up 70% of the study's participants, had poorer mental health than Christians. Those less likely to be depressed or anxious were people who kept their ethnic or religious ties but also had relationships with other people in the community. And more Christians than Muslims lived this "integrated" lifestyle, Amer says.

Though Muslims said they wanted more contact with Americans of other religions, it may be easier for Arab Christians to integrate, Amer speculates.

"They share the mainstream religion. Muslims may have different kinds of names or dress differently and, especially since 9/11, they're ostracized more."

Bias leads to depression

Virtually no mental health research was done on U.S. Muslims before 9/11, so her findings can't be compared with earlier studies. A new publication, the Journal of Muslim Mental Health, began publication in May, signaling concern about the growing problems and lack of research.

Many therapists are counseling more Arab-Americans and Muslims since 9/11, Amer says. Also, in surveys of Muslim spiritual leaders to be reported at the psychological association meeting, the imams report a surge in worshipers seeking help for anxiety and stress related to possible discrimination.

Reports of such abuses skyrocketed in the first six months after9/11, fell in 2002 and have climbed again since the Iraq war began in 2003, according to data kept by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, an education and advocacy group in Washington, D.C.

The number of assault and other discriminatory complaints filed with the group jumped from 1,019 in 2003 to 1,972 in 2005, says Arsalan Iftikhar, national legal director.

Nobody knows what proportion of U.S. Muslims encounter discrimination; even Muslims disagree.

"I don't think there's a Muslim out there who hasn't felt some kind of fallout from 9/11," says Jafar Siddiqui, 55, a real estate agent in Lynnwood, Wash. "I myself have been invited to 'go home' at least once a month." Siddiqui has been a U.S. citizen for 20 years.

Despite an increase in harassment since 9/11, "many, many have not felt any discrimination," says Farid Senzai, research director of the Detroit-based Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, a non-profit started four years ago to do research on Muslims.

Harassment charges claiming unreasonable arrest and detention have garnered the most publicity. But discriminatory acts in everyday life — in shops, schools and at work — are reported about as frequently to the American-Islamic relations council.

Elshafi, who got the nasty e-mail at work, still wonders at the boldness of a person who would send such a note. The sender was asked to apologize to several employees who filed complaints with Cisco's human resources department, says Elshafi, who didn't file a complaint.

"We wouldn't confirm a specific internal incident on the record," says Cisco's Robyn Jenkins Blum, who adds, "It is Cisco's policy not to tolerate artificial divisions or harassment of any individual."

Elshafi, a worshiper at the local mosque, says he has received a lot of support from non-Muslim friends at work. "After 9/11, people would say, 'Don't worry, 'Taz, we've got your back.' " He says Muslims are not doing enough to educate people about their religious practices. "We need to talk about our beliefs, know our neighbors."

People such as Elshafi are least vulnerable to becoming depressed due to bigotry, says John Dovidio, a University of Connecticut psychologist and expert on prejudice. "He gets strength from his group identity and support from the outside."

Many are not nearly as fortunate. Children of recent immigrants, women who wear the traditional head scarves or long robes and Iraqi-Americans often aren't faring as well, according to reports at the psychological association meeting.

In Seattle, Hate Free Zone Washington, an education and advocacy group, was launched five years ago to oppose backlash against local Muslims, Sikhs (sometimes mistaken for Muslims) and Arab-Americans. "We've seen an increase in bias-based harassment since 9/11," says Amelia Derr, the group's education director.

Derr says she has seen some Muslim children so traumatized by violent bigotry that she wonders whether they'll ever recover. Last October, a Seattle high school junior who had faced verbal harassment was assaulted in gym class. He suffered a hemorrhage behind his eye and a collapsed lung, Derr says. "The good thing is that the student who did it was convicted of a hate crime."

But the beaten boy won't go back to school, she says. "He's terrified. You can see how damaged he has been. He won't look you in the eye; he just shrinks back. He won't talk." The family came from Afghanistan four years ago, she says.

Even some who were born and raised in the USA feel their religious freedom has limits. Jafumba Asad, 32, of Tulsa stopped wearing the traditional dark robe after 9/11. "It's bad enough just wearing a head scarf. I get nasty stares every day. Wearing full cover makes it harder to get a job. It scares people," says Asad, a community college teacher and graduate student.

Muslim women who wear head scarves are more likely than those who don't to say they face discrimination and a hostile environment, according to a study to be presented at the psychological association's meeting by Alyssa Rippy of the University of Tulsa. The scarves make Muslim women stand out and could change behavior toward them, she suggests.

A few years ago, in a Wal-Mart parking lot, Asad says two men approached her and aggressively shouted "Y'all ought to be (expletive) locked up!" Pregnant at the time, she quickly backed away and then realized there were parked cars behind her. "I felt trapped and very vulnerable. I'm pregnant. I didn't know if they were going to get violent." Luckily, she says, they just walked away.

The mother of three girls says she developed ulcers a few months after 9/11. "I feel stressed a lot."

In Rippy's study, Muslim men were just as likely as women to report discrimination but more likely to become mistrustful and wary because of it. That can encourage sticking with your own group, "which intensifies feelings of paranoia," she says.

Iraq war's fallout

Men may back away more than women because they feel discrimination could have more serious consequences for them, for example being pegged as a terrorist or jailed, Rippy says.

The USA TODAY/Gallup Poll suggests Americans have greater fear of Muslim men than women: 31% said they'd feel more nervous flying if a Muslim man was on the plane; 18% said they'd be more nervous with a Muslim woman. The poll, conducted July 28-30, has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

The Iraq war has made its mark on U.S. Muslims as well, psychologist Ibrahim Kira will say at the meeting. In his study of Iraqi-Americans, the more time people spent listening to the radio and watching TV news about the war, the more likely they were to have post-traumatic stress disorder. Many of them had relatives still in Iraq, and stress-disorder rates were high: 14% compared with 4% for the U.S. population, Kira says.

Tuning in to war news also correlated with more stress-related health problems, such as high blood pressure, headaches and stomach trouble, Kira says.

Although the war creates special problems for Iraqi-Americans, they also share a key challenge with other Muslims: lack of trust from people living here. Many Americans clearly don't trust those of the Muslim faith. In fact, 54% said they couldn't vote for a Muslim for president in a June Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll. That compares with 21% who turned thumbs-down on an evangelical Christian and 15% who wouldn't cast their ballot for a Jew.

Amer believes the world has changed for U.S. Muslims since Sept. 11 but says: "I don't think Americans understand what's happened. Muslims have the same anxieties and anguish about terrorism as everyone else in the U.S. At the same time, they're being blamed for it. They're carrying a double burden."

    USA's Muslims under a cloud, UT, 9.8.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-08-09-muslim-american-cover_x.htm

Sorting Out Life as Muslims and Marines

August 7, 2006
the New York Times
By ANDREA ELLIOTT

Few people ever see Ismile Althaibani’s Purple Heart. He keeps the medal tucked away in a dresser. His Marine uniform is stored in a closet. His hair is no longer shaved to the scalp.

It has been 20 months since he returned from Iraq after a roadside explosion shattered his left foot. He never expected a hero’s welcome, and it never came — none of the balloons or hand-written signs that greeted another man from his unit who lived blocks away.

Mr. Althaibani, 23, was the last of five young marines to come home to an extended family of Yemeni immigrants in Brooklyn. Like the others, he grew accustomed to the uneasy stares and prying questions. He learned not to talk about his service in the company of Muslim neighbors and relatives.

“I try not to let people know I’m in the military,” said Mr. Althaibani, a lance corporal in the Marine Corps Reserve.

The passage home from Iraq has been difficult for many American troops. They have struggled to recover from the shocking intensity of the war. They have faced the country’s ambivalence about a conflict in which thousands of their fellow soldiers have been killed or maimed.

But for Muslim Americans like Mr. Althaibani, the experience has been especially fraught.

They were called upon to fight a Muslim enemy, alongside comrades who sometimes questioned their loyalty. They returned home to neighborhoods where the occupation is commonly dismissed as an imperialist crusade, and where Muslims who serve in Iraq are often disparaged as traitors.

Some 3,500 Muslims have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan with the United States armed forces, military figures show. Seven of them have been killed, and 212 have been awarded Combat Action Ribbons.

More than half these troops are African-American. But little else is known about Muslims in the military. There is no count of those who are immigrants or of Middle Eastern descent. There is no full measure of their honors or injuries, their struggle overseas and at home.

A piece of the story is found near Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, where two sets of brothers and a young cousin share a singular kinship. They grew up blocks apart, in the cradle of a large Muslim family. They joined the Marines, passing from one fraternity to another. Within the span of a year and a half, they had all gone to Iraq and come home.

Ismile’s cousin Ace Montaser sensed a new distance among the men at his mosque on State Street. He described it as “the awkward eye.”

Ismile’s older brother Abe, a burly New York City police officer, learned to avoid political debates.

Their cousin Abdulbasset Montaser took a different approach. He answered questions about whether he served in Iraq with a feisty, “Yeah, we’re going to Yemen next!” He has helped recruit for the Marines and boasts about his cousin’s medal to the neighbors.

“I want every Muslim in the military to be recognized,” said Mr. Montaser, a corporal. “If not, people will feel they’re not doing their part.”

Their service bears some resemblance to that of Japanese and German immigrants who fought for the United States in World War II. But for Muslims of Arab descent, the call to serve in Iraq is complicated not only by ethnic ties, but by religion.

Islamic scholars have long debated the circumstances under which it is permissible for Muslims to fight one another. The arguments are intricate, centering on the question of what constitutes a just war.

In Brooklyn, those fine points are easily lost. Here, many immigrants say that killing Muslims is simply wrong, and they cite the Koran as proof. Their opposition to the war is rooted as much in religion, they say, as in Arab solidarity.

The same week that Abe Althaibani headed to Iraq with the 25th Marine Regiment, his wife joined thousands of antiwar protesters in Manhattan, shouting, “No blood for oil!”

“It was my people,” said his wife, Esmihan Althaibani, a regal woman with luminous green eyes. “I went because it was Arabs.”

Yet the American military desperately needs people like her husband: Arabic speakers with a religious and cultural understanding of the Middle East. They have become crucial figures in Iraq, serving as interpreters, conduits and even buffers between soldiers and civilians.

The Althaibanis and Montasers knew they would be useful. They wanted to help bring change to Iraq. They did not know how much the war would change them.

Brooklyn to Yemen and Back

As boys, the Althaibanis and Montasers lived in two worlds. They took summer trips to the pastoral villages of their Yemeni ancestors, and spent winters shoveling snow off Brooklyn stoops. They attended Koran classes, and rooted passionately for the Knicks.

They saw themselves as both American and Arab, as brash Brooklyn kids in the halls of John Dewey High School, and respectful Yemeni sons at the dinner table.

One by one, they graduated from high school and joined the Marine Corps Reserve. Some of their parents found it odd, even disappointing. The sons of other Yemeni immigrants tended to follow their fathers into commerce, or better yet, studied law and medicine.

But for the young men of this family, the first to be born in America, military service became an honorable rite. It offered discipline and adventure. It also promised a new kind of respect from other Americans. Starting in 1992, eight of the family’s young men enlisted, almost all of them before Sept. 11.

The prospect of fighting in a Muslim country unsettled the five cousins who were deployed to Iraq, recalled an uncle, Naji Almontaser.

“It was very heavy on their conscience,” said Mr. Almontaser, 47, a banquet captain at the New York Hilton. “I kept pounding on them that when you go there you have to do good.”

It helped that four of them went to Iraq together, with the same two units. Still, they found themselves thrust into a daunting role. Their fluency in Arabic made them invaluable. But it also laid bare the horrors of war. They heard what their comrades could not. A frantic sequence of foreign words was, they knew, a girl crying out that her father was dead.

“It’s like you’re part of two different worlds,” Abe Althaibani said. “You’re part of the military thing, yet you totally relate to this country you just invaded. You’re not as foreign as everyone else.”

He recalled the evening he tried to calm a bleeding woman as her children lay dying several feet away. He crouched next to her, near a bridge in Nasiriya, talking softly in Arabic.

Ismile Althaibani, Abe’s younger brother, remembers insisting that a mentally disabled prisoner be allowed to ride in the passenger seat of a truck, without a sandbag over his head, when a group of men were transported from Abu Ghraib to another prison.

Their cousins Abdulbasset Montaser and Khalil Almontaser were stationed in Babylon. There, Mr. Montaser befriended Iraqi workers. “I tried to look out for them a little more, help them a little more than the average soldier,” he said.

But at times, such gestures brought unease. One day, as Mr. Montaser walked the young workers to lunch, a gunnery sergeant yelled, “Get away from them,” he recalled.

He and his cousins learned to ignore the pejoratives of war, words like “hajji,” “camel jockey” and “Johnny Jihad.” They understood that their fellow marines had to dehumanize the enemy in order to carry on, Abe Althaibani said.

But for them, the task was far more trying.

“I couldn’t distance myself,” Mr. Althaibani said. “Sometimes I wanted to.”

Thousands of miles away, on Court Street in Brooklyn, his mother met a similar challenge.

She and her husband live in a rambling apartment adorned with Persian rugs and gold-lettered passages from the Koran. In the living room, a giant Sony television holds court.

The television was Sadah Althaibani’s tether to her sons. But unlike other military mothers, who might watch CNN or Fox, Mrs. Althaibani followed the war on Arab news channels that showed far more graphic images, and were decidedly more critical of the United States.

Day after day, she and Abe Althaibani’s wife, Esmihan, would sit anchored to the plastic-covered couches, watching.

“You see what’s going on over there,” said Esmihan Althaibani, 26. “The casualties on both sides. Iraqis speaking for themselves, saying, ‘We didn’t want to get invaded.’ They would hold dead babies with their heads blown off.”

One afternoon in May, the television filled with the image of a blood-soaked sidewalk in Baghdad.

“Look, look,” said Sadah Althaibani, 65, a petite woman with a stubborn frown. “They’re cleaning the blood off the ground.”

When Mrs. Althaibani talks about the war, she sounds like other American parents upset by their children’s service. She laments that her sons had to fight while President Bush “was playing with his dog.” She has no doubt that the occupation was driven by a quest for oil.

But among Yemeni immigrants, Mrs. Althaibani found that she could not speak openly about her sons’ deployment. Muslim Americans have been vehemently opposed to the war: Of roughly 1,800 surveyed by the pollster John Zogby in 2004, more than 80 percent were against it.

Mrs. Althaibani told people that her sons were working as translators, not as marines in combat. On her television, she had seen reports of Shiites fighting Sunnis, but she clung to the idea that Muslims should not kill each other.

“It’s a sin,” she said. “Nobody kills other Muslims. They’re like brothers.”

After Combat, Questions

The question that shadows the Montasers and Althaibanis is whether they killed anyone. The same question haunts any soldier returning from combat. But for Muslims, the reckoning is different.

Abdulbasset Montaser, 23, a slim, soft-spoken man, said he fired his weapon only in self-defense, and never at targets he could distinctly see.

“I never had to kill anyone face to face,” he said.

He believed that battling with the insurgents was justified because they were not following the rules of Islam. What disturbed him were the civilians caught in the cross-fire.

“It’s not that I feel guilty going out there, but you’re fighting your own people in a way,” he said.

Of the five cousins, no one saw heavier combat than Ismile (pronounced ish-MY-el) Althaibani, who was stationed in Falluja in the fall of 2004, during the American offensive against the insurgents there. He worked in convoy security with the First Marine Division.

“If you’re out there — no matter your culture, your religion — and somebody shoots at you, what do you do?” Mr. Althaibani said. “It’s either him or me. That’s how I come to terms with it.”

Still, he was troubled by his belief that Islam prohibits killing.

Over dinner at an Italian restaurant one evening last month, Mr. Althaibani sat hunched at the table, spinning his cellphone like a top.

Abdulbasset Montaser sat across from him. They were the only ones in their family to enlist after Sept. 11, when deployment to the Middle East was a clear possibility. They never expected the war that followed.

When asked if he was proud of his service in Iraq, Mr. Althaibani thought for a moment.

“It’s mixed feelings, right?” he said, looking at his cousin. Mr. Montaser nodded silently.

Mr. Althaibani was awarded a Combat Action Ribbon, in addition to the Purple Heart. He did not want to talk about whether he killed anyone, or about the violence he witnessed.

“You just try to forget,” he said.

A Marine Transformed

The oldest of the group, Abe Althaibani, came home with much of his former character intact. He had the same easy laugh. He still cleaned his plate at dinner.

But there were hints of change. He was more on edge, his mother noticed. He had acquired the habits of his comrades: he smoked Marlboro Reds and took to dipping tobacco.

What struck his wife was something less common among marines: Mr. Althaibani spoke Arabic with a new Iraqi accent.

He told his relatives little about his role in the war. When prodded, he would sometimes say that he served in “civilian affairs.”

In fact, Mr. Althaibani had worked on secret missions around Iraq with two counterintelligence teams.

He had been trained as a rifleman. But soon after he arrived at his base in Nasiriya in April 2003, he became a full-time interpreter, going on raids, assisting with interrogations and working undercover to cultivate sources. To fit in, he grew a beard and wore a long, checked scarf popular among Iraqi men.

The irony of Mr. Althaibani’s evolution did not escape him: He assumed, by outward appearances, a more traditionally Arab identity with the Marines than he ever had growing up among Yemenis.

The greatest challenge of his service, he said, was “the acting.”

“It’s like you gotta be somebody you’re not sometimes in order to get information,” he said. “It’s basically like you’re a fake, you’re a fraud. But you have to think you’re doing this in order for good things to happen.”

Mr. Althaibani, 28, wanted only to unwind when he came home five months later. Other marines he knew had struggled to readjust to civilian life.

“It’s hard,” he said. “You’re out there giving people orders, and you come here and the lady at the checkout is giving you attitude.”

He eventually became a police officer, taking a path that three other marines in his family plan to follow.

One sunny afternoon in June, Mr. Althaibani guided his black Nissan Maxima through the Carroll Gardens section of Brooklyn. Frank Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon” floated from the speakers. The playgrounds, schools and cafes of Mr. Althaibani’s youth passed in slow sequence.

As he drove, Mr. Althaibani began recounting the crowning achievement of his team in Iraq: the capture of a suspected Baath party official who was believed to have taken part in the deadly ambush of Pfc. Jessica Lynch’s convoy.

“I felt like I was doing something,” he said.

The Iraqi captive, Nagem Sadoon Hatab, was detained at Camp Whitehorse near Nasiriya in June 2003. During an interrogation, he would accept water only from Mr. Althaibani, the marine recalled.

Two days later, another marine dragged Mr. Hatab, who was covered in his own feces, by the neck outside his cell and left him lying naked in the heat, according to court testimony. He was found dead hours later. An autopsy showed that he had suffered a broken neck bone, broken ribs and blunt trauma to the legs.

A Marine Corps major and a sergeant were charged with assaulting Mr. Hatab. Both were acquitted of the charge, though the major was found guilty of dereliction of duty and maltreatment in the case and the sergeant was convicted of abusing unidentified Iraqi prisoners.

Mr. Althaibani testified at the sergeant’s trial. He spoke about the case later with a shrugging detachment, saying he had witnessed no abuse and believes that the prosecutors were intent on “crucifying the Marines.”

Looking back on the war, he feels the greatest loyalty toward his fellow marines.

“I wanted to get out there, do what I had to do and get home,” he said. “I had no choice. Even if there was a choice — you’re going to train with these guys and leave them?”

The Marine Corps is “like a cult,” he said. “You went together and you come home together.”

No Looking Back

It is difficult to picture Ace Montaser at war. He has a boy’s face, with flushed cheeks and aqua eyes that dance about.

When he rolls up his sleeve, the image hardens. Sprawled across his arm is a tattoo of the Grim Reaper. Below it, a ribbon of letters spells “Brooklyn,” and across the top are the words, “Trust no one.”

He got the tattoo when he came home from Iraq. It signaled his entry into another kind of battle, one between him and the traditions of his family.

From the time Mr. Montaser was 12, he remembers his mother telling him he would marry a girl from Yemen. He never liked the idea.

“They say you just build love,” he said.

A bride had also been chosen for his brother, Abdulbasset, and the family began talking of a dual wedding before the two men left for Iraq, with different units, in the spring of 2003.

While he was away, Mr. Montaser, 25, served mostly as a translator in Nasiriya, training the Iraqi police and rebuilding schools.

Iraq felt strangely familiar. He studied the streets, the cars, the way people dressed, and kept thinking of Yemen, where he had spent stretches of his youth.

In young Iraqis, he saw himself. He would look at them and wonder, had his father not moved to Brooklyn, would his life have been so different?

He was most haunted by the children, those who begged in the street and others who lay dead in a hospital he visited.

“I just saw how precious life was,” he said. “To come back alive, I feel I have the right to do whatever I want to do.”

Soon after he returned that September, Mr. Montaser fell in love with a woman from the Bronx. She was Muslim, but did not cover her head. She was of Arab descent, but not Yemeni.

Their relationship was not the first rebellion staged by Mr. Montaser, who prefers the nickname Ace to his birth name, Abdulsamed.

His parents went ahead with the original wedding plan. Nine months later, they persuaded him to fly to Yemen, where they own a house in the capital, Sana.

The night before the wedding, he plotted his escape.

He quietly packed his camouflage Marine bag. At midnight, he slipped out of the house. On a dresser, he left a note saying that he had gotten cold feet and was traveling south to the port city of Aden.

“That’s the good thing about being a marine,” he said. “You plan. You’re made for these situations. That’s how I got out.”

He hailed a cab to the American Embassy, where a Marine staff sergeant ushered him inside. The next day, he flew back to New York.

“What he realized is the Marine Corps is his other family,” said Gunnery Sgt. Jamal Baadani, an Egyptian immigrant and a mentor of Mr. Montaser.

A week later, Mr. Montaser married his girlfriend, Nafeesah, at City Hall. They live in the Bronx with her parents.

Mr. Montaser is now studying to become a radio producer. For a long time, he did not speak to his parents. He is trying to mend the relationship, but has no interest in returning to Yemen.

“I don’t care what I left behind,” he said. “There’s nothing for me there. Everything’s in America.”

A Quiet Return

Ismile Althaibani was the last to come home. He arrived at his parents’ doorstep without warning on Thanksgiving day in 2004, leaning on a pair of crutches.

They answered the bell and embraced him. He knew there would be none of the balloons and signs that welcomed a Puerto Rican marine in the neighborhood.

“It’s just decorations,” Mr. Althaibani said.

Nine days earlier, on Nov. 17, Mr. Althaibani was in Falluja, riding in a predawn convoy to pick up detainees. He had said a prayer before the trip, reciting the Koran’s first verse. If he survived, he promised God, he would become a better Muslim.

Suddenly, a bomb planted by the insurgents exploded under his truck.

Shrapnel flew into his face and dug deep inside his left foot. Blood trickled from his ears. A friend dragged him from the wreckage, and soon he was on a helicopter to Baghdad.

Mr. Althaibani almost never tells the story of his injury. Few of his relatives know what happened. When he was awarded the Purple Heart at a ceremony at Floyd Bennett Field, in Brooklyn, he invited only his brother Abe and a couple of friends.

His mother does not know the name of his medal.

“You can’t say ‘purple heart’ in Arabic,” said Mr. Althaibani.

But word traveled. About six months after he returned, Mr. Althaibani was standing outside Yemen Cafe on Atlantic Avenue, sipping tea. A stranger walked up, shook his hand and asked him, in Arabic, if he had killed Iraqis.

None of the marines in Mr. Althaibani’s family welcomed the attention. But for Ismile, it was especially uncomfortable.

A lean man with brown, searching eyes, Mr. Althaibani is always standing off to the side. He is quiet by nature, but returned from Iraq even more withdrawn, his relatives observed. He smiled less, and smoked often.

One afternoon in May, he sank into a couch in his family’s living room. His father, who is a maintenance foreman at a building in Manhattan, sat across from him.

“Iraq is wrong — 100 percent,” his father said, speaking in English to this reporter. “Nobody support the war in Iraq.”

Ismile looked away. He had never asked his father what he thought of the war.

Weeks later, the young man stood in a park in Downtown Brooklyn, smoking a cigarette.

“He’s proud of me,” he said of his father. “He don’t express himself a lot.”

His foot had finally healed. He had been attending a local mosque, and would soon begin training at the New York City Police Academy.

The physical traces of his time in Iraq were all but gone. His hair fell loosely over his forehead. A soft goatee shaded his face.

The only hint of his service hung from two silver chains that disappeared beneath his shirt. They held the aluminum tags of his military identity: name. Blood type. Social Security number.

Stamped across the bottom, in the same block letters, was the word “Muslim.”

    Sorting Out Life as Muslims and Marines, NYT, 7.8.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/07/nyregion/07marines.html?hp&ex=1155009600&en=c2e49f979e1647c3&ei=5094&partner=homepage

As Mideast Churns, U.S. Jews and Arabs Alike Swing Into Action

July 28, 2006
The New York Times
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

With Israel at war again, American Jewish groups immediately swung into action, sending lobbyists to Washington, solidarity delegations to Jerusalem and millions of dollars for ambulances and trauma counseling, just as they always have.

But this time there is a parallel mobilization going on in this country by Arab-Americans and Muslim Americans in support of Lebanese and Palestinian victims of the war. These Americans, too, are sending lobbyists to Washington, solidarity delegations to the Middle East and boxes of lentils, diapers and medicine to refugees.

Both sides are worried about friends and relatives under bombardment or driven from their homes. Both are moved to act by the scenes on television of their suffering kin.

“The world in which I live is filled with people who are deeply connected to Israel,” said Rabbi Steve Gutow, a New Yorker who is executive director of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, an umbrella group for 125 local councils and 13 national groups. “For almost everyone I know, there’s no distance. It’s hard for me to turn the TV off at night, and I wake up in the middle of the morning and turn the TV on to find out how things are going.”

Although people in both diasporas are glued to their television screens, the parallel ends there. While the American Arab and Muslim groups say they are better organized than ever before, they say they have not made a dent in American foreign policy. Their calls for an immediate cease-fire by Israel have been rebuffed by the White House and most legislators on Capitol Hill.

“I’m devastated,” said James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, in Washington. “I thought we’d come further. We’re doing well, so far, in terms of our capacity to deal with everything from the humanitarian crisis to identifying families and working to get people out. What is distressing is the degree to which this neoconservative mindset has taken hold of the policy debate. It’s like everyone has drunk the Kool-Aid.”

Salam al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, said, “This is probably the only issue in Washington where there’s no real debate.”

Jewish leaders say there is surprisingly little debate even inside usually contentious American Jewish circles about Israel’s decision to bomb Lebanon and send in troops to rout the militants of Hezbollah, who are launching rockets into Israel.

The most coordinated dissent by American Jews so far is a campaign by the liberal Tikkun magazine and the Network of Spiritual Progressives, both founded by Rabbi Michael Lerner in Berkeley, Calif., to raise money for newspaper advertisements calling for a cease-fire by both sides and an international peace conference.

Any criticism of Israel is “very marginal,” said William Daroff, vice president of public policy for United Jewish Communities, an umbrella organization of 155 Jewish federations in the United States. Mr. Daroff said he had also found an astounding degree of consensus among American politicians.

Last week he helped organize a Washington lobbying blitz by more than 40 Jewish leaders who, he said, spent the day essentially expressing their thanks to officials in the White House and the State Department and on Capitol Hill.

“From Nancy Pelosi on the liberal wing of the Democratic Party to Rick Santorum on the conservative wing of the Republican Party, I have literally heard unanimous approval and support for Israel’s right to defend itself,” Mr. Daroff said.

“Certainly there are concerns by all parties about civilian deaths in Lebanon,” he said, “but there’s also great understanding on the Hill that when Hezbollah uses civilians as shields and folks have a rocket launcher next to their dining room table, it makes them a target in addition to it being a violation of international law by Hezbollah.”

Arab and Muslim American leaders say they have tried to meet with the White House and many legislators but have been rebuffed.

Ahmed Younis, national director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, said he had finally succeeded in arranging a meeting with Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, for next week. While Jewish groups field 40 lobbyists, Mr. Younis’s Muslim group is sending one Muslim leader, one rabbi and one Christian minister to meet the senator.

Jewish groups have also excelled at emergency fund-raising. United Jewish Communities, only one of several major Jewish groups, has raised $21 million in the past two weeks for its Israel Crisis Fund.

Another group, American Friends of Magen David Adom, which supplies ambulances and emergency medical care in Israel, initiated a fund-raising effort it calls Code Red.

The organization has raised $38,000 a day over the Internet for the past 10 days, said David Allen, the executive vice president, several hundred times more than it usually raises in a day. Mr. Allen said he was in talks with 10 donors who were considering giving enough for 10 ambulances in the next week, at a cost of $80,000 to $100,000 each.

Arab and Muslim groups have been raising money for humanitarian aid for Lebanese who were trapped in cities shelled by the Israelis and for those who fled.

The Council on American Islamic Relations is encouraging American Muslims to send boxes of lentils, powdered milk and diapers — rather than money — to Life for Relief and Development, a charity based in Southfield, Mich. It is discouraging direct financial contributions because many American Muslims fear they will be investigated by the American government if they donate to a Muslim charity.

Khalil Jassemm, chief executive of the organization, said the contributions had amounted to “a bit less than we had really hoped,” worth no more than $3 million. The reason, Mr. Jassemm said, could be “donor anxiety” about giving to Muslim charities.

“We need to fully analyze what’s going on,” he said, “but we think that donors are asking themselves, ‘If I do help, am I going to be in trouble?’ ”

Both sides are also working to sway public opinion. Jewish groups have held rallies in almost every major American city, Mr. Daroff said.

The Council on American Islamic Affairs has sponsored news conferences around the country in which Lebanese-Americans and others recount traumatic stories of escaping from Israeli bombardment.

“People can’t believe what they’re seeing,” said Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the council. “The United States is actively supporting the systematic destruction of the civilian infrastructure of Lebanon, a friendly nation, using American weapons. Not only do they not seek to stop the destruction, they actually provide the bombs to accomplish the destruction.”

The pro-Israel lobby has held sway over American policy, Mr. Hooper said, but that could be changing.

“The American Muslim community has reached a point where it has a little more political maturity, a little more ability to speak out, to reach out to elected officials and to opinion leaders,’’ he said. “I don’t think it’s going to be that American politicians can get away with making speeches pledging allegiance to Israel and nobody’s going to challenge them. I think those days are over.”

    As Mideast Churns, U.S. Jews and Arabs Alike Swing Into Action, NYT, 28.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/28/us/28homefront.html

Arab-Americans Sue U.S. Over Re-entry Procedures

June 20, 2006
The New York Times
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

A group of Muslim and Arab-Americans, frustrated by what they say is the climate of suspicion and fear that dogs their re-entry into the United States from trips abroad, sued the Department of Homeland Security and the F.B.I. yesterday, demanding that the courts protect their civil rights.

The seven main plaintiffs in the class action suit assert that both the United States Congress and the federal government are ignoring the plight of innocent Americans harassed repeatedly because of problems with the terrorist watch list.

The lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Chicago by the American Civil Liberties Union, contends that the courts alone can ensure that antiterrorism policies do not repeatedly subject ordinary Americans to detention, questioning, fingerprinting and the like.

"These are law-abiding citizens, and it is too extreme, too offensive," said Harvey Grossman, the legal director for the A.C.L.U.'s Illinois branch, saying that repeated complaints to Homeland Security as well as senators or congressmen barely get a response. "The court is the only forum where these people have a chance to get a hearing."

The lawsuit asserts that repeated border detentions and improper actions of border guards violate the plaintiffs' constitutional protection against unreasonable search and seizure and their right to travel.

Civil rights lawyers and government officials note that the courts have often struck down efforts to limit the scope of searches or questioning by border agents. But at least one other suit, a New York case involving five Muslim Americans who were detained without explanation after returning from a religious conference in Toronto, is proceeding.

"We will not let anybody into the country until we are sure they are not going to do harm to our citizens and violate our laws; it is that simple," said Bill Anthony, the senior public affairs spokesman for United States Customs and Border Protection. He said Congress had given the agency broad authority to conduct border searches. Mr. Grossman said most case law on border searches hinged on criminal suspects, with extended detention and searches deemed reasonable to catch drug smugglers. His plaintiffs are not outlaws and are always re-admitted eventually — the government could question them at home if needed, he said.

He noted that Robert S. Mueller III, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, testifying May 2 before the Senate Judiciary Committee, could not guarantee that inaccuracies on the terrorist watch list would be corrected within the next five years.

The watch list, maintained since 2003 by the Terrorist Screening Center of the F.B.I., had more than 237,000 names in 2005, according to a Homeland Security report. Some 12 agencies can add names, and only the originating agency can remove a name.

Donna A. Bucella, the center's director, said that matches were made every day from the list and that it was an important tool for local law enforcement agencies. "Obviously there have been a lot of people complaining about it, so there must be ways the U.S. government could refine it and make it better," Ms. Bucella said.

The Illinois lawsuit, expanding on one first filed a year ago, focuses on two main issues. First, those whose names resemble ones on the watch list and who find it virtually impossible to get off the list.

A June 2005 government review found that 42 percent of the calls to the screening center from December 2003 to January 2005 showed that the wrong person was being detained. Second, some people on the list are wrongly categorized as dangerous, resulting in agitated, armed border agents swarming them, the suit claims.

The customs agency says the number of passengers detained for additional checks is relatively small — roughly 2 percent.

The men suing compare their brusque treatment to that in a totalitarian state.

Niaz Anwar, 55, who fled Afghanistan 11 days after the Soviets occupied the country in 1978 and eventually settled near Boston, said he has been detained nine times since April 2004. In April at the Peace Bridge in Buffalo, he said, a border agent asked him his opinion about the Iraqi war and his party affiliation.

"I was thinking that I was in Moscow during Brezhnev's time," Mr. Anwar said.

Mr. Anthony denied that any such questions could have been asked, saying any officer who did risked termination.

Dr. Elie Ramzy Khoury, a 68-year-old Christian who immigrated from Jerusalem in 1963 and has been an American since 1974, said he had been stopped seven times since May 2002 and now avoided even family funerals abroad because he so dreaded the return. When he complained to Homeland Security, he received a letter back two years later explaining how he could board domestic flights, which is not the issue.

"They never tell me what they are looking for nor what they want," Dr. Khoury said. "I've never done anything unlawful or irregular. I'm a practicing physician and I've been criminalized."

Critics believe the government has not recovered from the shock that the 19 hijackers in the Sept. 11 attacks were moving about freely and has constructed a big, ineffective sieve to try to avoid a repeat.

But the erroneous detentions show intelligence gathering remains poor, Mr. Grossman said. "It is this endless collection of information without any kind of focus, and they allow it to go on and on and on."

    Arab-Americans Sue U.S. Over Re-entry Procedures, NYT, 20.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/20/us/20lawsuit.html

U.S. Muslims Confront Taboo on Nursing Homes

June 13, 2006
The New York Times
By LYNETTE CLEMETSON

BROOKLYN PARK, Minn. — As a founder of the growing Shiite Muslim community here, Hussein Walji oversaw the building of the area's first mosque. He directed construction of its youth center, and followers hailed him as a visionary for adding an auditorium for ecumenical functions like the M&M picnic for Muslims and Methodists.

But even family members find Mr. Walji's latest expansion uncomfortably American: he is developing plans for an assisted living and nursing complex in this Minneapolis suburb.

"I could never do it," said Mohamed Remtula, Mr. Walji's brother-in-law, his ailing mother at his side in his living room as he and Mr. Walji discussed the planned complex. "It just is not in our culture."

Such uneasy discussions are taking place in Islamic enclaves around the country as more families try to reconcile religious teachings on caring for elders with the modern realities of their hectic American lives.

Muslim leaders from Florida to California are eager for a successful approach to the issue. But early efforts have been a tough sell. Sajda Khan and her husband, Rahmat, opened Fonthill Gardens, a six-bed assisted living home in Hawthorne, Calif., for the Los Angeles area's aging Muslim population. They found a contractor to provide halal meats, included a prayer room and made enthusiastic presentations to area mosques. A year later they have cared for two Christians and one Buddhist, but no Muslims.

"People feel that others will criticize them," said Mrs. Khan, who is from Pakistan. "You know, 'So and so left her mother in a facility, and now look at her looking fashionable at the mall.' It's very frustrating."

For generations, immigrant groups have grappled with the American concept of housing for the elderly, tailoring it to meet their ethnic, cultural and religious needs. But for many Muslims, the idea of placing parents in facilities is still unthinkable, seen as a violation of a Koranic obligation to care for one's elderly relatives.

"This change will be difficult, but it is inevitable," said Mr. Walji, 54, who is also president of the North American Shia Ithna-Asheri Muslim Communities Organization, an association of mosques in the United States and Canada. "Someone has to make the first move." If families are being forced to consider outside care, he reasoned, having a facility affiliated with the mosque might ease the pain of the decision.

In Ohio, the Islamic Center of Greater Toledo approved a proposal in May to develop elder housing near its mosque.

The Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit is establishing a program to help the area's Muslim and Arab population address end-of-life issues.

"Our immigrant Muslim populations are totally unprepared to deal with this," said Dr. Hasan Shanawani, a critical care specialist who is starting the program. "We talk about respect for our parents, but in the name of love and tradition we are often neglecting our loved ones. We have to accept that there are some things we just can't do on our own."

The need for skilled care outside the home is, for an increasing number of Muslims, an unavoidable passage in the immigrant experience. Like many other American families, first- and second-generation adult siblings in Muslim families are often spread out around the country, struggling to balance the demands of dual-income marriages, work and children. Medical advances have enabled people to live longer, but often with chronic conditions that require more care than can easily be provided at home.

The Koran does not directly deal with how to care for aging parents. But prophetic teachings emphasize children's responsibility to care for parents as they were cared for as infants. Traditionally, families and religious leaders have interpreted this as a duty to care for parents at home.

"Yes, it is a mandate to take care of one's parents, but it is not explained how to do that," said Shakeel Syed, executive director of the Islamic Shura Council of Southern California, an organization of mosques. "You can keep your parents at home and not truly be caring for them, if you cannot meet their needs."

Other traditional teachings have been updated to meet contemporary needs, Mr. Syed said. Day care and baby-sitting help, also once thought of as a violation of religious obligation to family, are now accepted by many working Muslim families.

Mr. Walji's brother-in-law is not the only member of the family to have to consider the issue of elder care. Two years ago, Mr. Walji's wife's family made the tough decision to move an elderly aunt, with congestive heart failure, diabetes, leg problems and no children, into a local nursing facility.

Sitting on her bed recently at the Maranatha Care Center in a neighboring suburb, three doting nieces at her side, the aunt, Zera Suchedina, said with a resigned nod that the place was "O.K. Fine." But of roughly 90 residents in the complex's nursing care wing, Ms. Suchedina, 75, with limited English language ability, is the only Muslim.

She conducts her daily prayers alone in her room, she must accept care from male nurses — which she finds religiously unacceptable — and she eats vegetarian meals because no halal meats are offered.

A Muslim woman on the kitchen staff keeps her company and warms up the curries that her nieces bring her. Still, Ms. Suchedina said: "I would feel more at home to be with people I can relate to. It would be good to be with Muslims."

For advice on developing such a place, Mr. Walji has turned to the Lutheran Church, which helped his family settle in the Minneapolis area in 1972, after the dictator Idi Amin of Uganda expelled them and other ethnic Asians from the country.

The Augustana Care Corporation, run by Lutherans, has provided health care to the elderly for over a century. Tim Tucker, its president, has offered to assist Mr. Walji with development and management of his project and with updating facilities to better meet the needs of Muslims. Over lunch in the dining room of Augustana's main elder care complex in Minneapolis, Mr. Tucker listened to Mr. Walji's wish list: communal prayer space, halal foods and same-sex nursing care.

Mr. Tucker then posed a host of questions. What was the proposed size and budget for the project? What levels of care would the new facility offer? Would it be better to build a new building or buy an existing space? Would the new organization also provide day care for the elderly, or at-home services, which might be less objectionable?

The lunch ended with the bulk of questions unanswered, but with a shared resolve. "This initiative will improve the way we think about care across the board," Mr. Tucker said. In recent decades, Asian and Hispanic immigrants have influenced the elder care industry, developing their own health services or adding multilingual staff members and a more diverse array of foods, activities and aesthetic touches to facilities.

In Toledo, Manira Saide-Sallock is a supporter of her mosque's efforts to build an assisted living and nursing center. A retired teacher, Ms. Saide-Sallock, 66, is the primary person responsible for the care of both her mother and her mother-in-law, one weakened by a stroke, the other from a serious fall.

"This level of care takes its toll physically and emotionally, and having a facility that was part of the mosque would be such a help," she said, adding, "Not that my mother or mother-in-law would ever go there."

Though his family is struggling to manage, Mr. Remtula, Mr. Walji's brother-in-law, is adamant that his home is the only viable base of care for his mother, Sakina, 86, who has Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases and who now wears a motion sensor to sound warnings of her frequent and dangerous wanderings.

Razia Remtula, Mr. Walji's sister, said that her brother's project, while controversial now, might one day ease the burden and guilt for her own children. "I know how hard it is for me to provide this care," she said, "and I don't want my children to struggle with these decisions."

Her son, Sibtain, 27, listening intently from across the room, seemed puzzled by the discomfort surrounding his uncle's venture. "I think, in fact, it might be a better way to live when you are older, to be with your own peer group," he said. "If it was there, near the mosque, why not? I would definitely look into that."

Unsurprised by his nephew's response, Mr. Walji said: "You see? Inevitable."

    U.S. Muslims Confront Taboo on Nursing Homes, NYT, 13.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/13/us/13muslim.html?hp&ex=1150257600&en=ebb73fe59c98a5cf&ei=5094&partner=homepage

After 9/11, Arab-Americans Fear Police Acts, Study Finds

June 12, 2006
The New York Times
By ANDREA ELLIOTT

In the aftermath of Sept. 11, Arab-Americans have a greater fear of racial profiling and immigration enforcement than of falling victim to hate crimes, according to a national study financed by the Justice Department.

The study also concluded that local police officers and federal agents were straining under the pressure to fight terrorism, and that new federal policies in this effort were poorly defined and inconsistently applied.

The two-year study, released today by the Vera Institute of Justice, explored the changed relationship between Arab-Americans and law enforcement in the years since the 2001 terrorist attacks. The Vera Institute is a nonprofit policy research center based in New York.

About 100 Arab-Americans and 111 law enforcement personnel, both F.B.I. agents and police officers, participated in the study, which was conducted from 2003 to 2005. Some respondents were interviewed privately and others took part in focus groups in cities around the nation, which were not identified in order to protect the identities of the respondents.

Both Arab-American community leaders and law enforcement officials interviewed in the study said that cooperation between both groups had suffered from a lack of trust.

"It underscores the importance of community policing, of engaging the Arab and Muslim community in a constructive way and bringing them in to be partners," said Farhana Khera, the executive director of Muslim Advocates, a national nonprofit organization of lawyers.

While Muslims represent a spectrum of ethnic and national backgrounds, the study focused on Arab-Americans in order to understand the experience of one group more deeply, said Nicole Henderson, the lead author of the report. An estimated two-thirds of Arab-Americans are Christian.

Arab-Americans reported an increasing sense of victimization, suspicion of government and law enforcement, and concerns about protecting their civil liberties, according to the study, which was paid for by the National Institute of Justice, a research agency of the Justice Department.

A fear of surveillance ranked high among their concerns. During one focus group, a woman told the story of an encyclopedia salesman who came to her door and asked to use the bathroom. She worried that he might have been an agent trying to plant a listening device in her home.

While hate crimes against Arab-Americans spiked after Sept. 11, they have decreased in the years since, according to both law enforcement and Arab-American respondents.

A series of post-9/11 policies have sown the deepest fear among Arab-Americans, including unease about the USA Patriot Act, voluntary interviews of thousands of Arab-Americans by federal agents, and an initiative known as Special Registration, in which more than 80,000 immigrant men were fingerprinted, photographed and questioned by authorities.

These new measures threatened to harm decades of work by police departments to build trust in their communities, especially among immigrants, the study concluded. After 9/11, federal agents increasingly turned to the police for help with gathering intelligence and enforcing immigration laws, Ms. Henderson said.

F.B.I. agents were also given expanded powers to arrest people for immigration violations in connection with terrorism cases.

The study concluded that there was confusion among both F.B.I. agents and the local police about their roles in enforcing immigration, and that their resources had been stretched thin by counterterrorism initiatives.

John Miller, an assistant director for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said the report confirmed many of the realities facing the bureau.

"We have finite resources and tremendous responsibilities," Mr. Miller said. "When you take 40 percent of your resources and turn them towards national security issues in the wake of Sept. 11 because of a significant and demonstrable threat, you're going to see a strain on resources."

The degree to which police officers have enforced immigration laws varied, according to the study: Some departments formally deputized officers to arrest people for immigration violations, while other departments left this to the discretion of officers.

Both Arab-Americans and law enforcement personnel expressed dismay about the reporting of false information in the form of anonymous tips. F.B.I. agents said they had responded to calls stemming from petty disputes, business competition and dating rivalries, according to the study.

"It reminds me of Syria," an Arab-American was quoted as saying in the study. "If someone wants to get you, they will call the police."

Both Arab-Americans and law enforcement respondents acknowledged that the relationship between them was necessary, but could be improved.

Mr. Miller said the process would take time.

"We didn't bring this on the community — the terrorists did," he said. "The community is paying for that. We are paying for that as law enforcement because when we're doing our investigations, it seems like we're singling out a group or a religion and the fact is, we're not. We have to go where the leads take us."

In the weeks after Sept. 11, community outreach by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department helped engender trust among Muslims, said Sheriff Lee Baca. The department received reports that Pakistani immigrants working at 7-Eleven stores had been harassed. In response, officers visited more than 100 stores in Los Angeles and Orange Counties, he said.

"Our premise here in Los Angeles is that unless we enlist Muslim-American partnerships in the homeland security mission, we are leaving out our greatest resource for preventing terrorist attacks," Sheriff Baca said.

The Vera Institute study concluded that Arab-Americans tended to have a closer relationship with the local police than with federal agents.

James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute in Washington, said increased surveillance by the F.B.I. had damaged the image many Arab-Americans had of the bureau.

"I think there's more of an arm's length attitude," Mr. Zogby said. "The community still wants very much to cooperate because we know it is important and good to do so, but the cooperation is a one-way street.

"It's, 'Tell us everything you know,' which in most cases is nothing," he said. "What we want is more of relationship, a partnership, and not to be viewed as just sources."

    After 9/11, Arab-Americans Fear Police Acts, Study Finds, NYT, 12.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/12/us/12arabs.html