The stories you want. The opinions that matter.
No, thanks
Tag: american muslims
Meet The Muslim Military Father Who Headlined With The Clintons

Meet The Muslim Military Father Who Headlined With The Clintons

In 2004, Humayun S.M. Khan took ten steps that killed him.

A 27-year-old army captain serving in the Iraq War, Khan was inspecting the front gates of his military camp with his infantry unit when an unfamiliar vehicle sped towards him. As he approached and signaled for the car to stop, it exploded, taking his life but sparing the soldiers in his command that he’d instructed to stay back.

Khan, who was posthumously awarded a Bronze Star for his heroism, was memorialized on a national stage on Thursday: His father, Khizr, spoke during a prime-time slot at the final night of the Democratic National Convention, right before Chelsea and Hillary Clinton.

“We still wonder what made him take those 10 steps,” Khan told Vocativ in an interview about his son last fall. “Maybe that’s the point where all the values, all the service to country, all the things he learned in this country kicked in. It was those values that made him take those 10 steps. Those 10 steps told us we did not make [a] mistake in moving to this country.”

Following an election cycle filled with calls from Donald Trump to ban all Muslims from entering the country, Khan—a Muslim who brought his family to the U.S. in 1980—highlighted one of the largest rifts between the Democratic and Republican candidates this year.

“This is our country too,” Khan, who works as a legal consultant in Virginia, told the San Francisco Chronicle ahead of his speech. “This is not only Donald Trump’s country. He is an ignorant, divisive manipulator, and through my message I wish to convey to him and to all Muslim Americans: This is our country too.”

The Pakistan-born Khan and his family moved from the United Arab Emirates to Boston so he could attend Harvard Law School, before they eventually settled in Maryland. Decades later, Humayun enrolled in the army after studying psychology at the University of Virginia and participating in ROTC.

A driven young man who quickly climbed the army ranks and planned to attend law school, he would become one of 14 American Muslims killed in combat during the Iraq War in the 10 years following the attack.

Humayun’s story also serves as a potent and poignant counterpoint to Trump’s Islamophobia: Contrary to the GOP nominee’s claim that Islam poses a threat to the U.S., Khan gave his life for his country that accepted and honored his valiant service.

Indeed, Clinton told Khan’s story during a speech at the University of Minnesota in December, in which she called him an example of “the best of America.”

To contrast with the divisive rhetoric of the Trump campaign—as well as the rise in Islamophobic attitudes and hate crimes since Trump has announced his run for the presidency—Khan is expected to instead deliver a message of unity and tolerance.

For his part, though, he said he was honored and humbled to be speaking at the Democratic convention to begin with.

“Nowhere but in the United States is it possible that an immigrant who came to the country empty-handed only a few years ago gets to stand in front of patriots and in front of a major political party,” he said in the Chronicle interview. “It is my small share to show the world, by standing there, the goodness of America.”

 

Photo: Humayun Khan / Screenshot via YouTube

Trump Advisor And Former Christian Militia Commander Courts Muslim Voters

Trump Advisor And Former Christian Militia Commander Courts Muslim Voters

A key foreign policy advisor to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, Walid Phares, has reportedly been dispatched to Muslim communities around the nation to rally support for the sole presidential candidate to explicitly promise to ban their coreligionists from entering the country.

Like most of Trump’s heavy-handed approaches to dealing with minorities, it’s unclear how this latest overture will significantly change the fortunes of the Republican Party among American Muslims.

“These people know what they want – they’re concerned about the well-being of their communities and believe that Trump has the right economic and social agenda,” Phares said in an interview with The Hill. “But they’re trying to get a handle on how he’ll deal with the Middle East.”

However, according to polls performed by the Council on American Islamic Relations, how Trump, or any presidential candidate, handles the Middle East ranks low on the list of issues that concern American Muslims. “Foreign affairs issues” — which would presumably include “how he’ll deal with the Middle East” — was the most important issue for just 6 percent of poll respondents. Islamophobia, which Trump has fanned, and the economy, which he would surely drive into the ground with his proposed policies, which were the biggest concerns to Muslim voters.

Equally as important, the majority of American Muslims aren’t from the Middle East, according to a study done by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding. Only 18 percent of respondents identified as Arab. Meanwhile, 25 percent described themselves as Asian and 24 percent described themselves as black.

But lumping all Muslims together as Middle Easterners is to be expected from Phares. He has repeatedly appeared on Fox News, Rush Limbaugh’s radio show and other conservative media outlets as a “terrorism expert,” though he has close ties with several known Islamophobes who espouse simplistic views and circulate out-of-context readings of the Quran as proof that Islam is fundamentally at odds with the West.

His own rhetoric shows that such company isn’t an accident. “Jihadists within the West pose as civil rights advocates, interested solely in the ‘rights’ of their immigrant communities,” he claimed in his book Future Jihad, effectively writing off any Muslim civic group as a potential front for religious extremists. But that doesn’t mean he won’t attempt to downplay the extremism of the side he represents.

“Right now the ban is just a few sentences in a foreign policy announcement and a tweet, it’s not like he’s written books or published articles or delivered lectures on this,” he said, attempting to assuage fears that Trump’s ban wouldn’t be that bad. “He’ll continue to add context and distinction to his position as he gets new information.” It’s unclear what new information would lead to Trump changing any policy based on the premise that “Islam hates us.”

Even back in 2011, when Mitt Romney first brought on Phares to advise him in his presidential run, numerous foreign policy experts were confused as to why Romney even hired him, other than to engage in dog-whistle politics. “I’m more confused than anything else, given what I know about the types of initiatives Phares has been involved in,” said Andrew Exum of the Center for a New American Security, to New Republic. “When you have a lot of credible scholars and practitioners within the Republican Party, why would you select as co-chair of your policy committee someone who is widely viewed as an extremist?”

At the same time, As’ad Abu Khalil, a well-known Lebanese American professor and author of the Angry Arab blog, recorded any mention of Phares in Lebanese newspapers during the Lebanese Civil War. He discovered that Phares, who generally tries to avoid discussion of his past, was a “[m]ember of the Command Council of the Lebanese Forces, [and] head of the Lebanese Immigration Apparatus in the Lebanese Forces,” a Lebanese Christian militia that believed in the creation of a Christian Arab homeland in Lebanon, partially through the ethnic cleansing of Muslim enclaves in Christian majority areas. Phares was also a close advisor of its current leader, Samir Geagea, the only militia leader to be imprisoned for crimes committed during the civil war.

Perhaps Trump thought that sending a man with an obviously Arab-sounding name would dupe Muslim voters into thinking that he had reneged on his promises to bar Muslims from entering the country and registering the ones who remained. After all, Trump failed twice in a single interview to push back against the notion that Phares was a Muslim. Perhaps he was hoping they would do the same.
Photo: YouTube user Christian Solidarity International USA. 

How To Become Terror-Torn Europe — And How Not To

How To Become Terror-Torn Europe — And How Not To

Recoiling from the terrorist carnage in Brussels, Americans may be attracted to the “tough” posturing of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. The casino mogul wants to bring back torture, while the Texas senator hopes to bomb indiscriminately until the desert glows. Trump would bar any Muslim from entering the United States, while Cruz would dispatch special police patrols into Muslim neighborhoods. Both eagerly stigmatize Muslims in America and worldwide.

Yet we know that the leaders of ISIS or Daesh, the self-styled Islamic State, welcome such signs of panic. That is why they recently featured footage of Trump in a propaganda video, ranting about the Brussels attack. The would-be presidents vying for the Republican nomination consistently serve as useful idiots, their declarations of hostility to Islam only alienating that faith’s billion followers here and abroad, while in no way advancing our security.

Our success in defeating Daesh depends on achieving the opposite – that is, winning the cooperation of the great majority of Islam’s believers against the murderous apostates whose victims include thousands of Muslims.

Despite the rash of bigotry and violence encouraged by Islamophobic demagogues like Trump, the Muslims who live here remain as stable, patriotic, and peaceful as they have been for many, many years. Their integration and assimilation into our political culture is an important reason why we, as a nation, don’t confront the same challenges as France, Belgium, and other European countries with socially isolated Muslim ghettoes.

Last year’s mass murder in San Bernardino is actually a case in point. Horrible as it was, the assault by a deranged couple differed significantly from the mass killings perpetrated by teams of jihadis in Paris and Brussels. After months of investigation, the FBI has found no evidence that Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik were in contact with Daesh, let alone any broader conspiracy that operated within a local community. (The neighbor who helped them obtain weapons was quickly detected and arrested.)

By contrast, there is already plenty of evidence that the Paris and Brussels killers were part of a multinational network rooted in local districts, where the killers could hide and plot. Security experts believe more conspirators are yet to be found in Belgium, France, and perhaps elsewhere in Europe.

That fundamental difference between here and there is why American law enforcement officials are appalled by the aggressive, Muslim-baiting rhetoric emanating from Trump and Cruz, as Michael Hirsh reports in Politico. According to Hirsh, the Republican message has “distressed U.S. law enforcement officials actually involved in the counterterror effort,” because “Muslim communities already are highly wired by U.S. law enforcement and intelligence.” And contrary to being radicalized, those communities “have proven astonishingly cooperative on the whole.”

Having interviewed law enforcement and national security authorities, Hirsh found that in Muslim communities like Dearborn, Michigan, sophisticated outreach programs have produced real advances in security — including bold action by parents seeking to protect their own children from recruitment. When New York City police commissioner Bill Bratton bluntly told Cruz to shut up because he “doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about,” the city’s top cop wasn’t kidding. Bratton noted that New York has about a thousand Muslim police officers, many of whom are combat veterans.

This isn’t “political correctness,” as Cruz and Trump always sneer; it is common sense.

Meanwhile, those two politicians and others of their ilk are quickly becoming the most valuable recruits ISIS could imagine. With their irrepressible impulse to denigrate the Obama administration’s counter-terror effort, both of them have been trumpeting Daesh’s central message – namely, the lie that the Islamic State is winning when, in fact, they are slowly but steadily losing. In recent weeks, American forces have reportedly killed the group’s second-in-command, even as the Iraqi Army prepares a major campaign to take Mosul, the oil city that ISIS has held for the past two years.

Should we have the misfortune to elect one of these useful idiots to the presidency, we may well suffer the consequences of their ignorance and prejudice. For if Trump or Cruz ever enacts the kind of repressive policy they now advocate, then eventually we will become much more like Europe in its ethnic and religious polarization.

That would not only be morally wrong and contrary to our constitutional traditions. It would be a path toward national disaster.

NYPD Monitored Muslims Long Before Ted Cruz’s Proposal

NYPD Monitored Muslims Long Before Ted Cruz’s Proposal

New York City’s police department has emerged as one of the biggest opponents of Ted Cruz’s call to patrol specifically Muslim neighborhoods following the Brussels attacks. However, that same police department was a pioneer in monitoring American Muslims for over a decade following the September 11 attacks.

Following the Brussels attacks, Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz, riding high off his appointment of a man who thinks President Barack Obama is secretly a Muslim, said counterterrorism strategy must be approached in the same way police deal with gangs, by having increased levels of patrolling and policemen in the area. “I’m talking about any area where there is a higher incidence of radical Islamic terrorism,” he said on CNN, shortly after the attacks.

The NYPD criticized the Texas senator almost immediately. The police department’s spokesman, J. Peter Donald, tweeted at Ted Cruz:

That message was reiterated by Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, who also lambasted Cruz for his comments. “The statements he made today is why he’s not going to become president of this country. We don’t need a president that doesn’t respect the values that form the foundation of this country,” he said. “As the mayor mentioned, I have over 900 very dedicated officers in this department, many of whom do double duty, and they serve as active duty members of the U.S. Military in combat, something the senator has never seen.”

While American Muslims were undoubtedly relieved that the country’s largest police force was standing up for them, the NYPD has not always seen Muslims under its jurisdiction as a trustworthy population. Less than six months after the September 11, 2001 attacks, now-former police commissioner Raymond Kelly created the Demographics Unit out of the skeleton of the police department’s Intelligence Unit, a specialized unit that once focused on breaking into drug and criminal networks.

The two men leading the unit’s transformation into an ethno-religious program were former CIA agent David Cohen and then-current CIA agent Larry Sanchez, despite a federal ban on the CIA engaging in domestic spying. The two were inspired by the Israeli military’s method of monitoring and controlling the Palestinian population in the occupied West Bank, according to an in-depth report by New York magazine. The system relied on thousands of “rakers” — informants who patrolled neighborhoods — collecting information as inconsequential as what TV channels were on at a local restaurant, what people wore, how often they went to pray, and a whole variety of other markers that mapped out the intimate details of thousands of Muslims in the city.

When the program was made public in a 2011 Associated Press report, American Muslims finally had confirmation of what they suspected for years since the 9/11 attacks: They were being monitored on the basis of their religion. Commissioner Kelly denied that religious identity played a role in what neighborhoods were monitored, saying only that the police force went where their investigations took them. Mayor Michael Bloomberg made a similar statement, saying that the NYPD did not consider religion in its policing, due to a ban on singling out communities due to their religion.

By that point, the Demographics Unit was expanding beyond its already broad mandate to monitor the entire Muslim population of the country’s largest city. They were monitoring anti-police brutality groups and antiwar protesters, cataloguing contact information and keeping tabs on their activities. Sanchez once even tried to share the information collected by the unit with the FBI, but his offer was refused after the agency discovered how information was obtained, which would have violated federal law.

Leonard Levitt, a columnist for Newsday known for his insider reporting on the NYPD, alleged that the NYPD hired another CIA official, Marc Sageman, as the department’s scholar-in-residence. That was not the only controversy surrounding the hiring. Even more troubling was the way in which Sageman was paid — through secret donations made to a secret non-profit whose directors included Stephen Hammerman, the NYPD’s former Deputy Commissioner of Legal Matters, and Joe Wuensch, Kelly’s chief of staff. “Just think about it. A municipal agency seeking funding for terrorism-related programs by secret donors. That’s how a municipal city agency does business?” he wrote, calling the Demographics Unit a rogue division of the police force.

In the end, the NYPD acknowledged that it failed to bring up a single case of alleged terrorism with the Demographics Unit, not to mention that the program damaged the relationship between the city’s Muslim population and its governing institutions. “The Demographics Unit created psychological warfare in our community,” said Linda Sarsour, head of the Arab American Association of New York, to the New York Times. “Those documents, they showed where we live. That’s the cafe where I eat. That’s where I pray. That’s where I buy my groceries. They were able to see their entire lives on those maps. And it completely messed with the psyche of the community.”

The city’s new administration, under Bill de Blasio, has charted a different course with its Muslim residents. The unit was disbanded by Police Commissioner Bill Bratton in April 2014 following several months of inactivity that began after de Blasio took office. The officers involved in the unit were reportedly reassigned to other departments. Former Commissioner Kelly has continued to play word games with the mission of what is perhaps his most infamous legacy, insisting that the program was perfectly legal and designed only to know where certain groups of people lived — even though the U.S. Census Bureau already does that.

If Kelly still thinks unwarranted surveillance of Muslim citizens was worth alienating an entire group of innocent Americans, he should endorse Ted Cruz.