By MEREL VAN BEEREN (written for my reporting class at NYU)
NEW YORK – Singling out one faith group in the United States is “divisive and wrong” and harks back to McCarthyism. Thus claim 51 organizations in a letter on February 1, addressed to House Speaker John Boehner and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, in response to the scheduling of hearings later this month on homegrown terrorism that specifically focus on American Muslims.
The House Committee on Homeland Security is run by newly appointed Chairman Peter King, the Republican representative for New York in Congress. King has justified the hearings’ focus by referring to the myth that 80 percent of American mosques can be qualified as extremist and the idea that Muslim organizations have not cooperated enough with American law enforcement.
“These claims are as much grossly inaccurate as politically irresponsible,” said Alejandro Beutel, government and policy analyst for the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC).
“Our concern is that King’s way of going about these hearings is more about political circus than anything else. He’s playing politics instead of solving real problems.”
Though King’s Republican colleagues support his approach, he has critics on both sides of the political spectrum. Where his left-wing opponents disagree with his narrow focus, some on the right are upset that he has not invited critics of Islam such as Robert Spencer, the director of Jihad Watch, and Daniel Pipes, head of the Middle East Forum, both conservative policy bodies.
The organizations of the coalition that wrote the letter to Pelosi and Boehner mainly fear the impact the hearings might have on the perception of Muslims – a group of people who have already dealt with much bias ever since the attacks of September 11, 2001.
The hearings, they say, could foster fear and suspicion and might cause government surveillance to target innocent people. The letter even drew a comparison with the investigations led by Joseph McCarthy, the notorious senator who prosecuted suspected communists in the late 1940s and early 50s.
A policy report on Post-9/11 terrorism in the United States by the MPAC concluded that 7 out of 11 Al-Qaeda related plots were actually foiled with the active help of Muslim communities, directly contradicting one of King’s main claims.
“Just because some people choose to cooperate quietly does not make them any less patriotic,” said Geneve Mantri, Director for Terrorism and Counterterrorism at Amnesty International USA.
Amnesty was one of the organizations that joined the coalition in the hope of bringing some common sense to the debate. Its “fear is that the impression will be created that Muslims are uncooperative, which will expose them to more vitriol,” Mantri said.
The coalition’s letter also made note of the international repercussions the hearings might have. “A hearing that demonizes the American Muslim community will not go unnoticed by Muslims around the world and will contribute to perceptions of how the U.S. government treats Muslims,” it says.
The Public Religion Research Institute polled the public on their attitude towards the hearings. Despite the fact that 56 percent of Americans were in favor of the hearings in general, more than 7 out of 10 people said they were against the narrow focus on Muslims.
Mohamed Sami Essoulh, a student at the City University of New York and founder of the non-profit organization “Moroccan Americans in New York,” was disappointed in the choice to focus on Muslims. He fears Muslim immigrants will feel frustrated and denied their place in society.
“There are radicals and extremists in every religion and not only in Islam,” Essoulh wrote in an e-mail. “Honestly, I believe that Muslim Americans are the scapegoats for the real issues that Peter King and his colleagues should be addressing.”
Most members of the coalition who wrote the letter did not expect it to have an effect on the hearings, according to Beutel. The motivation to send the letter was more about making a public statement – to “sing in a unified chorus against manipulation and fear-based bigotry,” he said.
A press release from the Committee on Homeland Security on February 8 stated that the hearings will proceed as planned, confirming the coalition’s expectations. King wrote Bennie Thompson, a Democratic member of the Committee who asked for a different focus, that he would “not allow political correctness to obscure a real and dangerous threat to the safety of the citizens of the United States.”
Dr. Paul Abels, Director of Knowledge and Analysis at the Dutch National Coordinator for Terrorism Prevention’s Office, said that he can understand the American focus on jihadist Muslims. He said that it is similar to the Dutch approach, but emphasized that it is very important to be aware of threats coming from other groups. The Netherlands is a country where Muslims make up 5.8 percent of the population as opposed to the 0.6 in the United States, and came to the country for work purposes, where American Muslims usually migrated for political reasons.
The Netherlands has taken a broad approach when it comes to dealing with domestic terrorism. The focus is mainly on preventing the radicalization of Muslim youth, but the authorities monitor other ideologies constantly. The focus on prevention of radicalization rathr than on Muslims in general has largerly prevented the stigmatization that some fear next month’s congressional hearings might lead to.
Law enforcement in the Netherlands has, said Abels, seen an increased “shared resistance” to terrorism among Muslim groups and organizations. Abels deliberately chose the word “resistance” over “cooperation” – the latter word, he said, often gets equated with
betrayal of fellow Muslims. Because of the “shared resistance,” he said, relations have improved between government and Muslim groups, and “recruiters are no longer allowed to access mosques, imams no longer call for violence and mosque councils inform the government of possible radicalization of youth.”
Abels’ predecessor, Lidewijde Ongering, spoke to a U.S. Senate Committee some years ago about the Dutch approach to homegrown terrorism. “That was in a time when Americans were under the impression that homegrown terrorism was not a factor in their country, only in Europe. Several incidents since then have shown that they had a false sense of security,” Abels wrote in an e-mail in Dutch.
That is exactly what the coalition wants to achieve – a focus on actual threats, instead of imagined ones. “The Committee on Homeland Security should focus on keeping us safe, rather than engaging in fear-mongering and divisive rhetoric that only weakens the fabric of our nation and distracts us from actual threats,” the letter concluded.
Efforts to combat the anti-Muslim rhetoric the coalition believes King’s hearings represent have not decreased in the least. Last Sunday, the coalition and many more organizations organized a rally on Times Square, under the banner of “Today, I am a Muslim Too”. Several hundreds of people attended, despite the torrential rains. Today, two days before the Committee’s Hearings are scheduled, the website whatunites.us was launched. It “calls on Americans to focus on what unites us and to call out rhetoric and actions that divide us,” the site states.
