‘We have to channel fear into organizing’: Muslim-Americans prepare for Trump’s ‘Muslim registry’

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”.

As of publication, there have been at least two vague surveillance program concepts floated by Donald Trump—one which would target Muslim-Americans, and one that would instead focus on Muslim immigrants entering the United States. There have been no specific explanations offered as to how either of these proposals would be implemented, nor has any member of Trump’s administration confirmed who exactly will be cataloged. Nevertheless, the prospects are certainly terrifying, regardless of what Muslim community will be at the mercy of the state’s surveillance apparatus.

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. 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. CNN received information from “a source familiar with the incoming administration” who claimed that “there will be a database and it’ll be similar to the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS).”

Protest against NSEERS “special registration” in late 2003. (Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images)
Protest against NSEERS in late 2003. (Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images)

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. In late March, research from a YouGov/HuffPost poll revealed that “most Americans (51%) now support banning Muslims entering the United States.” Imraan Siddiqi, Executive Director of CAIR-Arizona, tells Mondoweiss that he’s “this is a time where we have to channel fear and concern into organizing.”  “It’s going to take a multi-faceted effort to stand up against draconian policies that may be coming down the pipeline,” Siddiqi went on to say.

He argues that rather than standing back “we have to strengthen our bonds with allies, engage with our elected officials and continue to support institutions that will challenge these abuses through the legal system.” Siddiqi finds that based on past statements made by Trump and his transition team, there is a legitimate concern regarding heightened surveillance of the Muslim-American community, and Muslim institutions. “We’ve seen this type of policy play out during the Patriot Act, so nothing is out of the realm of possibility.  But rather than sitting in fear, we have to ensure that we stand up for our rights—even during the darkest times.” In terms of what allies can do, Siddiqi recommends that non-Muslims lend support to the ACLU, CAIR chapters, and similar organizations. “Interfaith partners can build task forces and coalitions—and educate the public, and apply pressure to elected officials representing large groups of people,” Siddiqi tells Mondoweiss.

Sana Saeed, a journalist based in San Francisco, tells Mondoweiss that the fear she is seeing in her community “is real and devastating.” “Muslims should absolutely be be worried about a so-called Muslim registry while being aware that not only have we had it before in the form of NSEER (and most recently HR-158) but also that the government has been keeping files on countless Muslims, Muslim communities for well over decade,” Saeed says. “Chances are that the Trump registry will resemble NSEER [meaning it would target immigrants] so it can bypass the unconstitutionality of ‘religious tests’. That doesn’t mean citizens should breathe out a sigh of relief and further create a dichotomy between citizen and immigrant.”

Saeed hopes that the Muslim community uses this opportunity to form coalitions with other communities “especially undocumented immigrants who are also facing the threat of deportation, [because both] struggles will, as they have for a long time, overlap.”

Any response to Donald Trump’s registry proposal, if it is to have any impact, should keep in mind the existence of a state surveillance apparatus that has long focused on Muslims, both at home and abroad. We can’t fight against one arm of this apparatus and neglect the system itself. It must all come down.

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Well, what a relief! Finally a topic of serious concern, as opposed to a discussion on the non-existent anti-Semitism in Trump’s cabinet, gets the lead headline it deserves.

If I were part of the Muslim Community this is what I would suggest. Get together with Black Lives Matter, because blacks in America have been fighting discrimination and oppression for a longer time and they may be able to impart wisdom on how to tackle this enormous challenge in a country where ignorance is bliss and racism is rampant. Of course, there are ways to try to sensitize the American mass on how painful it is to be profiled and marginalized for doing nothing wrong, and Blacks have been dealing with this scourge for a long time, and maybe they can guide you and maybe it might help for the two to join in solidarity to fight this injustice. This goes for Latinos as well. There should be an overlap of the three most threatened groups on this issue, because there is strength in numbers. Joining together on these issues will create a powerful movement and coalition that politicians/legislators would be foolish to ignore.

None of us white, Christian, Jewish, even Asian (Japanese Americans should be reminded of what they suffered) should sit back in complacency and allow this kind of fascism to infect our society. This profiling must be condemned by the rest of us everywhere it rears its ugly head.

America is becoming more like Israel every day; but Palestinians have it much worse. The influence of Zionism in America via police training in Israel, Airport security contracted to Israeli firms, and other tools of oppression Zionists excel in is infecting the American system, including Zionist influence in American government policy and finally the demonization of Islam and Muslims by Zionists via mainstream media (especially Fauxfoxnews) and increasing propaganda is staggering, toxic and contagious.

Don’t give up; as I stated, networking, reaching out to other groups also threatened with suppression and oppression on overlapping issues will strengthen your cause.

It is shameful

Anyway Patti Smith has good song

In heart I am a Muslim
In heart I am an American

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1o68h4Usqs

Fuck Trump and all his empty promises

Van Jones
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/11/van-jones-donald-trump-sanders-clinton-racism
The usual pattern of demagogues is to promise the moon, fail to deliver, and then blame vulnerable others for those failures. He’s promised the moon. Now he has power. He’s going to fail to deliver. He’s not going to be able to bring a bunch of coal jobs back and a bunch of factory jobs back in this global economy. Period. Because you can’t. It’s not going to happen.
When he fails to deliver and the economic pain is the same as it is right now, he’ll have two choices. He’s going to have to spend a bunch of money on infrastructure jobs, which, frankly, I’m not mad at. Especially if they’re not only in the red states. That will have, against the overall economy, some multiplier effects, but relatively limited impact. He’s not going to want to pay for it, so he’s going to have to do that depth of finance, which will have some economic consequences, maybe mild. Then he’s going to start blaming people. He’s going to start a war, he’s going to start attacking immigrants or Muslims or Black Lives Matter or whatever. Because he’s going to have to distract them from the no jobs. I think we have every reason to hope for the best but to expect and prepare for the worst.

Gideon Levy
http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.754073
These racists love Israel because it’s carrying out their dreams: to oppress Arabs, to abuse Muslims, to dispossess them, expel them, kill them, demolish their houses, trample their honor. This bunch of trash would so
dearly love to behave as we do.

Aside from all of the soppy, overheated rhetoric, I think most people feel Islam has a problem and that it isn’t addressing it. Sure, it’s easy to hold up a sign saying “I”M NOT A TERRORIST” like you’ve just passed the bar exam and deserve a cookie but does that really negate the fear people have considering that Muslims commit terrorist acts far, far out of proportion to their % of the population? I wonder what solutions people have for this or should we just consider shootings and bombings to be the “new normal” or like Kellyanne Conway said “like extreme weather.”

those of an scholastic bent might enjoy

“Ambiguous State of Being”: Identity
Construction in Contemporary ArabAmerican
(post-9/11) Poetry”

by Radwan

“Corbey and Leerssen
(1991) argue that the construction of this Othering (for example, as expressed in the literary productions of the Arab-American community even before 9/11), ―can be detected at the root of much injustice and suffering‖ (xvii). Such an approach intends to highlight how American racial structures (or hierarchies), with their multiple socio-historical connotations, influence Arab-American group studies and the development of an Arab-American critical analysis.

According to Leerssen (2007b), the image of the ―Arab‖ in the European imagination:

was never sharply distinguished from the Islamic religion (which is centered on the Arabian holy places of Mecca and Medina, and whose holy book, the Qur‘an, is in the Arabic language). Most characteristics attributed to Arabs therefore are part of the more general discourse of European […] Orientalism.(94)
European Orientalist discourse has made its way into American representations of Arabs, Islam and the East in general. However, in America, Orientalism has been thoroughly racialized, ―something that was central to the early Arab immigrant experience since the late-19th century, when race had cultural, political, and legal implications”

http://doras.dcu.ie/21029/1/Thesis_FINAL_E-version_Edition.pdf