Muslim-beating in the 'righteous' US
By Stephan Salisbury
Alioune Niass, the Sengalese Muslim vendor who first spotted the now infamous
smoking SUV in Times Square and alerted police, is no hero.
If it were not for the Times of London, we would not even know of his pivotal
role in the story. No mainstream American newspaper bothered to mention or
profile Niass, who peddles framed photographs of celebs and the Manhattan
skyline. None of the big television stations interviewed him.
As far as the readers of the New York Times are concerned - not to mention the
New York Post and the Daily News - Niass doesn't exist. Nor does he exist for
President Barack Obama, who telephoned Lance Orton and Duane Jackson, two
fellow vendors, to thank them for their alertness in reporting the SUV. The New
York Mets even feted Jackson and Orton as heroes at a game with the San
Francisco Giants.
And Niass? Well, no presidential phone calls, no encomiums, no articles (though
his name did finally surface briefly on a New York Times blog several days
after the incident), no free Mets tickets. Yet as the London Times reported, it
was Niass who first saw the clouds of smoke seeping from the SUV on that May 1
Saturday night.
He hadn't seen the car drive up because he was attending to customers - and,
for a vendor in Times Square, Saturday nights are not to be taken lightly.
Niass was alarmed, however, when he saw that smoke. "I thought I should call
911," he told the Times, "but my English is not very good and I had no credit
left on my phone, so I walked over to Lance, who has the T-shirt stall next to
mine, and told him. He said we shouldn't call 911. Immediately he alerted a
police officer nearby." Then the cop called 911.
So Lance got the press, and he and Jackson, who also reported the SUV, have
been celebrated as "heroes". As the Times interview with Niass has made the
Internet rounds, there have been calls for the recognition of his "heroism",
too.
These three men all acted admirably. The two other vendors did what any citizen
ought to do on spotting a smoldering car illegally parked on a busy street. But
heroes? In the case of Niass, characterizing him as a hero may in a sense
diminish the significance of his act.
A vendor in New York since 9/11, he saw something amiss and reported it,
leading him into contact with the police. That a Muslim immigrant would not
think twice about this simple civic act speaks volumes about the power of
American society and the actual day-to-day lives and conduct of Muslims in this
nation, particularly immigrant Muslims.
This was a reasonably routine act for Orton and Jackson, but for Niass it
required special courage, and the fact that he acted anyway only underscores
what should be an obvious fact about Muslims in post-9/11 America: they
represent a socially responsible and engaged community like any other.
Assault on American Muslims
Why do I say that his act required courage?
Like many Muslim immigrants in New York City and around the country, Niass
senses that he is viewed with suspicion by fellow citizens - and particularly
by law-enforcement authorities - simply because of his religion. In an
interview with Democracy Now, an essential independent radio and television
news program, Niass said that, in terrorism cases, law enforcement authorities
view every Muslim as a potential threat. Ordinary citizens become objects of
suspicion for their very ordinariness. "If one person is bad, they are going to
say everybody for this religion. That is, I think, wrong."
As far as Niass is concerned, terrorists are, at best, apostates, irreligious
deviants. "That not religion," he told his interviewer, "because Islam religion
is not terrorist. Because if I know this guy is Muslim, if I know that, I'm
going to catch him before he run away."
The New York Police Department Intelligence Division, the Federal Bureau of
Investigation and Immigration and Customs Enforcement all routinely run armies
of informers through the city's Middle Eastern and South Asian communities. In
the immediate wake of 9/11, sections of New York experienced sweeps by local
and federal agents. The same in Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, Houston and
communities on the West Coast - everywhere, in fact, that Muslims cluster
together.
I've been reporting on this for years (and have made it the subject of my book Mohamed's
Ghosts: An American Story of Love and Fear in the Homeland). Despite
the demurrals of law-enforcement officials, these sweeps and ongoing,
ever-widening investigations have focused exclusively on Muslim enclaves. I
have seen the destructive impact on family and community such covert police
activity can have: broken homes, deported parents, bereft children, suicides,
killings, neighbors filled with mutual suspicions, daily shunning as a fact of
life. "Since when is being Muslim a crime?" one woman whose husband had been
swept up off a street in Philadelphia asked me.
Muslim residents have been detained, jailed and deported by the thousands since
9/11. We all know this and law-enforcement and federal officials have
repeatedly argued that these measures are necessary in the new era ushered in
by al-Qaeda. A prosecutor once candidly told me that it made no sense to spend
time investigating or watching non-Muslims. Go to the source, he said.
Radicalization is a problem of limited proportions
There are many problems with this facile view, and two recent studies - one
from a think-tank funded in large part by the federal government, the other
from the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University and the University
of North Carolina's departments of religion and sociology (using a US
Department of Justice grant) - highlight some of the most glaring
contradictions.
The Rand Corporation studied the incidence of terrorist acts since September
11, 2001, and found that the problem, while serious, was wildly overblown.
There have been, Rand researchers determined, all of 46 incidents of Americans
or long-time US residents being radicalized and attempting to commit acts of
terror (most failing woefully) since 9/11. Those incidents involved a total of
125 people.
Think about that number for a moment: it averages out to about six cases of
purported radicalization and terrorism a year. Faisal Shahzad's utterly inept
effort in Times Square would make incident 47. In the 1970s, the report points
out, the country endured, on average, around 70 terrorist incidents a year.
From January 1969 to April 1970 alone, the US somehow managed to survive 4,330
bombings, 43 deaths and US$22 million in property damage.
The Rand report, "Would-Be Warriors: Incidents of Jihadist Terrorist
Radicalization in the United States since September 11, 2001," argues that
ham-handed surveillance and aggressive police investigations can be, and often
are, counter-productive, sowing a deep-seated fear of law-enforcement and
immigration authorities throughout Muslim communities - whose assistance is
vital in coping with the threat of Islamic terrorism, tiny as it is here.
Family members, friends and neighbors are far more likely to know when someone
is headed down a dangerously radical path than the police, no matter how many
informers may be in a neighborhood. "On occasion, relatives and friends have
intervened," the Rand researchers write. "But will they trust the authorities
enough to notify them when persuasion does not work?" And will the authorities
actually use the information provided by family members when they receive it?
Don't forget the perfunctory manner in which Central Intelligence Agency
officials treated the father of the underwear bomber when he tried to report
his son as an imminent threat.
The second study, conducted by a research team from Duke University and the
University of North Carolina, found similarly small numbers of domestic terror
plots and incidents since 9/11. The report identifies 139 Muslim Americans who
have been prosecuted for planning or executing acts of terrorist violence since
September 11, 2001, an average of 17 a year. (Again, most of these attempted
acts of terror, as in the Shahzad case, were ineptly planned, if planned at
all.) Like the Rand report, the Duke-UNC study highlights the meager numbers:
"This level of 17 individuals a year is small compared to other violent crime
in America but not insignificant. Homegrown terrorism is a serious but limited
problem."
The Duke-UNC researchers conducted 120 in-depth interviews with Muslims in four
American cities to gain insight into the problem of homegrown Islamic terrorism
and the response of Muslim Americans to it. Why so few cases? Why so little
radicalization? Not surprisingly, what the researchers found was widespread
hostility to extremist ideologies and strong Muslim community efforts to quash
them - efforts partially driven by a desire for self-protection, but more
significantly by moral, ethical and theological hostility to violent
fundamentalist ideologies.
Both of these reports underscore the importance of what the researchers call
"self-policing" within Muslim communities. They consider it a critical and
underutilized factor in combating terrorism in the US. Far from being secretive
breeding grounds for radicalism, the Duke-UNC report argues, mosques and other
Muslim community institutions build ties to the nation and larger world while
working to root out extremist political fundamentalism. It was not for nothing
that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed instructed his 9/11 hijackers to steer clear of
Muslim Americans, their mosques and their institutions.
The UNC-Duke report urges federal and local officials to work aggressively to
integrate Muslim communities even more fully into the American political
process. Authorities, it suggests, should be considering ways of supporting and
strengthening those communities by actively promoting repeated Muslim
denunciations of violence. (Such condemnations have been continuous since 9/11
but are rarely reported in the press.) Public officials should also work to
insure that social service agencies are active in Muslim neighborhoods, should
aggressively pursue claimed infractions of civil rights laws, and should focus
on establishing working relationships with Muslim groups when it comes to
terrorism and law enforcement issues.
The Times Square incident - and, yes, the small but vital role played by
Alioune Niass - illustrate the importance of these commonsensical
recommendations. Yet the media have ignored Niass, and law-enforcement agencies
have once again mounted a highly public, fear-inducing investigation justified
in the media largely by anonymous leaks.
This recreates the creepy feeling of what happened in the immediate aftermath
of 9/11: the appearance of a massive, chaotic, paranoid probe backed by media
speculation disguised as reporting. A warehouse raided in South Jersey. Why? No
answers. A man led away in handcuffs from a Boston-area home. Who is he? What
is his role? Was he a money man? Maybe. But maybe not. Suspicious packages.
Oddly parked trucks. Tips. Streets closed. Bomb squads cautiously approaching
ordinary boxes or vehicles. No answers - even after the all-clear rings out and
the yellow caution tape comes down.
More importantly, the controlled flow of anonymous leaks to the mainstream
press has laid the groundwork for the Obama administration to threaten Pakistan
harshly - even as Iraq and Afghanistan sink further into deadly and destructive
fighting - and to ponder extreme revisions of criminal procedures involving the
rights of suspects. The administration's radical suggestion to suspend Miranda
rights and delay court hearings for terrorism suspects amounts to a threat to
every American citizen's right to an attorney and a defense against state
power. Is this the message the country wants to send "the evil-doers", as
president George W Bush used to call them?
Or have we already taken the message of those evil-doers to heart? Faisal
Shahzad, an American citizen taken into custody on American soil, disappeared
into the black hole of interrogation for more than two weeks - despite Obama's
assertion to a CIA audience over a year ago that "what makes the United States
special ... is precisely the fact that we are willing to uphold our values and
our ideals even when it's hard, not just when it's easy, even when we are
afraid and under threat, not just when it's expedient to do so."
When the going gets tough, as Attorney General Holder made clear on Meet the
Press on May 9, the tough change the rules. "We're now dealing with
international terrorists," he said, "and I think that we have to think about
perhaps modifying the rules that interrogators have and somehow coming up with
something that is flexible and is more consistent with the threat that we now
face." None of this is good news for Muslims in America - or for the rest of
us.
Stephan Salisbury is cultural writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer. His
most recent book is Mohamed's Ghosts: An American Story of Love and
Fear in the Homeland.
(If you are interested in reading the Duke University-University of North
Carolina study, it is available by clicking
here, as is the Rand report by clicking here. (Note that both are PDF
files.) Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's aversion to contact with US Muslims is
mentioned in evidence presented at the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui and can be
found in PDF format on page 36 of defense exhibit 941
here. For another view of just how overblown the Islamic terrorist
threat in the U.S. is, check out Tom Engelhardt's
"Fear Inc".]
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
