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Executive Editor: Abdus Sattar Ghazali
Chronology of Islam in America (2016)
By Abdus Sattar Ghazali
November 2016 - Page Two
Muslim Americans speak of escalating worries
Nov 18: Muslim Americans, already alarmed by the election of Donald J. Trump, said today that Mr. Trump’s choices for crucial posts heightened their fears of discrimination, violence, deportation and even detention, The New York Times said Saturday adding: Many said they worried that a more hostile America could prompt more Muslims to join forces with terrorists. The New York Times pointed out that during the presidential campaign, Mr. Trump said “Islam hates us,” endorsed the idea of a government registry of Muslims and proposed suspending immigration by Muslims or people from some Muslim majority countries. In interviews on Friday, many Muslims said that they were not sure before the election how seriously to take such talk, hoping that it was more political hyperbole than policy, but that the personnel moves of the last few days had confirmed their worst fears. The paper pointed out that “Mr. Trump has offered the post of national security adviser to Michael T. Flynn, a retired Army general who has written that “fear of Muslims is rational,” has said that “Islam is a political ideology” and is “like a malignant cancer.” For director of central intelligence, Mr. Trump has tapped Representative Mike Pompeo of Kansas, who has said that “most Islamic leaders across America” were complicit in terrorist attacks for not speaking out more forcefully. He has asked Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, who has endorsed a Muslim immigration ban, to be attorney general, and has named Stephen K. Bannon, whom critics have denounced as a white nationalist, as senior White House strategist.” The paper said some Trump supporters have cited the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II as a possible precedent. The New York Times quoted Zareena Grewal, an associate professor of American studies and religious studies at Yale, as saying: “I did not take Trump’s statements seriously enough, and I did not take these white nationalists as seriously as I should have. That these people have moved from the fringe of American politics to the very center should frighten everybody.” [New York Times]
Arab American in Dearborn finds this hate letter in her mailbox
Nov 19: Over the weekend, Arab America was notified about a hateful letter received by an Arab American resident in Dearborn, Michigan. The woman was found the letter in her mailbox this afternoon. The letter features President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign logo at the top, followed by graphic language informing the reader that the “Neighborhood Town Watch” will not tolerate anyone wearing a headscarf anymore. The letter orders the reader to either “take your radical attire [off] and live like all Americans” or “go back to your God Forsaken land you came from.” [Arab America]
Spike in hate puts Bay Area Muslim college students on guard
Nov 19: Hana Ghanim, a UC Berkeley student, doesn’t feel safe at school anymore. Ghanim and other Muslim students at universities across the Bay Area are taking precautions after a number of hate crimes occurred on their campuses since the Nov. 8 presidential election of Donald Trump, who said during his campaign that he would ban people of her faith from entering the country. Her fears come after an incident Nov. 10 on the UC Berkeley campus in which three men threatened to rip off a student’s hijab, or headscarf, and taunted her over Trump’s stunning victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton. “The fact that half the country voted to elect a man with such blatant xenophobic, Islamophobic, homophobic and racist views is telling,” said the 21-year-old Ghanim. Hate incidents have “become quite common, and that’s very worrisome for me.” Ghanim’s Berkeley organization also created a WhatsApp message group with more than 200 members who volunteer to escort students fearful of walking on campus alone. Berkeley students are not the only ones taking action. Doaa Abdelrahman, president of the Muslim Student Association at San Jose State University, also created a Facebook message group with close to 50 participants for students to call on if they don’t want to walk by themselves. Despite the Bay Area’s reputation for having some of the most accepting and ethnically diverse cities in the United States, complaints of harassment and discrimination have been on the rise since Trump’s historic win, Maher said. And Muslim women are an easy target for incidents triggered by hate because of the hijabs they wear, she added. [San Francisco Chronicle]
Arab American in Dearborn finds this hate letter in her mailbox
Nov 19: Over the weekend, Arab America was notified about a hateful letter received by an Arab American resident in Dearborn, Michigan. The woman was found the letter in her mailbox this afternoon. The letter features President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign logo at the top, followed by graphic language informing the reader that the “Neighborhood Town Watch” will not tolerate anyone wearing a headscarf anymore. The letter orders the reader to either “take your radical attire [off] and live like all Americans” or “go back to your God Forsaken land you came from.” [Arab America]
Trump's victory fuels an anti-Muslim backlash in L. A.
Nov 19: The initial sense of shock and disbelief has led to apprehension, as Muslim leaders in L.A. monitor the latest news from Trump Tower on the cabinet appointments and policy directives of the new president-elect. Yesterday, Trump named U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama as his attorney general, the official who would be responsible for implementing — and has voiced support for — Trump's campaign pledge for a complete shutdown on Muslims entering the U.S. The Anaheim office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations reports having received more than 40 complaints of verbal or physical attacks against Muslims in Los Angeles County, Orange County and the Inland Empire since the day after the election. They allege that Southern California has seen a spike in acts of aggression against Muslim organizations and individuals who are "visibly Muslim" — who include women wearing headscarves, dark-complected men with beards, and Arabic speakers. Hussam Ayloush, executive director of CAIR-LA, says he believes the current degree of hostility against Muslims is unprecedented in Southern California. "I've been doing this social-justice activism for 30 years now, and I've never seen such a degree of anger, ignorance, bigotry, disrespect, vulgarity and incivility as I'm seeing from many of the self-proclaimed Trump supporters," Ayloush told the L.A. Weekly. Southern California is one of the most diverse and socially progressive regions in the country, and Ayloush acknowledged that CAIR has received fewer complaints from Muslims here than elsewhere in the country. [LA Weekly]
Nearly 200 organizations demand rescinding of Muslim registry law
Nov 21: In a letter, sent to President Barack Obama, nearly 200 organizations today called on his administration to rescind the regulatory framework behind the National Security Exit-Entry Registration System (NSEERS). The signatories include civil and human rights, civil liberties, education, social justice, and inter-faith organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), The Leadership Conference on Civil Human Rights, American Immigration Council, Center for American Progress (CAP), National Council of La Raza, the National Immigration Forum (NIF), and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The letter pointed out that the NSEERS was a failed national security program that resulted in civil liberties violations and zero known convictions for terrorism-related crimes. The registration program violated civil liberties through profiling, unlawful arrests, and detentions of individuals who were not even required to register. In April 2011, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) delisted the countries under the NSEERS program, however the regulation was not rescinded. As a result of NSEERS more than 13,000 people were placed into removal proceedings, tearing families and communities apart, and abruptly ended productive jobs and educational aspirations. [AMP Report]
Muslim-Americans prepare for Trump’s ‘Muslim registry’
Nov 21: Roqayah Chamseddine writes on Mondoweis, Donald Trump’s ever-shifting call for a discriminatory ‘Muslim registry’ has led to the fitting invocation of Martin Niemöller’s poem, “First They Came”, as well as the misguided creation of Register US, a website whose unidentified authors call on Americans to enter their personal details and pledge to ‘register as Muslim’ should Trump follow through with his proposal to forcefully catalogue Muslims. Filmmaker Michael Moore, and senior writer at Newsweek, Kurt Eichenwald, even promised, should Trump’s administration create a Muslim registry, to convert to Islam and “sign up”. Like much of Donald Trump’s platform, the concept of a Muslim registry is borrowed, in this case from The National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS), which was inaugurated in 2002, thanks to the War on Terror, says Chamseddine adding: “According to a report from Penn State Law, The NSEERS Effect: A Decade of Racial Profiling, Fear, and Secrecy, “the most controversial piece of NSEERS required non-immigrant males who were 16 years of age and older from 25 specific countries to register at local immigration offices for fingerprinting, photographs, and lengthy, invasive interrogations”, and violators were fined and in some cases even deported—but for North Korea, every country on the NSEERS list has a majority Muslim population, most of them Arab. “The civil rights organization South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT) released a statement in May 2012 calling for the Department of Homeland Security to dismantle the NSEERS after the Obama administration announced that it would not terminate the program. With this in mind, it is more than possible for Trump’s administration to bring NSEERS back to life. Open campaign hostility aimed at Muslims has arguably influenced attacks against mosques, women wearing the hijab, and even members of the Sikh community who are associated with Muslims based on their religious dress. [Mondoweis]
Arab American Uber Driver Called "Arab Terrorist" and "Sand N*****" on the Road
Nov 22: The land of dreams is becoming a land of racism for this Arab American who was called a “sand nigger” by a Trump supporter on the streets of Astoria. The U.S. has always been a diverse land, open to people from different nations. However, racism still exists among the most close-minded, shallow people can still surprise the country with their level of hatred and racism. Last week, a video went viral in which a white man insulted and verbally abused an Arab American motorist who was called: “sand nigger”, “Arab terrorist”, and “a loser”. The recipient kept calm, and didn’t say a word in return to the insults. Rather, he filmed the incident. The abuser showed no fear or hesitation to stop his tirade after learning that he was being recorded. The victim, Muhammed, moved to the U.S. from Morocco seven years ago. He did not record the video to report it as a hate crime and is still not sure if he will. He told the Washington Post that he recorded the incident because he was so shocked by the way this man behaved. Muhammed is an Uber driver, and after telling a client what happened that day, the client published the video to Facebook. Karim Metwaly, an Egyptian YouTube actor, posted the video, which has been shared over 60,000 times, and viewed by over a 5 million people. [Arab America]
To resist a ‘Muslim registry’ we need active solidarity not symbolic gestures
Nov 21: Max Geller, an organizer with the international Jewish Anti-Zionist Network in New Orleans, says if the government of the United States requires its Muslim citizens to register, I will register as a Muslim. Writing on Mondoweiss, writes: Almost a year ago, then-candidate Donald Trump first publicly flirted with the idea of forcing American Muslims to register into some kind of ill-defined national database whose nefarious purpose was never articulated save by pointing a fat, small finger at the usual bogeymen: ISIS or terror. When asked follow-up questions about this registry Trump stared at his interlocutors and spread his arms wide open, as if to say: “What?” Max Geller also says: Since the election, discussions of the possibility of a Muslim registry and how we would resist it have exploded. Proposals for the registry have come from inside the new administration, and they draw on horrifying historical examples — including the internment of Japanese Americans— as justification. They also revisit, as Ayesha Siddiqi (among others) have pointed out, the ugliest Islamophobic tactics of the Bush administration, during which a post 9/11 de facto registry was put in place. “Both precedent and the administration’s statements suggest that a Muslim registry may be instated. No one — left or right — seems to be denying it. And I’m certainly not the only person or group this week to promise to register as a Muslim if any sort of law requiring Muslim registration is enacted,” Max Geller said adding: “As stunned reactions to the idea of a registry have spread, I’ve seen a lot of invocations of the King of Denmark. The idea is that the Danes — including their king, Christian X — wore the yellow armband required for Jews by the Nazis. The noble King’s actions, the story goes, inspired enough Danish Gentiles to follow suit and thus rendered pointless the Nazis’ attempt to publicly stigmatize and “other” Denmark’s Jews. That sounds nice, doesn’t it? [Mondoweiss]
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