Mosques, students and NGOs: Journalist blows the lid off police spying on NYC Muslims

Two weeks after an Associated Press investigation exposed the New York Police Department (NYPD)’s  ”demographic units” used to spy on a wide array of Muslim New Yorkers, a journalist has published startling new details that reveal the breadth of that operation.  The details are sure to raise new alarms in the Muslim-American community in New York City (NYC) as the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks approach. 

Leonard Levitt, a long-time writer on the NYPD beat, reports:

The New York City Police Department has been spying on hundreds of Muslim mosques, schools, businesses, student groups, non-governmental organizations and individuals, NYPD Confidential has learned.

The spying operation has targeted virtually every level of Muslim life in New York City, according to a trove of pages of Intelligence Division documents obtained by NYPD Confidential.

The documents do not specify whether the police have evidence or solid suspicions of criminality to justify their watching the Muslim groups.

The breadth and scope of the surveillance described in the documents suggest that the police have been painting with a broad brush and may have targeted subjects without specific tips about wrongdoing.

Specifically, Levitt reveals exactly who the NYPD spied on:

The NYPD’s spying operation has compiled information on 250 mosques, 12 Islamic schools, 31 Muslim student associations, 263 places it calls “ethnic hotspots,” such as businesses and restaurants, as well as 138 “persons of interest,” according to the Intel documents.

Police have singled out 53 mosques, four Islamic schools and seven Muslim student associations as institutions of “concern.” They have also labeled 42 individuals as top tier “persons of interest.”  

At least 32 mosques have been infiltrated by either undercover officers, informants, or both, according to documents, which are dated between 2003 and 2006 and marked “secret.”  

The NYPD has also been monitoring Muslim student associations at seven local colleges: City, Baruch, Hunter, Queens, LaGuardia, St. John’s and Brooklyn.

The department calls the two student groups at Brooklyn and Baruch colleges “of concern” and has sent undercover detectives to spy on them, the documents reveal.

The department defines a Muslim student association as “a university based student group, with an Islamic focus, involved with religious and political activities.”

The documents reveal that an Intelligence Division Cyber Unit has monitored MSAs at Brooklyn, City and Queens colleges.

The department also lists 10 non-governmental organizations as “of concern.” According to the documents, all 10 organizations have been spied upon by NYPD undercovers, informants, detectives with the Joint Terrorist Task Force or what the documents describe as a “secondary.”

On the NYPD list of 42 top tier “persons of interest” are: a corrections officer, a former imam, an un-indicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, a lecturer at Brooklyn College and what the department describes as a “Brooklyn College MSA member [who] has expressed desire to be a suicide bomber in Palestine.”

The police have spied on all these people with either an undercover officer, an informant, or both, the documents say.

The spying operation–which appears to run afoul of a 2004 NYC law that prohibits racial and ethnic profiling by the NYPD–was created by former CIA agent David Cohen.  Cohen has previously been criticized for helping spearhead an expansive NYPD operation that saw the department travel the globe to monitor social justice activists ahead of the 2004 Republican National Convention.

Muslim-American and civil liberties groups have slammed the NYPD operation.  A statement by the Muslim-American Civil Liberties Coalition demands:

• the New York City Council to investigate and oversee the NYPD’s operations, as well as a City Comptroller Audit;
• the Obama Administration to initiate a federal investigation into the extent to which the CIA has engaged in domestic spying within the United States, in violation of law and its manadate;
• Congress and the New York State Senate to hold hearings into the NYPD’s, FBI’s, and CIA’s  surveillance and policing practices in Muslim communities with a focus on the role of informants;
• Congress and New York State Senate to pass enforceable anti-racial profiling legislation;
• NYPD and the Department of Justice to revise their internal guidelines to disallow the use of surveillance and informants absent suspicion of specific criminal activity. 

The response to the relevations about the NYPD casting a large net over NYC Muslims is by no means the first time civil liberties and Muslim-American advocacy groups have clashed with the NYPD.  As I reported for the Gotham Gazette last November:

Arguably the biggest irritant came when the police department released a 2007 report, titled Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat. The report detailed the process by which it saw some American Muslims as being “radicalized” into terrorists and said that, while Americans Muslims are “more resistant to radicalization than their European counterparts, they are not immune.”

The Council on American-Islamic Relations promptly criticized the report, saying, “Its sweeping generalizations and mixing of unrelated elements may serve to cast a pall of suspicion over the entire American Muslim community.” In the wake of the report, the Muslim American Civil Liberties Coalition formed and critiqued the report for presenting “a distorted and misleading depiction of Islam and its adherents.”

Following meetings with Muslim organizations, the police department quietly issued a two-page clarification that stressed that the “NYPD’s focus on al Qaeda inspired terrorism should not be mistaken for any implicit or explicit justification for racial, religious or ethnic profiling.”

While Muslim organizations welcomed the clarification, criticism of the report remains.

“It’s not clear what the NYPD really thinks, because it’s leaving the bulk of its assertions and its conclusions in place,” said Faiza Patel, who works with the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Project. The clarification “didn’t address all of [the Muslim community's] concerns. The way it was done — really kind of hidden there — makes it seem as if the police department is talking out of two sides of its mouth.”

A separate Associated Press article on the NYPD documents states that they “paint the clearest picture yet of how the past decade’s hunt for terrorists also put huge numbers of innocent people under scrutiny as they went about their daily lives in mosques, restaurants and social groups. Every day, undercover officers and informants filed reports from their positions as ‘listening posts’ inside Muslim communities.”

The expansive intelligence operation is representative of perhaps the most enduring legacy of the September 11 attacks:  the harassment and surveillance of the Muslim-American community and the alarming rise of a national security state that strips away Americans’ civil liberties. 

 

 

Anti-Muslim law enforcement trainer cited by Norway killer rakes in U.S. taxpayer cash

The U.S. government has strongly denounced the recent massacre by a right-wing extremist in Norway, which killed at least 76 people.  But at the same time, sectors of the U.S. government have paid an anti-Muslim activist who helped fuel Anders Behring Breivik’s twisted ideology.  Breivik has admitted to being behind the massacre in Norway.

The American Prospect’s Adam Serwer writes:

Walid Shoebat, a “terrorism expert” with a dubious background who was paid by the U.S. government to train law enforcement in counterterrorism, is frequently cited in the manifesto of Anders Behring Breivik, the alleged right-wing terrorist who is accused of killing more than 90 people in Oslo last week. Brevik cites Shoebat more than 15 times.

Brevik cites Shoebat to support his arguments that immigration from Muslim countries threatens the West. “This is why the face of Islamic fundamentalism in the West has a façade that Islam is a peaceful religion,” Brevik cites Shoebat as saying, “Because they are waiting to have more Islamic immigrants, they are waiting to increase in number, waiting to increase their political power.”

As I reported here, Shoebat, the subject of a recent CNN report that debunks his purported life story as a former Palestinian terrorist, rakes in U.S. taxpayer cash.

Two months ago, Shoebat delivered a keynote address to law enforcement officers attending a South Dakota conference on homeland security.  Shoebat was paid $5,000 for the appearance by the South Dakota Office of Homeland Security–the money coming a federal grant administered by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

At a similar counter-terrorism event held last year in Las Vegas, Shoebat reportedly told the audience that the way to solve the threat of Islamic extremism was to “kill them…including the children.”

Shoebat is one of many anti-Muslim activists from the United States cited in Breivik’s online manifesto.  It’s a disturbing reality that Shoebat’s views on Islam are being funded with federal grants and listened to by law enforcement agencies in the U.S. The revelation that Breivik’s manifesto is laced with citations of Shoebat should be a wake-up call to the U.S. government that Shoebat, and others like him, have no place training law enforcement officers, and should certainly not be taking money from U.S. taxpayers.

Anti-Muslim bigot Walid Shoebat, brought to you by U.S. taxpayers

Late last year, Walid Shoebat, a self-styled “expert” on Islamic extremism, reportedly told public safety personnel attending a Las Vegas anti-terrorism conference that the way to solve the threat posed by terrorists was to “kill them…including the children.” 

And on May 11, despite criticism of the Las Vegas speech, Shoebat, who continues to tout his credentials as an “ex-terrorist” in the Palestine Liberation Organization despite serious questions about his purported biography, was welcomed to a similar place.  He delivered a keynote address to more public employees who attended the second annual South Dakota Homeland Security Conference held in Rapid City–a conference entirely funded by federal tax money.  The topic was “Jihad in America.”

David Montgomery of the Rapid City Journal reported on the speech:

Walid Shoebat, who says he was a former terrorist in the Palestine Liberation Organization before converting to Christianity, said that Americans should focus on what he called the “culture of terrorism” among Muslims rather than “only the ones who carry out the explosive act.”

Shoebat said closet supporters of terrorism exist throughout the Muslim community in mosques, community groups and in the U.S. armed forces.
“You’ve been infiltrated at all levels,” Shoebat said. “Are all Muslims who interpret for the U.S. military terrorists? Of course not. But that doesn’t mean you play Russian roulette.”

Shoebat’s appearance was paid for by a federal grant from the Department of Homeland Security as part of the second annual South Dakota Homeland Security Conference. He also spoke at the first conference last year in Sioux Falls.

Shoebat was invited for a second time to the conference because the speech was highly popular among attendees, Jim Carpenter, the state’s director of homeland security, told Montgomery.  “The critiques and evaluations that came back highly recommended that he come back again…We acted on those, and that’s why he came back.”
 
But even more alarmingly, Shoebat, described by religion writer Richard Bartholomew as “a pseudo-expert on terrorism…[who] teaches that Obama is a secret Muslim and that the Bible has prophesised a Muslim anti-Christ,” is only the tip of an anti-Muslim iceberg being funded by taxpayers.  Author and journalist Chris Hedges recently reported that “much of this [anti-Muslim] indoctrination within the law enforcement community is funded under two grant programs for training—the State Homeland Security Program and Urban Areas Security Initiative—which made $1.67 billion available to states in 2010.”

Since September 11, the federal government has poured money into fighting terrorism.  But some of this money has gone to pay for public employee attendance at seminars and trainings that feature crude propaganda about Islam.  The speakers at these trainings, like Shoebat, also often push a far-right agenda when it comes to the Israel/Palestine conflict.  For example, on his website, Shoebat claims that “the Arab refugees are being used as pawns’ to create a terror breeding ground, as a form of aggression against Israel.”

Shoebat and others like him preach bigoted tropes about Islam across the country at similar conferences paid for with taxpayer money.  The trend has continued despite more public scrutiny in the form of investigations published by the Washington Post and a March 29 letter from top senators in the Senate’s Homeland Security committee.  The letter, authored by Senators Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins, expressed concern about “state and local law enforcement agencies…being trained by individuals who not only do not understand the ideology of violent Islamist extremism but also cast aspersions on a wide swath of ordinary Americans merely because of their religious affiliation.”

The Senate letter came after the publication of a comprehensive report by the Political Research Associates that documented how “public servants are regularly presented with misleading, inflammatory, and dangerous information about the nature of the terror threat.”

“What we are documenting here is the institutionalization of these views in a critical part of our government—those who have the power to monitor, extract, arrest and interrogate people,” Thom Cincotta, the author of the report, told me in a recent interview published in AlterNet.  “This isn’t the type of country we want to be.  We want to embrace our diversity and build ties with the Muslim-American community.” 

But despite the increase in public scrutiny, and demands from the Council on American-Islamic Relations  to drop Shoebat from the South Dakota conference, the Shoebat show went on.

The scrutiny of Shoebat was met with a shrug from Carpenter, the state’s director of homeland security.  He told the Rapid City Journal that he doesn’t think that “we should be complacent in any way…Sometimes it takes folks to wake us up a little bit.”  But in reality, Shoebat and others like him let law enforcement go to sleep on the real work of counter-terrorism.

How Your Tax Dollars Fuel the Hatred of Muslims

This article appeared in AlterNet today, where you can read the whole piece.  Here’s an excerpt:

The decade after the 9/11 attacks has seen the creation of a profitable cottage industry of self-styled “experts” on Islam. As Sarah Posner recently noted in an article on Religion Dispatches, anti-Muslim fear-mongers, ranging from politicians to national security experts, have “cultivated awide-ranging conspiracy theory that totalitarian Islamic radicals are bent on infiltrating America, displacing the Constitution, and subverting Western-style democracy in the U.S. and around the globe.”

What hasn’t gotten a comprehensive look, at least until now, is how public tax dollars have been funding parts of this industry under the guise of counter-terrorism trainings for city and state law enforcement across the country, which after 9/11 has gotten heavily involved in fighting terrorism.

A recently released report by the Political Research Associates, a group that monitors the right in America, puts the spotlight on how “public servants are regularly presented with misleading, inflammatory, and dangerous information about the nature of the terror threat.” The report, titled, “Manufacturing the Muslim Menace:  Private Firms, Public Servants, and the Threat to Rights and Security,” examines frames—like “Islam is a terrorist religion,” or “mainstream Muslim-Americans have terrorist ties”—and how they are propagated to law enforcement officers.

These trainings have caught the eye of Senator Joe Lieberman, the chairman of the Senate’s Homeland Security committee, and Senator Susan Collins, a ranking member. A March 29 letter to Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano from the senators reads, in part:  “We are concerned with recent reports that state and local law enforcement agencies are being trained by individuals who not only do not understand the ideology of violent Islamist extremism but also cast aspersions on a wide swath of ordinary Americans merely because of their religious affiliation.”

The letter asks the attorney general to provide a list of grant programs being used to fund counter-terrorism trainings and asks about “improved oversight” of these trainings—demands that mirror the recommendations made in the Political Research Associates’ publication.

AlterNet recently caught up with Thom Cincotta, the author of the report and a Political Research Associates’ staff member, to delve into more detail on this subset of the anti-Muslim cottage industry.

Alex Kane: How did this project come to be?

Thom Cincotta: At the Political Research Associates, we have been, for the past two years, looking at the growth of the domestic security apparatus, particularly how local police have been mobilized to fight terrorism—specifically in new forms of collaborative bodies like intelligence fusion centers and Joint Terrorism Task Forces. This mobilization represents a tremendous, unprecedented growth of our domestic intelligence apparatus, and with the new powers, capabilities and resources at the hands of that bureaucracy, there are risks for our civil liberties.

In examining that infrastructure, we have had an eye out for opportunities for the politicization of intelligence-type policing, and during the course of our investigation into fusion centers, we noticed some courses being offered at the local level. Specifically, in Massachusetts, we noticed that one company called Security Solutions International in May 2009 was offering a seminar on the “radical jihadist threat” that was hosted by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. The description of that course included things like the “legal wing of jihad in America,” and that right away set off red flags that this course content might not simply be looking at detecting valid terrorism.

Read the whole piece here.

U.S. funded Israeli-linked security company pushes anti-Muslim ideology

As Representative Peter King’s hearings on “Muslim radicalization” refocus attention on Islamophobia, a new report sheds light on the  network of private security firms tapping into public funds that push an anti-Muslim agenda to law enforcement agencies.

An organization called Security Solutions International (SSI) is one focus of the Political Research Associates’ report (pdf) , titled “Manufacturing the Muslim Menace:  Private Firms, Public Servants, & the Threat to Rights and Security.”

SSI “trades on the reputation of Israeli counterterrorism expertise by using Israeli veterans as trainers.”

This is the ideology that SSI, which “taps into public funds for its trainings,” promotes, according to the report:

Following civil liberties advocates’ criticism of SSI’s courses on “Radical Islamic Culture” in 2008, SSI intensified its promotions for the course. SSI Chief Executive Officer Solomon Bradman responded to criticism by saying, “I can’t take the responsibility of my course linking their religion [Islam] to terrorism. I think their religion got linked to terrorism a long time ago.”56 SSI planned to expand the reach of its “Islamic Jihadist Threat” seminar, holding it in even more venues, including Detroit, Minneapolis, Washington, DC, Dallas, Kansas, and Boston…

The Counter Terrorist’s coverage [, an SSI publication,] includes infrastructure protection, school shooting threat assessments, intelligence gathering and what SSI calls “the Radical Islamic Threat.” Articles like “U.S. Prison Recruitment for Jihad”—a piece by M. Zuhdi Jasser and Raphael Shore, founder of the Clarion Fund, a nonprofit organization “that aims to alert Americans about the real threat of Radical Islam”—reinforce an image of Muslims as menacing militant fundamentalists. The magazine’s regular inclusion of such articles allows the publication to function as a credentialed law enforcement outlet for authors who exaggerate and distort terrorist threats.

The report also notes other instances where a far-right pro-Israel agenda has been promoted hand-in-hand with Islamophobia.

Here’s the bottom line the report gives on support for Israel and Islamophobia:

Islamophobic story lines characterize the widespread support for Palestinian statehood and opposition to the continuing Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands among Muslim-American leaders as evidence of sympathy for terrorism.

The report is further evidence of Scott McConnell’s observation “that anti-Muslim bigotry is becoming embedded in American political culture, and Israel and its supporters are playing a substantial role in generating it.”

 

 

 

The NYPD’s Islamophobia Problem

Tom Robbins of the Village Voice has a disturbing report on the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) use of an anti-Muslim video as part of its “counter-terror” training for police officers:

It was a spectacularly offensive smear of American Muslims. The film is called The Third Jihad. It is 72 minutes of gruesome footage of bombing carnage, frenzied crowds, burning American flags, flaming churches, and seething mullahs. All of this is sandwiched between a collection of somber talking heads informing us that, while we were sleeping, the international Islamist Jihad that wrought these horrors has set up shop here and is quietly going about its deadly business. This is the final drive in a 1,400-year-old bid for Muslim world domination, we’re informed. And while we may think there are some perfectly reasonable Muslim leaders and organizations here in the U.S., that is just more sucker bait sent our way.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations is calling for a probe into the NYPD’s use of the film. What’s more disturbing than the video itself, though, is the fact that the NYPD has a documented record of employing anti-Muslim tropes as part of its “counter-terrorism” program since the September 11, 2001 attacks.

As I reported in November 2010 for the Gotham Gazette, the biggest blemish on NYPD-Muslim relations came in 2007 with the publication of a report for the department titled “Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat“:

The report detailed the process by which it saw some American Muslims as being “radicalized” into terrorists and said that, while Americans Muslims are “more resistant to radicalization than their European counterparts, they are not immune.”

The Council on American-Islamic Relations promptly criticized the report, saying, “Its sweeping generalizations and mixing of unrelated elements may serve to cast a pall of suspicion over the entire American Muslim community.” In the wake of the report, the Muslim American Civil Liberties Coalition formed and critiqued the report for presenting “a distorted and misleading depiction of Islam and its adherents.”

Following meetings with Muslim organizations, the police department quietly issued a two-page clarification that stressed that the “NYPD’s focus on al Qaeda inspired terrorism should not be mistaken for any implicit or explicit justification for racial, religious or ethnic profiling.”

While Muslim organizations welcomed the clarification, criticism of the report remains.

“It’s not clear what the NYPD really thinks, because it’s leaving the bulk of its assertions and its conclusions in place,” said Faiza Patel, who works with the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Project. The clarification “didn’t address all of [the Muslim community's] concerns. The way it was done — really kind of hidden there — makes it seem as if the police department is talking out of two sides of its mouth.”

And after Najibullah Zazi came to New York City in 2009 in an alleged failed attempt to carry out bombings on NYC transit targets, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, of which the NYPD is a member of, arrested Zazi and also conducted raids in Flushing, Queens.  Heather Appel of City Limits documented Flushing residents’ outrage at the FBI and the NYPD’s practices:

Almost two months after a suspected terrorist visited New York, setting off a chain of law enforcement activities including police raids of homes in Queens, activists are methodically collecting and recording complaints from Queens residents who allege a spectrum of harassment by law enforcement from verbal abuse to home entry without a warrant. The complaints will be logged by CUNY School of Law and given to Joseph M. Demarest Jr., the assistant director in charge of the FBI’s New York City office.

Ever since Najibullah Zazi, a Colorado resident born in Afghanistan who also lived in Pakistan and Queens, spent a night at the apartment of an old friend in Flushing, Queens, many Flushing residents have felt under siege by law enforcement. Zazi is in custody on terrorism conspiracy charges – after police found he had bought bomb-making materials and compiled bomb-making instructions on his computer – while his host for one night in September, Naiz Khan, is free. But others in the neighborhood say that since the Joint Terrorism Task Force raided several apartments Sept. 14 in an effort to find co-conspirators or evidence, everyday life has become more uncomfortable if you are – or might look like you are – Muslim or of Afghan or Pakistani descent.

As the above examples show, the most recent revelation of the NYPD’s flirtation with Islamophobia is no anomaly.

 

 

 

The Hypocrisy of Fran Townsend

Fran Townsend, a former Bush administration advisor and now a CNN contributor

In the midst of the now-famous debate on CNN between Glenn Greenwald and Fran Townsend on WikiLeaks, Townsend claimed:

[The release of the State Department cables] was so vast, of what was public, whether or not it would be useful or no he made no distinctions about the harm he might be doing to foreign governments, to the U.S. government, to diplomats and soldiers around the world.

While Townsend is implying that WikiLeaks’ has caused harm to “diplomats and soldiers”–a claim that has no merit–she is at the same time an outspoken supporter of a designated terrorist group:  the Mujaheddin-e-Khalq (MEK).

Last week, according to Talking Points Memo (and pointed out by Mondoweiss):

A group of prominent Bush-era Republicans, including former NYC Mayor Rudy Guiliani, former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, former White House adviser Frances Townsend and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, flew to Paris to speak in support of an Iranian exile group there — one that’s been designated a terrorist organization by the U.S.

TPM explains the history of MEK:

The group, known as Mujaheddin-e Khalq or MEK, is a militant group that’s been violently fighting the Iranian government since the 1960s. It has ties to the regime of Saddam Hussein, which trained and outfitted the MEK and for whom the MEK fought in the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. According to the State Department, which declared the group a terrorist organization in 1997, the group’s philosophy is a combination of “Marxism, Islam, and feminism.“

WikiLeaks does not have “blood on its hands,” as Townsend implied.  The MEK, on the other hand, does, according to the U.S. State Department–and has also caused harm to the very same U.S. “government, diplomats and soldiers” Townsend ostensibly looks out for:

During the 1970s, the MEK assassinated several U.S. military personnel and U.S. civilians working on defense projects in Tehran and supported the violent takeover in 1979 of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Despite U.S. efforts, MEK members have never been brought to justice for the group’s role in these illegal acts.

In 1981, MEK leadership attempted to overthrow the newly installed Islamic regime; Iranian security forces subsequently initiated a crackdown on the group. The MEK instigated a bombing campaign, including an attack against the head office of the Islamic Republic Party and the Prime Minister’s office, which killed some 70 high-ranking Iranian officials, including Chief Justice Ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti, President Mohammad-Ali Rajaei, and Prime Minister Mohammad-Javad Bahonar..

The MEK’s relationship with the former Iraqi regime continued through the 1990s. In 1991, the group reportedly assisted in the Iraqi Republican Guard’s bloody crackdown on Iraqi Shia and Kurds who rose up against Saddam Hussein’s regime; press reports cite MEK leader Maryam Rajavi encouraging MEK members to “take the Kurds under your tanks.”

 

 

How the U.S. Government Promotes Islamophobia

I often focus on organizations and individual right-wing activists outside the U.S. government that have stoked anti-Muslim sentiment here.  But the U.S. government itself is just as culpable in promoting a McCarthyist climate of fear where every Muslim-American is considered a “terror threat” and Islam is turned into the new bogeyman of the day.

The latest installment in the Washington Post‘s investigative series by Dana Priest and William Arkin, “Top Secret America,” provides a look into how the U.S. government is mired in the deep swamp that is Islamophobia in America (emphasis mine):

Seeking to learn more about Islam and terrorism, some law enforcement agencies have hired as trainers self-described experts whose extremist views on Islam and terrorism are considered inaccurate and counterproductive by the FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies…

Ramon Montijo has taught classes on terrorism and Islam to law enforcement officers all over the country.

“Alabama, Colorado, Vermont,” said Montijo, a former Army Special Forces sergeant and Los Angeles Police Department investigator who is now a private security consultant. “California, Texas and Missouri,” he continued.

What he tells them is always the same, he said: Most Muslims in the United States want to impose sharia law here.

“They want to make this world Islamic. The Islamic flag will fly over the White House – not on my watch!” he said. “My job is to wake up the public, and first, the first responders.”

With so many local agencies around the country being asked to help catch terrorists, it often falls to sheriffs or state troopers to try to understand the world of terrorism. They aren’t FBI agents, who have years of on-the-job and classroom training…

Amazingly, the Center for Security Policy, a neoconservative think tank, is also being listened to by the U.S. homeland security apparatus:

A book expanding on what Shoebat and Montijo believe has just been published by the Center for Security Policy, a Washington-based neoconservative think tank. “Shariah: The Threat to America” describes what its authors call a “stealth jihad” that must be thwarted before it’s too late.

The book’s co-authors include such notables as former CIA director R. James Woolsey and former deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, along with the center’s director, a longtime activist. They write that most mosques in the United States already have been radicalized, that most Muslim social organizations are fronts for violent jihadists and that Muslims who practice sharia law seek to impose it in this country.

Frank Gaffney Jr., director of the center, said his team has spoken widely, including to many law enforcement forums.

“Members of our team have been involved in training programs for several years now, many of which have been focused on local law enforcement intelligence, homeland security, state police, National Guard units and the like,” Gaffney said. “We’re seeing a considerable ramping-up of interest in getting this kind of training.”

The fact that Gaffney speaks with law enforcement on how to combat “terrorism” is disturbing.  Matt Duss of Think Progress explains that Gaffney is a person who thinks that “Obama is a Muslim, question[s] whether Obama is an American citizen, [and] believe[s] that the U.S. Missile Defense Agency’s new logo is a sign of the president’s ‘submission to sharia.’”  Gaffney is not an expert on Islam.  In fact, Gaffney did not consult a single Islamic scholar on his “report” on shariah law, and only started studying the religion three years ago.

What’s more, as I explained here, the Center for Security Policy’s general counsel is David Yerushalmi, an advocate for criminalizing Islam and who once wrote that “blacks [are]…the most murderous of peoples.”

Another recent instance of the U.S. government promoting Islamophobia was the arrest of Mohamed Osman Mohamud in Oregon, which in reality was, as Glenn Greenwald put it, the FBI successfully thwarting its own plot.

The next day, this happened:

U.S. investigators said a fire at an Islamic center in Oregon on Sunday was arson and warned they would tolerate no retribution for an attempt by a Somali-born teenager to detonate what he thought was a car bomb.

Islamophobia in New York, Redux: We Should Have Seen the Ground Zero Furor Coming

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf

When the Islamophobic furor against the proposed Muslim community center two-and-a-half blocks away from Ground Zero began to peak in mid-late July, some people wondered why it was occurring now, nine years after the 9/11 attacks.  As the New York Times recently noted, an article published in the paper “last December about the project drew little negative comment.”  Daisy Khan, the wife of the imam who is spearheading the Cordoba House, told the Times that the possibility of their project being controversial “never occurred” to them.

But there is no reason to be surprised at the anger over the community center.  While others have pointed to the economy, or to the recent surge in thwarted homegrown “terror” plots, to explain the anger over the community center, one can read what’s being played out as simply a continuation–albeit a much more intense strain–of the virulent anti-Muslim and anti-Arab sentiment that began after the September 11 attacks.  Specifically, the concocted controversy over the Khalil Gibran International Academy (KGIA) in 2007 should have set off alarm bells about the power of Islamophobic activists whose aim is to shut Muslims and Arabs out of American public life.  The Brooklyn academy, the nation’s first dual-language Arabic public school, barely survived an onslaught of racist right-wing attacks against the school.  Unfortunately, the founding principal, Debbie Almontaser, was not spared, and fell victim to an orchestrated smear campaign not unlike the one now targeting Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf.

There are many parallels between the controversies around the Cordoba House and KGIA: both of the project’s leaders–Rauf and Almontaser–are well-known and respected interfaith leaders in New York City; both campaigns were begun by right-wing, Islamophobic blogs and leaders and were only later picked up by mainstream media; and both campaigns smeared Islam and demonstrated a profound ignorance about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Debbie Almontaser

Imam Rauf is currently being tarred as a “radical Muslim” who supports al-Qaeda and wants to build the Muslim community center to celebrate “Islamic triumphalism.” Almontaser, too, was painted as a Muslim radical and a “9/11 denier” whose school would secretly indoctrinate students to hate America and Israel and support sharia law.  The hysteria about Rauf and Almontaser misses basic, sobering facts about the two leaders: both of them have demonstrated a profound commitment to interfaith understanding between Muslims and other groups in the U.S. after 9/11 and have sought to fight anti-Arab and anti-Muslim stereotypes.  Rauf is a Sufi Muslim leader in New York who, as Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek put it, “speaks of the need for Muslims to live peacefully with all other religions…emphasizes the commonalities among all faiths…advocates equal rights for women, and argues against laws that in any way punish non-Muslims…His vision of Islam is bin Laden’s nightmare.”  Almontaser was described as “the city’s most visible Arab-American woman” in an excellent profile of her written by the New York Times’ Andrea Elliott:

After 9/11, Education Department officials had enlisted Ms. Almontaser to hold workshops on cultural sensitivity for schoolchildren. She spread the message that Islam was a peaceful religion. She told of how her own son had served as a National Guardsman in the clearing effort at ground zero. She was soon attending interfaith seminars, befriending rabbis and priests. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg honored her publicly.

But none of these facts seem to matter to the bigots who are trying to take down Rauf and the proposed community center, or who successfully forced Almontaser to resign as head of KGIA.

The current drive against the Islamic community center in Lower Manhattan was started by, as Salon‘s Justin Elliott has shown, “third-tier right-wing blogs, including Pamela Geller’s Atlas Shrugs site,” and quickly moved to the New York Post, as well as other mainstream media outlets.  Republican politicians have now taken up the cause, and it’s impossible to turn on cable news and not see a racist rant directed against Muslims in the U.S.  The anti-Cordoba House movement has now reached a fever pitch, but it has not yet invented the “smoking gun” that would mean the downfall of the initiative, as they did in the case of Almontaser.

There was a similar trajectory in the case of Almontaser and KGIA.   As soon as plans for the school were announced in February 2007, Pamela Geller and friends begun a campaign to shut what they called a “madrassa in New York’s public school system” down.  Daniel Pipes, a neoconservative author who has made a career out of stoking fears of Muslims and Arabs in the Western world, and the so-called “Stop the Madrassa” coalition, were instrumental in the targeting of KGIA.  Soon after the school was announced, assisted by columns by Pipes that mis-characterized and lied about the school, the story migrated to the New York Sun and eventually the New York Post. Almontaser’s downfall came after the Post labeled her the “‘intifada’” principal, as I reported for the Indypendent in September 2008:

The intense media focus on KGIA peaked when the New York Post picked up the story. The DOE pressured Almontaser to agree to an interview with the Post. In an Aug. 6, 2007, article, the Post declared that Almontaser “defended” the use of the word “intifada” on a t-shirt made by Arab Women Active in the Arts and Media (AWAAM), a group whose only connection to Almontaser was that she was on the board of a Yemeni-American organization that at times shared office space with AWAAM.

On Aug. 9, Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott, following what Almontaser says was a directive from Mayor Bloomberg, forced Almontaser to resign as KGIA principal, saying that either she or the academy had to go.

“That was the most horrendous and devastating 24 hours of my life,” Almontaser says. “To experience working with people who admired me and respected me and who believed in me, and then just to see a complete shift, basically saying that ‘you’re the problem’ … was absolutely devastating.”

The quote used by the Post to claim that Almontaser “defended” the use of the word “intifada” on a shirt was found later to have been “inaccurately reported by The Post and then misconstrued by the press,” according to a federal appeals court.  In March 2010 of this year, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that New York City’s Department of Education “succumbed to the very bias that the creation of the school was intended to dispel, and asmall segment of the public succeeded in imposing its prejudices on the DOE as an employer.”

The conflating of Islam with terrorism and a demonstrated ignorance about the religion is another common feature of the furor over KGIA and the Cordoba House.  The opposition to the Islamic community center can only be justified by asserting collective Muslim guilt for the attacks of September 11, despite the fact that many Muslims died during the attack and the fact that al-Qaeda has killed more Muslims that any other religious group in the world.  Furthermore–and this is not to say that other sects of Islam aren’t also peaceful– Sufi Islam, which Imam Rauf is an adherent to, “couldn’t be farther from the violent Wahhabism of the jihadists. [Rauf's] videos and sermons preach love, the remembrance of God (or “zikr”) and reconciliation,” as William Dalrymple writes today in the Times.

In the case of KGIA, Pipes claimed that “Arabic instruction is heavy with Islamist and Arabist overtones and demands.”  According to Pipes, any teaching of Arabic is bound to promote Islamism–which, in Pipes’ world, is all one and the same, an ideology that promotes terrorism and al-Qaeda.

Lastly, let’s turn to the Israel-Palestine angle.  Imam Rauf has been pilloried for not condemning the Palestinian Hamas movement as a “terrorist organization,” as they are labeled by the U.S. State Department.  Rauf said, “Look, I’m not a politician.  The issue of terrorism is a very complex question.”  And he’s exactly right.  The State Dept. list of “terrorist groups” is a highly politicized grouping.  “Terrorism,” in mainstream parlance, has no real meaning besides armed struggle against the West and Israel.  If you support the U.S. or Israel, you’re not a terrorist.

To simply call Hamas a “terrorist” group is a disservice to understanding what Hamas, an Islamist movement, is.  Hamas has committed terrorist acts; but by the same token, so has the U.S. and Israel, but on a far larger scale.  Hamas is resisting a brutal occupation, whereas Israel is focused on continuing their colonization of Palestinian lands.

Almontaser attempted to explain the origin of the word “intifada,” which appeared on t-shirts made by Arab Women Active in the Arts and Media.  The Post, in the article that led to Almontaser’s forced resignation, spun her explanation as “downplaying” the significance of the t-shirts and the word intifada.  The Post reported that the  “inflammatory tees boldly declare ‘Intifada NYC’ – apparently a call for a Gaza-style uprising in the Big Apple.”  Further down in the story, they quote Pamela Hall, who fought against KGIA, as saying, “Intifada is a war. Isn’t that what Arafat had?”  Intifada, as Almontaser tried to explain in that Post article, “basically means ‘shaking off.’ That is the root word if you look it up in Arabic.”  The first Palestinian intifada was largely nonviolent.  And the second intifada, as Neve Gordon pointed out in his book Israel’s Occupation, began as a nonviolent popular uprising, but only turned violent after Israel brutally suppressed the uprising, firing 1.3 million bullets into the West Bank and Gaza Strip after Israeli security forces were directed to “fan the flames”, as Haaretz’s Akiva Eldar reported in 2004.

These misunderstandings and distortions about the situation in occupied Palestine have added fuel to the Islamophobic fire.

The lesson of the KGIA controversy should have been that Islamophobes hold a disturbing amount of power in the United States and that anti-Muslim and anti-Arab sentiment needs to be combated.  So it’s no surprise that Islamophobia continues to be a potent political weapon.  Perhaps we should take this opportunity to double-down on our efforts to combat Islamophobia, so when the next furor over Islam in the U.S. comes–and it will–education and activism can successfully tamp down these dangerous games being played.  If we didn’t learn that lesson after KGIA, we better learn it now.