Video: CAIR Reps Discuss Religious Freedom in CBS Interfaith Special

Becoming the Trustworthy: Upholding Our Constitution, Defending Our Faith

(Speech given at CAIR-San Diego on November 10, 2012.)

Salaam alaykum. Peace be unto you. Good evening.

Before we begin our discussion, I want to offer some good news.

The day before the 2012 presidential election there were 11 members of Congress routinely making use of anti-Muslim themes. (The full report on the electoral fate of the anti-Muslim caucus can be seen here.)

Four of them will not be returning to Congress in January.

Florida’s Allen West, who claims Islam is not a religion and asserts that Muslims are a “fifth column,” lost his race. Be assured that Muslims played a role in bringing about that electoral defeat.

Similarly, Illinois’s Joe Walsh, who cast suspicion on all Muslims, and Minnesota’s Chip Cravaack, who asserted that a mainstream Muslim organization was a terrorist group, lost their races.

Finally, Rep. Sue Myrick of North Carolina retired. A few years ago she held a press conference where she alleged that Muslim interns on Capitol Hill were spies. You may also recall her 2003 warning about a previously unnoticed security threat because, "You know, look at who runs all the convenience stores across the country. Every little town you go into, you know?”

I have one other item of good news. Islam’s favorability rating, last time it was polled in 2010, stood at 30 percent according to Pew Research Center.

As of August, 2012 Congress’s favorability rating is 10 percent.

We are still more popular than Congress.

Upholding the Constitution

 

We here tonight are among those who are on the front lines of protecting the Constitution from people who, selling anti-Muslim stereotypes and fear, seek to return America to a legal system that treats one group of Americans as different from others.

 

Worse, if you pay attention to Islamophobes like Pamela Geller or David Yerushalmi, there are those who appear to seek the rebirth of South African apartheid with religion as its new targeted class.

Indulge me, please, while I offer proof of what I just said.

Anti-Islam Legislation

First, we will look at efforts to legislate government-sanctioned discrimination against Muslims.

 

In 2011 and 2012, 78 bills or amendments aimed at interfering with Islamic religious practices were considered in 31 states and the U.S. Congress.

 

Sixty-two of these bills contained language that was extracted from Islamophobe David Yerushalmi’s American Laws for American Courts (ALAC) model legislation.

 

(As an aside: An internet search of “David Yerushalmi” returns results demonstrating his call for a “WAR AGAINST ISLAM and all the Muslim faithful.” You will also see his anti-woman, anti-black and similarly biased comments on the first results page. It is reasonable to be alarmed that a man so central to that anti-Islam hate movement in the United States is able to have real impact on legislators.)

 

73 of these bills were introduced solely by Republicans. Not just fringe legislators, but in too many cases this included state-level GOP party leadership.

 

Bills were signed into law in Arizona, Kansas, South Dakota, Tennessee, Oklahoma and Louisiana.

 

I want you to be clear that this anti-Sharia movement is really a cover for Islamophobic sentiment.

 

In Tennessee, the original bill’s definition of “Sharia” was, in practical terms, the entire religious tradition of Islam.  It stated that “Sharia” encompasses all content derived from “any of the authoritative schools of Islamic jurisprudence of Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i, Hanbali, Ja’afariya, or Salafi.”

They wanted to make being a Muslim illegal in Tennessee.

South Dakota anti-Islam bill sponsor Phil Jensen (R-District 33) told an audience, “It is alarming how many of our sisters and daughters who attend American universities are now marrying Muslim men.”

In Pennsylvania, the bill itself included no mention of Islam. However, in a memo to all House members urging them to co-sponsor the bill, Rep. Rosemarie Swanger (R-District 102) falsely claimed that Sharia is "inherently hostile to our constitutional liberties."

Later, Swanger claimed she “had no idea how [the memo] was going to be written” and that it was never circulated. Swanger also claimed that it was leaked by “someone who is not my friend.”(iv)

 Her claim strains credibility, given that the memo, with Swanger’s signature, was easily found on the Pennsylvania state legislature’s website.

 

As you may have already concluded, these legislators frequently have no idea what they are talking about.

 

The Star Assistant in Alabama reported, “But no one—not even Sen. Gerald Allen, who sponsored the bill—can point to examples of Muslims trying to have Islamic law recognized in Alabama courts.”(viii)

That inability to point to actual examples is a pattern by the way.

Allen could not even define Sharia. When asked he said, “I don’t have my file in front of me.”

When pressed about why the Alabama bill’s definition of sharia matched one found in Wikipedia, Allen’s legislative staff “confirmed that the definition was in fact pulled from Wikipedia.”

Now college students that I know tell me that Wikipedia is not a valid citation in their papers. I find it intriguing that it is, however, a valid source for things that may become the law of the land.

 

Texas legislator Leo Berman said his bill was necessary because he had heard, but apparently had not actually tried to confirm, that one American town was allowing judges to use sharia. “I heard it on a radio station here on my way into the Capitol one day. I don’t know Dearborn, Michigan but I heard it [Sharia law is accepted there] on the radio. Isn’t that true?”

The Kansas City Star’s Jason Noble reported that anti-Islam bill sponsors, “Missouri Reps. Paul Curtman and Don Wells agree there’s no evidence that state courts are judging cases based on Islamic principles of foreign laws.” Challenged again a month later, Curtman still could not provide an example.

 

Missouri Speaker of the House Stephen Tilley also “could not provide an example of foreign law trumping domestic law in Missouri courts,” reported Politicalmo.com. The article noted that Tilley’s office later issued a statement outlining one case in New Jersey, but that poor ruling--which in fact received no support from Muslim groups because it involved a man claiming it was his religious right to rape his wife--was rightfully overturned by a higher court.

 

The news here is fairly straightforward: Yes, they have passed anti-Islam laws in six states. Yes, they will try again in 2013. But by upholding the Constitution, we can preserve everyone’s liberty.

 

CAIR is in the forefront of asserting this principle of free religious exercise. The Constitution is the law of the land and we like it that way. We agree with people of the Jewish and Catholic faiths, who already have an established tradition of using religious mediation, that, within the law, we are free to make choices in accordance with our faith.

 

In accordance with Islam, my marriage contract required me to pay a mahr to my wife. Why anyone would be upset with a woman getting money up front that is hers to invest as she sees fit I have no clue.

 

In accordance with Islam, my home financing involves no interest. Similarly, my financial investment strategy avoids putting money into gambling, pornography and weapons manufacturing. I have no idea why anyone would think such things are a threat to American democracy.

So let’s turn back to the anti-Islam legislation.      

CAIR’s lawsuit against Oklahoma’s anti-Islam constitutional amendment asserts that the law would violate the First Amendment, which says no law can be passed that promotes or vilifies a particular religion, and the Supremacy clause, which says the Constitution is and will remain the highest law of the land. Interestingly, CAIR gets accused of trying to subvert the Constitution while we are making these arguments this constitutionally-subversive legislation.

So far, four federal judges have ruled in our favor and that law is on hold.

An appeals court ruling on the legal challenge concluded in part that arguments, “that the proposed state amendment expressly condemns [the plaintiff’s] religion and exposes him and other Muslims in Oklahoma to disfavored treatment -- suffices to establish the kind of direct injury-in-fact necessary to create Establishment Clause standing.” The ruling also notes, "Appellants [those representing the state of Oklahoma] do not identify any actual problem the challenged amendment seeks to solve. Indeed, they admitted at the preliminary injunction hearing that they did not know of even a single instance where an Oklahoma court had applied Sharia law or used the legal precepts of other nations or cultures..."

 

In Minnesota, the legislator who was going to introduce an anti-Islam bill pulled the idea within hours of a CAIR-led press conference.

 

Similarly, in New Jersey a law maker withdrew an anti-Islam bill and met with Muslim community leaders following CAIR’s intervention. In other states including Pennsylvania, Florida, and Michigan, CAIR played a crucial role in efforts that succeeded in ending proposed limits on American religious freedom.

 

Recently, a hearing on an anti-Islam bill in Pennsylvania was cancelled after CAIR, along with Christian and Jewish partner groups, began to raise concerns about it.

Mainstream Candidates Willing to Subject Muslims to Unequal Treatment

As a second example that Muslims need to defend our faith in order to uphold the Constitution let’s look at the recent presidential election.

Herman Cain was for a while the frontrunner for the GOP’s presidential nomination.

Speaking to Christianity Today on March 11, 2011, Cain said that followers of the “Muslim religion” have “an objective to convert all infidels or kill them.”

Cain also said that Muslims who wanted to serve in his administration would have to take loyalty oaths. He explained to Fox News host Glenn Beck that he would not require similar oaths from Mormons or Catholics, “Because there is a greater dangerous part of the Muslim faith than there is in these other religions.”

Article VI of the U.S. Constitution says there is no “religious test” for public office.

So, here we have a man, a frontrunner, committing to undermining the Constitution. Did he get tossed from the stage?

No.

He got applause. 

Rick Santorum, also a frontrunner for a time, endorsed religious profiling during one of the GOP presidential debates, saying, "Obviously, Muslims would be someone you'd look at." In January, 2012 journalists brought attention to a lengthy Islamophobic rant Santorum gave in 2007 at David Horowitz’s “Second Annual Academic Freedom Conference.” Santorum asserted that in order to “win” against a vaguely-defined Muslim enemy Americans must “…educate, engage, evangelize and eradicate."

A former Speaker of the U.S. House, Newt Gingrich, yet another onetime frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination, told an audience that he feared that by the time his grandchildren reach his age “they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.”According to Gingrich sharia is a "mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States."

The good news here? Even the Republican-party nominating process, which as we have heard in the news lately, pushes candidates too far right to win a mainstream presidential election ultimately rejected this kind of extremism. That’s good, but each man was in turn the frontrunner.

Other Attempts to Strip Muslims of Equal Treatment Under the Law

Public groups also seek to strip Muslims of equal protection under the Constitution.

According to Brian Fischer of the Islamophobic American Family Association the First Amendment does not apply to Muslims. “Islam has no fundamental First Amendment claims, for the simple reason that it was not written to protect the religion of Islam,” Fisher wrote in a blog post.

Similar to Fischer, a lawyer opposing a mosque expansion in Murfreesboro, Tenn. argued in court that Islam is not a religion and is therefore not protected by the First Amendment. Lawyers representing the Federal government submitted a brief to the judge in that case arguing that yes, Islam actually is a religion. We appreciated that, but reasonable people find that it was even needed to be somewhat surreal.

 

The Oak Initiative, a group whose name pops up more than once in association with anti-Islam legislation, says through its mouthpiece retired Lieutenant General William G. "Jerry" Boykin, that "[Islam] should not be protected under the First Amendment" and that there should be "no mosques in America."

 

The Family Leader, an Iowa-based Christian conservative group, asked GOP presidential candidates to sign a “marriage vow” pledge that proclaimed their opposition to “Sharia Islam and all other anti-woman, anti-human-rights forms of totalitarian control.”

 

In its original form, the pledge also contained troubling language regarding Africa-Americans: ‘Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA's first African-American President.”

Michelle Bachman, Rick Santorum and Rick Perry signed the pledge.

Rep. Peter King’s Anti-Muslim Hearings

As a final example, I will point to a use of one of our nation’s highest public forums--the halls of the U.S. Congress--as a place to justify different treatment of Muslims.

 

Rep. Peter King (R-NY) held a series of five anti-Muslim hearings in Congress in 2011 and 2012.

For seven years prior to the first hearing, King had maintained that “80%, 85% of the mosques in this country are controlled by Islamic fundamentalists" and that average Muslims "are loyal," but "don't come forward, they don't tell the police what they know. They won't turn in their own.”

Throughout the hearings, CAIR was among those in the forefront of exposing King’s record of anti-Muslim statements and false allegations against our community.

King spent a lot of the first hearing attacking CAIR, which tells me we were doing a good job. They do not attack you when you are not relevant.

Afterward, CAIR produced the only comprehensive study of the first four hearings and exposed the truth: after eight years, four hearings and 18 witnesses, King failed to produce the promised evidence to support his stigmatization of America’s Muslims.

Not a single witness attempted to factually validate the allegation of a Muslim community run by extremists.  Five of the six law enforcement representatives who testified did not support King’s assertion that Muslims do not cooperate with law enforcement. Instead, these witnesses described “strong relationships” with Somali Muslims, “strong bonds” with the American Muslim community and “outreach and engagement with Muslim communities.”

The Targeting of Islamic Places of Worship

Sadly, in a move that mirrors past efforts targeting African-American churches with acts of intimidation, our places of worship have become targets of hate.

 

Ramadan 2012—which started on Friday, July 20 and ended at sun down on Saturday, August 18—saw one of the worst spikes of anti-Muslim incidents in over a decade.

 

In the first seven months of 2012, there were 10 incidents in which Muslim places of worship were targeted. In thirteen days in August, the days immediately after theshocking murders of Sikh worshippers in Wisconsin, there were 8 incidents inwhich Muslim places of worship were targeted.

Incidents in Illinois included shots fired at a mosque in Morton Grove and an acid bomb thrown at an Islamic school in Lombard. In other states, a mosque was burned to the ground in Joplin, Mo., vandals sprayed an Oklahoma mosque with paintballs, pigs legs were thrown at a mosque-site in California, and a firebomb was thrown at a Muslim family's home in Panama City, Fla.

 In August, a CAIR team went on a national tour to support communities targeted by hatred and bigotry. First, they traveled to Joplin to meet with law enforcement officials and community leaders about the fire that destroyed the mosque. Then they were in Murfreesboro, Tenn., for the opening of a mosque that has been targeted for years by a campaign of Islamophobia. Finally, CAIR staffers went to Wisconsin to meet with Muslim community leaders and to pay a condolence visit to the Milwaukee-area Sikh temple that was targeted in a white supremacist's killing spree.

Optimism Can Reign Supreme

Threats to equal treatment are not new to America.

 

In fact, the Constitution as originally enacted treated black people as three-fifths of a human being and left them as property. Women were denied the seemingly basic equal treatment of getting to cast a vote in a presidential election until 1920. Those insults to humanitarian principle were rectified.

 

Even after slavery was ended, African-Americans were subjected to horrible treatment and discriminatory laws.

 

They did not hide.

 

Rev. Martin Luther King was wire-tapped by federal authorities. In an FBI memo, he was called the “most dangerous and effective negro leader in America.” J. Edgar Hoover called him a “degenerate.”

Today, they get King’s birthday off as a Federal Holiday.

 

I look to Japanese Americans as a prime inspiration and source of hope. Like Muslims, as a group they were blamed for an attack on this country. They were placed in internment camps. We likely have them to thank as the reason we were not similarly treated. They were vocal. They organized and after forty years of their hard work, the government acknowledged that what was done to them was wrong.

 

In fact, we inherit a rich tradition of standing up for an America that is based on a level playing field. Catholics were discriminated against. Jews were discriminated against. Mormons have been discriminated against. Each in turn has pushed back.

Today, it is our turn to push back.

I guarantee you that bias and efforts to treat someone as an enemy other will shift. We must push back to honor those before us and to ensure that the next targeted group does not say, “The Muslims failed us.”

 

The Trustworthy

A final thought. Before he became a prophet, Muhammad (peace be upon him) was known as Al-Ameen, the Trustworthy. He did not lie. He kept his word.

 

We as Muslims must consider this. Most Americans were introduced to our faith on 9/11 watching an airplanes slam into buildings. That was followed by repeated media images of crazy men in caves threatening Americans with a violent, brutal death.

 

We in this room know that such monstrosities are heretical. They are incompatible with any understanding of Islam. We know Islam compels us to be trustworthy.

 

But I wonder how many of our neighbors retain that image of planes and crazy in their deeper emotional places and are unsure if we are trustworthy. They may harbor, even unwanted, a concern that maybe the bigots who claim Muslims are an existential threat to America are right.

 

We must, each as an individual and in partnership with institutions like CAIR, strive to become known in America as the Trustworthy. We do that by upholding the Constitution for everyone. We do that by being a benefit to them and preventing harm from coming to them.

 

I know you are committed to this idea. I pray you will join us putting faith into action.

Thank you.

Corey Saylor: 'The greater insult to Islam is the violence, not the movie'

Saylor: The Greater Insult to Islam is the Violence, not the Movie."

See the video here.

On Mitt Romney's Mideast Gaffe

Video: CAIR Rep Discusses GOP's Anti-Muslim Rhetoric (RT)

Muslim Rights Group: Bachmann Playing 'Six Degrees of Separation Drinking Game' with National Security

Muslim Rights Group: Bachmann Playing 'Six Degrees of Separation Drinking Game' with National Security

A Muslim human rights group has issued a strong response to the allegations from House Republican members that longtime Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin’s family, as well as other prominent Muslim-Americans working within the U.S. government, have ties to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood.

Corey Saylor, a spokesperson for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, also known as CAIR, calls questioning the loyalty of ”patriotic American Muslims” based on what he says are old anti-Muslim conspiracy theories “beyond the pale.”

Five GOP members of Congress, including former presidential candidate Michelle Bachman, sent letters to the Inspector General offices for the State Department, as well as the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice, Defense and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, questioning whether Abedin and other prominent Muslims are part of a plot by Islamic extremists to infiltrate the U.S. government.

“America wants a serious national security conversation,” says Saylor. “Michelle Bachmann is giving us a six degrees of separation drinking game.”

CAIR, a Washington-based Islamic advocacy group founded in 1994, is not alone in its condemnation. Today veteran Republican Senator John McCain gave a spirited defense of Abedin, calling the allegations against her “ugly” and “sinister.” He chastised his GOP colleagues in the House saying that no one, “not least a member of Congress,” should launch such a “degrading attack against fellow Americans on the basis of nothing more than fear of who they are and ignorance of that they stand for.”

State Department deputy spokesperson Patrick Ventrell also shot down the accusations, calling them “preposterous.”

Saylor says that Abedin and the other Muslim officials listed in the House letter are American citizens who are “asking what they can do for their nation,” and now Bachmann “seems to be punishing them for the sin of offering that service during a Democratic administration,” he says.

In addition to Abedin, the letters also cite Mohamed Elibiary, an advisor to the Department of Homeland Security named in the letter, as also having possible ties to extremists. Last year Elibiary was given an award by the Society of Former Special Agents for his counter-terrorism work with the FBI.

“Now his contributions have been rewarded by Bachmann questioning his patriotism,” says Saylor.

Minnesota Representative Keith Ellison, the only Muslim member of Congress, has sent letters to Bachmann demanding she and her GOP colleagues produce evidence backing up their claims. Ellison told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that the allegations are “the worst of guilt by association,” said Ellison. “It is a stark affront to American values.”

Bachmann has issued a statement saying that Ellison has “distorted” the letters by taking certain comments out of context. “The intention of the letters was to outline the serious national security concerns I had and ask for answers to questions regarding the Muslim Brotherhood and other radical group’s access to top Obama administration officials,” said Bachmann.

But those who have spoken out, including McCain, Ellison and CAIR, reiterate that Bachmann and her House GOP colleague’s questions aren’t based on credible evidence. Saylor says it has more in common with the 1950?s political witch hunt spearheaded by former senator Joe McCarthy to take down political opponents by claiming they were communists. That period is generally seen as one of the darkest in American political history.

“You can’t help drawing parallels between this and McCarthyism,” says Saylor. “Half truths? Guilt by association? Overblown accusations? Sounds like Joe McCarthy to me.”

Colorado State Sen. Says Banning New Mosques Is Something to Think About « CBS Denver

Colorado State Sen. Says Banning New Mosques Is Something to Think About « CBS Denver

DENVER (CBS4) – In light of Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders recent remarks calling Islam “a totalitarian ideology striving for world dominance,” Colorado State Sen. Kevin Grantham, R-Canon City, expressed support for considering regulations on the construction of new mosques.

Wilders sparked controversy during a recent appearance at the Western Conservative Summit in Denver by warning audiences of the rising Islamic threat and hailing a stop to the “islamization process.”

“More Islam means more intolerance, more Sharia and less freedom,” said Wilders at the event. “We must stop immigration from Islamic countries, we must expel criminal immigrants, we must forbid the construction of new mosques. There is enough Islam in the West already.”

After Wilders’ speech, Grantham told The Colorado Statesman that he believes the idea to prohibit the construction of mosques warrants some attention.

“You know, we’d have to hear more on that, because, as (Wilders) said, mosques are not churches like we would think of churches,” said Grantham. “They think of mosques more as a foothold into a society, as a foothold into a community, more in the cultural and in the nationalistic sense. Our churches, we don’t feel that way, they’re places of worship, and mosques are simply not that, and we need to take that into account when approving construction of those.”

While Wilders justifies his proposal as an effort to “preserve our nations and our homes,” his plan of action seems to contradict the fundamental liberties established in the Constitution. Muslim-American activists highlight the proposed regulation on building mosques as a violation of the First Amendment’s right to freedom of religion.

“The same kinds of smears were used against Catholics and Jews,” said Corey Saylor, national legislative director at the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “We have moved past that kind of bigotry and we have the Constitution which prohibits the regulation of religion. In the U.S., we have the First Amendment. They are talking about interfering in the exercise of a minority religion, which is fundamentally against American values.”

However, the First Amendment argument is not a definitive tactic in preventing all attempts to ban new mosques. In May 2011, Wilders gave a speech in Tennessee that bears a striking similarity to his recent comments in Denver where he called upon the audience to “forbid the construction of new hate palaces called mosques.” A little over a year later, Murfreesboro, Tenn. finds itself in the midst of a dispute over whether to allow a new mosque to open.

In May, Chancellor Robert Corlew ruled that construction on the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro must stop because the Rutherford County Planning Commission did not give the public adequate notice of the May 2010 meeting where the site plan was approved. However, planning commissioners are currently appealing Corlew’s decision with the hope of opening the mosque before Ramadan, which begins July 19.

Despite the situation in Murfreesboro and the remarks by Wilders and Grantham, Muslim-Americans are optimistic that the United States will remain tolerant of Islam and unite to combat discriminatory actions.

“Too often what you see after fear mongering speech is fear mongering behavior,” said Saylor. “We just always stick to the greater hope that the bulk of American people will find that speech repugnant and stand up against it.”

EEOC Determination Against Kharoba: Muslim Asserted “Stereotyping” and “Personal Bias”

[Update: I am removing this post.]

Arab Americans: United we stand, divided we fall

An interview I did with two jounralism students. Their focus was on Arab Americans in the election, I defer to great organizations like the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and Arab American Institute on that, but I spoke to them from the perspective of an American Muslim.
I

Rep. Peter King: How did he do with his anti-Muslim hearings?

I authored a review on the first four hearings, you can read the full report here.

REPORT SUMMARY

For seven years prior to the first hearing, Rep. Peter King had maintained that “80%, 85% of the mosques in this country are controlled by Islamic fundamentalists" and that average Muslims "are loyal," but "don't come forward, they don't tell the police what they know. They won't turn in their own." In December 2010, he staunchly announced that he will “stand-by” the 85 percent number. Today, after eight years, four hearings and eighteen witnesses, King has failed to produce the promised evidence to support his stigmatization of America’s Muslims.

Not a single witness attempted to factually validate the allegation of a Muslim community run by extremists. King made only one foray into backing up his allegation during the entire series of hearings. He asked Zuhdi Jasser if extremism is a “systemic problem” in the American Muslim community. Jasser, a physician who works closely with the anti-Muslim movement, is not an expert and has conducted no research on the topic. Jasser’s response: “It's a minority, but there's an ideology that exists in some mosques-- not all, not a majority -- but in some mosques. And it's a significant number.”

Five of the six law enforcement representatives who testified did not support King’s assertion that Muslims do not cooperate with law enforcement. Instead, these witnesses described “strong relationships” with Somali Muslims, “strong bonds” with the American Muslim community and “outreach and engagement with Muslim communities…” Prior to the hearings, FBI Director Muller had told the House Judiciary Committee, “that many of our cases are a result of the cooperation from the Muslim community in the United States."

Raw Story kindly cited the report in their coverage of this week's fifth hearing:

"An analysis by Council on American-Islamic Relations of King’s first four hearings on Islamic radicalization determined that the chairman had 'failed to produce the promised evidence to support his stigmatization of America’s Muslims.'"

"'King’s record of leveling unsubstantiated allegations and biased attacks on the Muslim community and habit of naming people with records of anti-Muslim bias as potential witnesses and information sources denies him any current credibility in discussions about American Muslims and homeland security,' the group concluded."

Rep. Allen West Opposes the Founding Fathers

Broward Palm Beach New Times: CAIR Officials on NDAA, Indefinite Detention, and Allen West Calling Them an "Un-Indicted Co-Conspirator

See the article here.

Believe it or not, the Council on American-Islamic Relations might actually have something in common with tea party members. It's about last year's National Defense Authorization Act, which a federal judge ruled last week is vague enough to potentially allow for the indefinite detention of American citizens.

Tea partiers (and libertarians of other stripes) waving around copies of the Constitution say it's a gross abuse of government power to allow the military to pluck people out of their American homes and call them enemy combatants. CAIR agrees.

Congressman Allen West does not.

Despite his chest-thumping defense of the Constitution at every fundraiser and motorcycle rally he can rumble into, West rose in opposition last week to an amendment that would specifically guarantee constitutional rights to anyone arrested on terrorism charges on United States soil. It basically says that if you're arrested in America, you're guaranteed the due process afforded you by that book West is waving around all the time.

West said the military should be allowed to do what it wants, including to American citizens, because "we cannot look to guarantee to those who would seek to harm us the constitutional rights that are granted to Americans."

"We're all on this battlefield," he said in his defense of letting the Army subvert the Constitution on American soil. This was after he opened with an anecdote about Nazis.

West added, "I find it very interesting that a sponsor of this amendment is the Council for American-Islamic Relations [sic] that is a co-conspirator, unindicted co-conspirator, for the largest terrorist financing --" and then he was cut off.

Washington Rep. Adam Smith was the one doing the cutting of, responding with, "I point out that only members of Congress are allowed to sponsor amendments."

He's right, but I figured it was best to check in with CAIR, as their alleged support of the amendment was being used to somehow prove its insidious intent.

"We're against the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens," said CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper. "Why is he even bring us up in reference to the NDAA other than that he's fixated on Muslims?"

CAIR national legislative director Corey Saylor said sponsor wasn't an accurate word for the group's support of the amendment, but he did say that the group "did go around and tell offices that we were in support of it."

"[It's not new] to target organizations representing a disliked minority. [Saylor note: Such as the NAACP and Martin Luther King.] I stand on our arguments, though. What we're arguing for is our government does not have a way to indefinitely detain anyone in our country," Saylor said, pointing out that the Constitution refers to "all persons," even if West says terror suspects don't count.

"If he's offended by that, [his problem is] not with CAIR. His problem is with the founding fathers," Saylor said. "The Constitution guarantees due process, and we believe that the sections 1021 and 1022 remove that."

In any case, the point is moot -- the amendment was voted down the next day. But both Saylor and Hooper said it was a simple constitutional argument the group was espousing, nothing more.

"Allen West seems to have a personal vendetta against the American Muslim community and will push that vendetta forward at each and every opportunity. Why he chose this one, I don't know, but that's Allen West," Hooper said. "At least he's not calling us communists."

National Journal: Muslim Vote will Matter in 2012 Election

See the story here.

American Muslims will be an important voting bloc in the 2012 presidential election, but some politicians have been hesitant to reach out to the community for fear of a backlash, said Corey Saylor, spokesman for the Council of Islamic-American Relations.

“People want us to be a part of their movements but sort of toward the edge of stage,” Saylor said. “Often times what we see is that if someone is getting close to the Muslim community, they get attacked for being weak on national security.”

Muslims want to participate in the political process, and they’re paying attention to domestic and foreign events, according to a report released last month by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington.

The report recommends that politicians engage Muslim Americans because they could play key roles in the upcoming election, especially in key swing states like Florida and Michigan.

The U.S. census didn't ask about religious affiliation, so estimates regarding the size of Muslim communities living in Michigan and Florida are imprecise. But as minority voters become increasingly important in elections, Muslim political importance increases too, the report says.

“Because of numbers in Ohio, Florida, Northern Virginia, that’s going to make it a community whose concerns are a little more important to pay attention to this election cycle,” Saylor said.

In 2010, the Pew Research Center estimated that nearly 2.6 million Muslims lived in the United States, representing less than 1 percent of the population. By 2030, the number of Muslims living in the U.S. is expected to more than double, according to the Pew Research Center.

“It’s clear that they’re going to continue to grow and become a bigger piece of the electoral puzzle,” said Aimee Chiu of the American Islamic Congress. “It would be great to start looking at understanding the constituency.”

Policy decisions like the USA Patriot Act and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that followed the 9/11 attacks that caused American Muslims to abandon the Republican Party after supporting George W. Bush in the 2000 election, the report said.

Between 2001 and 2004, the percentage of American Muslims dissatisfied with the country’s direction increased from less than 40 percent to more than 60, according to the report. In 2008, 89 percent of Muslims who voted supported Barack Obama. In 2011, more than three quarters of Muslims approved of Obama’s performance, the report said.

But Muslim support for Democrats isn’t a sure thing. Forty percent of Muslims identified as independent in 2004, according to the report.

The Muslim population in the U.S. is very diverse, said Aimee Chiu of the American Islamic Congress. Muslims care about what’s going on abroad, but they also care about a wide variety of issues, she said.

Muslims are interested in domestic issues like the economy, health care, and civil liberties, Saylor said. Either party could cultivate support among Muslims if they engage with the community and address issues that they’re concerned about, the report said.

Meanwhile, American Muslims can work to show campaigns that engaging with the community is vital to winning elections, Saylor said.

“The people who organize the best and deliver, they’re more likely to get their issues listened to,” he said.

Fox News: "Group blasts Gingrich for limiting hires to Muslims who renounce Shariah law"

The largest Muslim civil liberties group in the United States on Wednesday condemned Newt Gingrich for saying he would only hire Muslims to his administration if they renounced the use of Islam's Shariah law as a tool for U.S. government.

Calling Gingrich "one of the nation's worst promoters of anti-Muslim bigotry," the Council of American Islamic Relations suggested the Republican presidential candidate is a segregationist.

“Newt Gingrich's vision of America segregates our citizens by faith. His outdated political ideas look backward to a time when Catholics and Jews were vilified and their faiths called a threat," said CAIR Legislative Director Corey Saylor in a statement.

"The time for bias in American politics has passed and Newt Gingrich looks like a relic of an ugly era," Saylor said.

CAIR said the release was prompted by the candidate's remarks Tuesday in Columbia when, asked if he would ever endorse a Muslim running for president.

"It would depend entirely on whether they would commit in public to give up Shariah," Gingrich said.

"A truly modern person who happened to worship Allah would not be a threat, a person who belonged to any kind of belief in Shariah, any effort to impose it on the rest of us, would be a mortal threat," Gingrich told the crowd, adding that he's "totally opposed" to Shariah law being applied in American courts and favors a federal law that "preempts" its use.

This month, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down an Oklahoma ban on the application of "Sharia law" and "international law" in courts.

Pointing to the religious freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment, CAIR defends Shariah law as a set of beliefs that "teaches marital fidelity, generous charity and a thirst for knowledge," and mandates that Muslims respect the law of the land in which they live.

Gingrich had a different interpretation of Shariah law, pointing to the, "rising Islamization of Turkey has been accompanied by a 1,400 percent increase in women being killed."

"When you look at the application of Shariah in places like Iran, when you look at churches being burned in Nigeria and Egypt, and that the decline of Christians in Iraq from a million, 200 thousand when the Americans arrived to about 500,000 today, I think it depends entirely on the person," he said.

"If they are a modern person integrated in the modern world and they are prepared to recognize all religions, that's one thing. On the other hand, if they're Saudis, who demand that we respect them while they refuse to allow Christians to worship in Saudi Arabia, that's something different," he continued.

Later in the day during a question and answer session in Aiken, S.C., Gingrich also called the Ground Zero mosque "a deliberate and willful insult to the people of the United States who suffered an attack by people who are motivated by the same thing."

"I think the time has come for us to have an honest conversation about Islamic radicalism. I don't think we should be intimidated by our political elites, and I don't think we should be intimidated by universities who have been accepting money from the Saudis and who, therefore, now have people who are apologists for the very people who want to kill us," he said.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/01/18/group-blasts-gingrich-for-limiting-hires-to-muslims-who-renounce-shariah-law/#content

Video: Fla. Plot Suspect Arrested with Help of Muslim Community (CAIR)

Video: CAIR-FL Rep Says Plot Suspect 'Had No Understanding of Muslim Faith'

Lebanon Daily Star on Romney's advisor Walid Phares

Lebanon Daily Star: The right-wing Lebanese Christian advising Romney on the Middle East
BEIRUT: With Mitt Romney’s bid to become the Republican candidate for the U.S. presidential election gaining ground with his win in the Iowa caucus, many around the world are wondering what his foreign policy would have in store should he reach the White House.

When it comes to the Middle East, alarms have been raised in some corners over his decision to appoint as his top adviser on the region Walid Phares, a leading figure in right-wing Christian militias during Lebanon’s 1975-1990 Civil War and a former adviser to Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea.

Critics have also focused on Phares' subsequent roles in the United States, where he has served as a “terrorism expert” for Fox News and the Christian Broadcasting Network. During these shows, he has warned that jihadists are the enemy, and that the U.S. must act preemptively to defeat them.

“An adviser on the Middle East should be more sensitive and neutral. Walid Phares is very extreme. He leans toward being an Islamo-phobe,” Warren David, president of the Arab-American civil rights group, the Anti-Discrimination Committee told The Daily Star. “I would think that most Lebanese Christians don’t agree with his viewpoints.”

David, who himself is a Lebanese-American Christian, adds, “Fortunately, he’s in the minority. But when you see it from one of your own it’s discouraging.”

Joseph Nehme, a spokesperson for the Lebanese Forces told The Daily Star that he remembers Phares from his days in Lebanon, describing him as “a nice person,” but declined to comment any further.

Phares has reportedly declared that Lebanese Christians were ethnically distinct from Arabs, and during the Civil War he “lectured militiamen, telling them they were part of a civilizational holy war,” according to an October investigative report by the U.S. magazine Mother Jones.

Since his arrival in the U.S. in 1990, he has reportedly been featured as a Middle East expert by the David Project, Israel’s college campus coalition; and the Israeli-linked groups Jihad Watch and Middle East Forum; he is also an associate with Israel’s Ariel Center for Policy Research and a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, an organization established after 9/11, which advocates U.S. military intervention in Muslim-majority countries.

“Anyone comfortable with those associations should not be advising the president,” says Corey Saylor, National Legislative Director at the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), who has been researching Phares’ background for about a year, ever since his appointment last February as a witness at hearings by the House Committee on Homeland Security entitled "The Extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community and That Community's Response."

In a letter last February to Peter King, the Republican U.S. House Representative who led the hearings, CAIR stated that “Mr. Phares’s prior position in, and association with, organizations and militia groups known for carrying out massacres and systematic torture raise reasonable concerns regarding his relevance to any sober and objective hearing.”

The U.S. Muslim civil rights group is referring to his position during the Lebanese Civil War in the Lebanese Forces, the Christian militia which was implicated by Israel’s official Kahan inquiry in the 1982 massacre of civilians at the Sabra and Shatila in Beirut.

And according to CAIR’s research, in 1999 the World Lebanese Organization, founded by Phares, included among its “leading members” both “Col. Sharbel Baraket, former deputy commander of the [South Lebanese Army], and Etienne Sakr, head of the radical Guardians of the Cedars group.”

The Guardians of the Cedars’ mission statement includes restoring Lebanon’s alphabet “to its Phoenician origins after liberating it from the defacement that was caused by the Arabic language” and “cutting down the number of foreigners in Lebanon...” The South Lebanese Army were allied with Israel during the 1975-1990 Civil War.

Saylor believes that Romney’s selection of Phares shows the Republican candidate’s growing conservative leaning, possibly in an attempt to court evangelical Christian voters. He noted that when he was running in the 2008 election Romney said that he would be open to appointing a Muslim to his cabinet if elected president, the New York Times reported in November 2007.

(Saylor note: I did not have the best phone connection with the reporter authoring this story, so I do not believe the above paragraph fully reflects my statement. I was asked how I thought Romney and Phares got connected and I answered that they both move in conservative circles. I have no issue with anyone having a growing conservative leaning. The 2007 New York Times article I sent the reporter was about Romney initially saying he would not appoint a Muslim to his cabinet and then later revising that statement.)

“Romney, overall, has been better [than the other candidates],” Saylor says. “This is a troubling direction.”

In fact, Romney’s main competitors’ inflammatory comments about the Middle East have caused even bigger stirs.

In early December, Republican hopeful Newt Gingrich called Palestinians “an invented people.”
"Remember, there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire,” the former Georgia congressman said.

"I think that we've had an invented Palestinian people who are in fact Arabs, and who were historically part of the Arab community. And they had a chance to go many places, and for a variety of political reasons we have sustained this war against Israel now since the 1940s, and it's tragic," he said.

Then, less than a month later, his competitor Rick Santorum went a step further by saying, “There are no Palestinians... All the people who live in the West Bank are Israelis. There are no Palestinians. This is Israeli land.”

The former Pennsylvania senator added that “The West Bank is part of Israel,” which won it as “part of an aggressive attack by Jordan and others” in 1967. Israel doesn’t have to give it back any more than the United States has to give New Mexico and Texas to Mexico, which were gained “through a war,” he said. This remark was criticized by media in Israel, where the current government has accepted the principle of a two-state solution.

Saylor believes that the relatively extreme views being put forth might be a case of politicians playing to their bases to win the primary before the general election, noting that in the past some candidates have said they would move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a promise never fulfilled when they reach power.

“Once the process plays out, then we’ll see the real rhetoric,” he says.

[Saylor note: I was talking about the old ruling is different from running adage. But not all candidates are simply engaging in rhetoric. A speech Rick Santourm gave in 2007 shows to me that he appears to identify all Muslims as an enemy and likely envisions some form of apocalyptic civilizational conflict as the appropriate response to Al-Qaeda.]

Still, the thought Phares having a key advisory position, even at this stage, doesn’t sit well with some.

Jim Abourezk, a former Democratic senator from South Dakota, whose family hails from south Lebanon, told The Daily Star that although he believes Romney is unlikely to reach the presidency, “A right-wing Lebanese would be a disaster for Romney and a disaster for the country."