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Agence France-Presse – Sept. 3, 2006
US Muslims plagued by discrimination after 9/11
By Mira Oberman
DEARBORN, Michigan -- Discrimination and harassment by law enforcement have come to plague American Muslims in the years since the terrorist attacks of September 11.
There have been suspicious looks, slurs, physical attacks, extra screening at airports and arrests on groundless charges.
And it seems to be getting worse.
A recent Gallup poll showed that 39 percent of Americans admit to being prejudiced against Muslims and that nearly a quarter say they would not want a Muslim for a neighbor.
"Most Americans don't know Muslims except for those they work with in an urban environment so all the information they get is through the media," said Dawud Walid, director of the Michigan chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR).
After having shown some restraint in his rhetoric after 19 Muslim men affiliated with Al-Qaeda flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President George W. Bush has of late been using far more inflammatory language such as 'Islamofacists,' Walid said.
"When the religious and political leaders use polarizing language these are the unfortunate side effects. It stretches from the likes of (Christian Coalition leader) Pat Robinson all the way up to President Bush."
CAIR has seen a steady increase in the number of complaints of harassment, violence and discriminatory treatment over the past five years. In 2004, complaints rose 49 percent to 1,522, of which 141 were reports of actual and potentially violent hate crimes. It appears that those numbers will continue to rise in 2005 and 2006, Walid said.
Osama Abulhassan, 20, registered one after he spent a week in jail on terrorism charges last month. He was arrested for buying pre-paid cell phones in a small town in the midwestern state of Ohio with his friend Ali Houssaiky. Both were born in the United States to Lebanese immigrants.
"I couldn't believe they would charge us for something like that," he said over a Halal chicken sandwich. "For a week straight we were asking what are we doing here and realizing it could happen to anybody."
Dressed in an Air Jordan T-shirt and Puma baseball cap, Abulhassan looks like any other college student. But his name has evoked gasps when he is called onto the basketball court for a game and he has grown used to suspicious looks as he walks down the street.
He never expected to be sitting in a jail cell and seeing his mug shot on the national news interspersed with images of bombings in Iraq."This didn't need to happen. It was all very unwarranted," he said of the charges that were eventually dropped.
"We're still proud to be Americans and of our heritage, but you experience something like that it's going to change the way you see things," he explained. "It makes us feel, not hatred...I've lost confidence in the justice system in general and the way things are done here."
At the Islamic Center of America, Imam Sayed Hassan Al-Qazwini sorts through his hate mail. After five years, the virulence still shocks him. "I hope all you and your swine people die. Go home towel head," one reads.
"After seeing the sinister rise of Islamofascism over the last several years I am now dedicating my life as a Christian to do whatever it takes to cleanse the world of Islam (sic) and hopefully convert its sad and misguided followers," reads another…..
http://newsinfo.inq7.net/breakingnews/world/view_article.php?article_id=18722
Reuters – Sept. 3, 2006
Post-9/11, U.S. Muslims insist they're American too
By Caroline Drees
WASHINGTON - Ihsan Saadeddin is proud to be an American. But he's tired of having to prove it just because he's a Muslim too.
The Palestinian grocery store owner in Phoenix has called the United States home for 25 years and feels as American as the next guy. He met his wife in Arizona, sent his three children to public school and has a weakness for McDonald's.
But Saadeddin says the Sept. 11 attacks were a tragic watershed which turned U.S. Muslims from ordinary citizens into objects of suspicion and discrimination overnight. He believes it is why he was questioned at the airport for 45 minutes last month and asked repeatedly if he supports terrorism.
"Being born in another country does not make me less American than the secretary of homeland security," Saadeddin said.
Estimates of the number of Muslim Americans vary between three and seven million, including Arabs, Iranians, South Asians, African Americans and many other communities.
News of domestic wiretapping, monitoring of mosques, immigration crackdowns, public support for racial profiling and bans on some Muslim scholars visiting the United States has made many Muslim Americans feel like targets of racism.
Imam Mohammad Ali Elahi from Dearborn Heights, Michigan, speaks for many when he complains that officials including President George W. Bush use terms such as ``Islamo-fascism'' to describe the militant threat. They say such terms are inflammatory and liken their faith to dictatorships.``This type of thing really hurts,'' said Elahi, an Iranian-born Shi'ite religious leader….
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/usa-muslims.html
San Francisco Chronicle – Sept. 3, 2006
Typecasting Muslims as a race
By Matthai Chakko Kuruvila
As the war on terror heads into its sixth year, a new racial stereotype is emerging in America. Brown-skinned men with beards and women with head scarves are seen as "Muslims" -- regardless of their actual faith or nationality.
Law enforcement measures, politicians, religious leaders and the media have contributed to stereotyping Muslims as a race -- echoing the painful history of another faith.
"Muslims are the new Jews," said Paul Silverstein, an anthropology professor at Reed College in Oregon who studies the intersection of race, immigration and Islam. "They're the object of a series of stereotypes, caricatures and fears which are not based in a reality and are independent of a person's experience with Muslims."
The Muslim caricature has ensnared Hindus, Mexicans and others across the country with violence, suspicion and slurs. And it has given new form to this country's age-old dance around racial identity.
With fair skin, green eyes and brown hair, Dailyah Patt is white. But when she puts on a head scarf, Patt has discovered, people see her as something altogether different. The Modesto-born convert to Islam has had people categorize her as Palestinian, and she's been told: "Go back to your own country." So Patt removes the hijab, as the head scarf is commonly referred to, when she goes to job interviews or has to fly. "I can pass as Christian," said Patt, 27, a Palo Alto resident, who was frustrated by repeated airport security interrogations until she stopped wearing a scarf. She feels "oppressed" for feeling forced into shedding a required article of the faith.
Nida Khalil, on the other hand, is Palestinian, spent many of her teenage years in the West Bank city of Ramallah, and deeply identifies with Palestinian politics. A nonpracticing Muslim, she doesn't wear a head scarf. People tell her they think she is Latino. She can't think of a single instance in the past five years when she's felt harassed for looking like someone from the Middle East. "I feel really badly for women who have to live in the U.S. that do wear hijab," said Khalil, 26, a San Mateo resident. "I can't even imagine all the snickers or stares ... or the disrespect they get from Western fanatics."
Patt and Khalil's experiences show how race works, say scholars who study the phenomenon: People often project their assumptions onto others based on physical characteristics, even ignoring their own experiences.
Caricaturing a faith as a race poses particular problems because there is no set of shared physical characteristics. For example:
-- Most Arabs in the United States, such as Ralph Nader, are not Muslims.
-- Many Palestinians are Christian.
-- Indonesia is the world's most populous Muslim country, but its residents don't resemble the stereotype.
-- African Americans make up more than a quarter of the U.S. Muslim population, more than any other ethnicity. Complicating matters, Muslims who are black often are confused with Black Muslims, Nation of Islam followers, who abide different beliefs.
"You can't define what a Muslim looks like," said Saifulloh Amath, 23, a San Jose resident who is Cham, an ethnic group native to Vietnam and Cambodia.
His family has been Muslim as long as it can trace. But he is taken for a "devout Buddhist."
"You can't stereotype all of humanity under one dress code," Amath said. "In the middle of the Vietnamese jungle, you have people who speak Arabic," the language of the Quran.
For women, the stereotype revolves around wearing a scarf, which complies with a religious requirement to cover their hair.
For men, the caricature has almost nothing to do with faith because there's no physical attribute unique to Muslim men. The male stereotype involves beards and skin, eye and hair color, and names…..
Stereotyping Muslims has had other profound effects, with 60 percent of respondents to a national poll released Aug. 29 telling researchers with the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute in Connecticut that authorities should single out people who look "Middle Eastern" for security screening at locations such as airports and train stations.
Another national study released last month, by economics researchers at the University of Illinois, found that the earnings of Muslim and ethnically Arab men working in the United States dropped about 10 percent in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Ghannam, the UCSF professor, said it has also resulted in an increased number of Muslims suffering from anxiety, depression and traumatic stress. "It's a psychological assault on one's identity," he said……
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/09/03/MNG4FKUMR71.DTL
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