Muslim leaders address Manhattan audience organized by Jews Against Islamophobia

Cyrus McGoldrick

At a time of almost daily reports of new ways in which the NYPD violates the civil liberties of people in the Muslim and Arab American community, a standing-room-only crowd at Manhattan’s Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew last Thursday night heard five speakers describe the impact of Islamophobia and the work their groups are doing to combat it. The event was sponsored by Jews Against Islamophobia (JAI), a coalition of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, Jewish Voice for Peace, and Jews Say No!

Moderator Debbie Almontaser, founding and former principal of the Khalil Gibran Inter-national Academy and chairperson of the Muslim Consultative Network, began the evening somberly. She asked for a moment of silence for Shaima Alawadi, the Iraqi woman murdered in California by someone who left a note saying, “Go back to your own country. You’re a terrorist.”

The first two speakers focused on NYPD and FBI surveillance programs and other civil liberties violations. Amna Akbar, Attorney-in-Residence/Adjunct Professor at Law in the Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility (CLEAR) project at CUNY School of Law, gave the audience a chilling overview of the scope of government attacks on Muslims. She started with a brief description of CLEAR services: (1) legal assistance related to such issues as the FBI/NYPD information-gathering, “flying while Muslim,” giving safely to Muslim charities, and informants in mosques; (2) Know Your Rights workshops (e.g., what to do when the FBI knocks on your door); and (3) support for organizing efforts in the Muslim community.

Akbar placed government attacks in the context of what the government has been doing to combat “terrorism.” She spoke in some detail about the NYPD’s development of a post-9/11“theory of radicalization” that it then used to justify its surveillance of the Muslim community. Akbar described the four-stage “radicalization” process outlined in the NYPD’s 2007 report, Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat. Its first three steps—“pre–radicalization”; “self-identification” (e.g., growing a beard, praying more); and “indoctrination” (politicization) (e.g., opposing the U.S. drone attacks)—have no relationship to “terrorists acts” (“jihadization”). From this perspective, every observant Muslim is a potential “threat.” Although the media hasn’t covered it, Akbar commented, the government is using “voluntary” interviews, with people who don’t know they can refuse, to gather information, such as immigration status, that they can then use to recruit informants.

Cyrus McGoldrick, Civil Rights Manager, Council on American Islamic Relations-New York (CAIR-NY), a national Muslim civil rights organization, elaborated on the ways in which the NYPD has engaged in “comprehensive and warrantless surveillance” of the Muslim community where “there was no evidence of crime being committed.” To the sympathetic nods of his listeners, McGoldrick noted that the NYPD would consider a number of innocuous qualities (e.g., being bearded, non-smoking, and mosque-going—all of which, he pointed out, describes him) as “indicators” of “radicalization.” He explained that the NYPD’s Demographics Unit had a list of 29 countries it considered “ancestries of interest”—28 countries with large Muslim populations plus “American Black Muslims.” The recent AP report about the NYPD’s spying on liberal and left progressive groups and the NYPD theory that “politicization” is one “stage” of the “radicalization process” indicates, McGoldrick commented, that the NYPD is “criminalizing dissent.”

“This is not,” he observed, “about keeping us safe.”

The next two speakers emphasized the personal toll that Islamophobia takes on individuals in the Muslim community, as well as work to challenge it. Linda Sarsour, director of the Arab American Association of New York (AAANY), who was representing the Muslim-American Civil Liberties Coalition, told several stories about the “psychic impact,” the repeated “traumatization” experienced by those living in her heavily Arab American Brooklyn community. She spoke about the fears of physical threat expressed by a Muslim boy about to enter middle school, and of how she herself was harassed in a supermarket. She told an engrossed audience that the organizers of a public Fourth of July celebration refused to allow her group to join, because, they said, “This is an ‘American’ holiday,” open only to those who “leave their ethnicity at the door.” So Sarsour’s group held its own celebration. When local reporters asked why they were having a separate gathering, Sarsour directed them to the organizers of the large “community” event, who were quite willing to express to them (on the record) their anti-Muslim, anti-Arab attitudes.

Quainat Zaman described her experience as a young Muslim living on Staten Island during a time when there was strong anti-Muslim opposition to the building of a local Muslim community center. As a youth member of Khadijah’s Caravan, an organization of Muslim youth that promoted spiritually based activism through arts, education, and entrepreneurship, she has found a space where, rather than being ignored, Muslim youth can tell their stories. Zaman became co-founder of Muslims In Action (M.I.A.), “Staten Island’s first EVER youth group for young Muslim girls.” She connected the “very persistent” Islamophobia that she found in Staten Island, particularly in response to the proposed community center, with people’s general tendency to “fear what they don’t know.”

To illustrate how people can change, Zaman described her own attendance at conferences of South Asians that had several LGBT speakers and workshops. Despite a prior lack of exposure to LGBT people, she developed both greater comfort with their issues and the awareness that she and they were engaged in “the same battles.”

The final speaker, Marjorie Dove Kent, director of JFREJ, who was representing Jews Against Islamophobia, talked about the ways in which JAI has tried to be an ally to the Muslim and Arab American community in the New York City area. These include opposing the NYPD surveillance program and its showing of the Islam-bashing film, The Third Jihad, and supporting the right of Muslims in Bridgewater, New Jersey to build a mosque. JAI has spoken out to hold Jewish institutions accountable—for example, when the Simon Wiesenthal Center harshly criticized Park51, and when the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) praised Police Com-missioner Ray Kelly and linked the city’s Muslim community to both “terrorism” and the threat of war between Israel and Iran.

JAI, Kent said to enthusiastic applause, wants people to know that “those voices don’t speak for us. There are thousands and thousands of Jews who want to be partners in challenging Islamophobia.”

In their presentations and during the discussion period, the speakers emphasized the importance of people from different religious, ethnic, and racial communities becoming active in opposing Islamophobia—joining groups that organize against Islamophobia, joining demonstrations, writing letters, making public statements, and engaging in public education.