http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Opinion/Commentary/Aug/15/Lets-not-spite-our-face-with-profiling.ashx

If anyone ever wondered what demons lurking in American culture might have possessed the singer Michael Jackson to bleach his skin and destroy his once-noble African features through a series of bizarre plastic surgeries – to literally cut off his nose to spite his face – all they need to do is cast their attention on the debate that has ensued in recent weeks in the United States about “racial profiling.”

Racial profiling is a long-discredited American law-enforcement technique whereby police identify individuals as suspects based on their apparent race, ethnicity, age, and other simple identity criteria. This was a central feature of abuse against African-American and Latino populations throughout the country, but is now illegal and has few defenders. Except where Arabs and Muslims are concerned.

Following the attacks on the London mass transport system, the New York City subway instituted random searches of passengers, as a reassurance to the public and a deterrent to terrorists. Many American commentators have condemned this policy, as well as the U.S. government’s entire counterterrorism strategy, for not engaging in racial profiling against Arab and Muslim Americans.

Many Americans are used to thinking in simplistic terms about race and ethnicity, of living in a world divided between black and white in which identity is obvious from pigmentation and can be discerned at a glance. Proponents of profiling have proven amazingly resistant to understanding that identifying Arab and Muslim Americans based on appearance is simply impossible.

Leaving aside the fact that over half of the Arabs in the United States are Christians, Arabs can resemble almost any group of southern Europeans, Latin Americans, Central and South Asians, or Africans.

Even more preposterous would be any attempt to identify Muslims by appearance, since Muslims come from almost every part of the world, and constitute a fifth of humanity. And, since about a third of American Muslims are African-Americans, any futile attempt at profiling of Muslims, especially in urban areas such as New York City, would immediately degenerate into yet another way of profiling black people.

Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer wants racial profiling but would “immediately exempt Hispanics, Scandinavians and East Asians,” as if Hispanics were readily distinguishable from Arabs and South Asians. And, as his Washington Post colleague Colby King pointed out, “by eliminating Scandinavians from his list of obvious terror suspects, Krauthammer would have authorities give a pass to all white people.”

Supporters of racial profiling cling to the idea that you can tell who is an Arab, and even a Muslim, just by looking at them. I was on a CNN debate recently with a profiling supporter who, when confronted with the facts, resorted to holding up the photos of the 19 hijackers of September 11, 2001, and insisting: “They all look alike.”

The tragic shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in the London subway could have been based in part on his dress and behavior, as British authorities maintain. But almost certainly Menezes would not been shot eight times in the head had he not been a young, brown-skinned man. British police looked at a Brazilian electrician and saw a Pakistani suicide-bomber.

Not that all the London bombers were of Pakistani origin – a fourth man was Jamaican. The failed bombers in the second group were all East Africans. And then you have Richard Reid, John Walker Lindh and Jose Padilla, to mention but a few. But it’s okay, “they all look alike.”

Brooklyn Assemblyman Dov Hikind has also demanded that New York police use ethnic profiling in the subway searches, maintaining that “the London suicide bombers on July 7 and July 21 fit a very precise intelligence profile.” He also found that “[T]hey all look a certain way.” The police replied “racial profiling is illegal, of doubtful effectiveness, and against department policy.”

Demagogues who call for profiling against American Muslims need to drop the pretence that this could be based on appearances or names. It would require Americans to carry identity documents confirming their official religious designation. And even if it were possible to profile Arabs or Muslims by sight, or Muslims were forced to carry religious identification to be produced on demand, the effect would still be to cast an impossibly wide pool of suspects and distract attention from behavioral and other contingent factors that may actually point to a potential threat.

Race, ethnicity and religious affiliation, even when accurately identified, are widely recognized by law enforcement and counter-terrorism officials as false leads, which in themselves say nothing relevant about whether or not an individual may be about to commit a crime.

Only two approaches in dealing with mass groups of people make sense: comprehensiveness, as at airports; or randomness, as in subways – anything in between serves less as a deterrent to terrorists and more as a tipping of the authorities’ hand and a helpful hint for how not to get caught.

When U.S. airport security was based on a supposedly neutral, secret computer profiling system, dating from 1996 and leading up to September 11, 2001, the evidence strongly suggested that it resulted in widespread discrimination against Arab and Muslim travelers. However, it did not prevent the September 11 attacks.

The intensified post-September 11 airport security regime has been both more thorough and more equitable, despite the ongoing bureaucratic nightmare of “no-fly” lists. There was more evidence of intentional discrimination against Arabs and Muslims in domestic air travel before September 11 than after, precisely because the U.S. government has had to accept that serious security threats require policies that do not boil down to crude stereotypes or rely on subjective judgments about ethnicity.

Toward the end of his tenure as the first secretary of homeland security, Tom Ridge, explained to Americans: “There was a legitimate concern right after 9/11 that the face of international terrorism was basically from the Middle East. We know differently. We don’t have the luxury of kidding ourselves that there is an ethnic or racial or country profile.”

Most Americans understand that fighting terrorism with racism is repugnant to their values and won’t work. And most people have enough sense not to cut off their nose to spite their face. But not everyone.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-0507310401jul31,1,6884546.story

The attacks on the London mass-transport system and the random
searches now in place on the New York City subways have again raised
the issue of racial profiling against Arab-Americans and Muslims.

The New York Police Department insists that the searches will be just
that–random–and one should presume that its officers will hold to
that standard.

Those who urge the government to ask officers enforcing security
policies like New York’s random searches to engage in profiling of
Arab-Americans and Muslims based on appearance are not only advocating
something degrading and pointless–they are asking for the impossible.

Leaving aside the fact that more than half of the Arabs in the United
States are Christians, Arabs simply do not possess to any set of
physical characteristics that either plainly bind them together or set
them apart from many other American communities.

Arabs are a very diverse ethnic group who can resemble almost any
group of southern Europeans, Latin Americans, Central and South Asians
or Africans.

Even more preposterous would be any attempt to identify Muslims by
appearance, as Muslims come from almost every part of the world, and
constitute one-fifth of humanity. And, because about one-third of
American Muslims are African-Americans, any futile attempt at
profiling of Muslims, especially in urban areas such as New York City,
will immediately degenerate into yet another way of profiling black
people.

The tragic shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes by British police may
well have been based in part on his dress and behavior, as United
Kingdom authorities maintain. But almost certainly Menezes would not
have been shot eight times in the head if he had not been a young,
brown-skinned man.

British anti-terrorism cops were capable of looking at a Brazilian
electrician and seeing a Pakistani suicide-bomber, and a terrible
injustice was the direct result.

Not that all the London bombers were of Pakistani origins–the fourth
was Jamaican.

As former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge explained, “There
was a legitimate concern right after 9/11 that the face of
international terrorism was basically from the Middle East. We know
differently. We don’t have the luxury of kidding ourselves that there
is an ethnic or racial or country profile.”

Remember the likes of Richard Reid, John Walker Lindh and Jose Padilla?

Demagogues who call for profiling, and even across-the-board
discrimination, against American Muslims should acknowledge that in
practice this could not be based on appearances or names.

It would probably require Americans to be categorized by, or register
their faith with, the government, and carry identity documents
confirming their official religious designation.

How else to distinguish Arab Muslims and Christians, Hindu and Muslim
South Asians, Muslims and Christians of African origin and so forth?

Even if it were possible to profile Arabs or Muslims by sight, or if
they were forced to carry something equivalent to a yellow star to be
produced on demand, the effect would still be to create an impossibly
wide pool of suspects and distract attention from behavioral and other
contingent factors that may point to a potential threat.

Worse than useless, such approaches would drain resources from serious
intelligence and law-enforcement tactics, and alert terrorists to
exactly what appearances to avoid.

Only two approaches in dealing with mass groups of people make sense:
comprehensiveness as at airports, or randomness as in subways.

Anything in between serves less as a deterrent to terrorists and more
as a tipping of the government’s hand and a helpful hint for how not
to get caught.

When airport security was based on a supposedly neutral, secret
computer profiling system, from 1996 to Sept. 11, 2001, the evidence
strongly suggested that it resulted in widespread discrimination
against Arab and Muslim travelers, but it did not prevent the Sept. 11
attacks.

The intensified post-Sept. 11 airport security regime has been both
more thorough and more equitable. There was more evidence of
discrimination against Arabs and Muslims in domestic air travel before
Sept. 11 than after, precisely because the government became committed
to providing effective security.

The government seems to be learning that serious security threats
require policies that do not boil down to crude stereotypes or rely on
subjective judgments about ethnicity.

Race, ethnicity and religious affiliation, even when accurately
identified, are widely recognized by law enforcement and
counterterrorism officials as false leads, which in themselves say
nothing relevant about whether an individual may be about to commit a
crime.

Institutionalized racism is repugnant to our values, but more to the
point, it cannot be the basis of serious, workable policies that
provide real security.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2004/09/26/media-he-can-t-pay-for-a-cab.html

Sept. 27 issue – There should be a New York Press award hanging on the wall of Hussein Ibish’s office, but the 41-year-old Lebanese-American and Washington correspondent for the Arab world’s most prominent English-language paper, the Daily Star, hasn’t had time to put it up. He picks up the plaque off his cluttered desk and reads it aloud: “best tv spokesman for the arab cause. It’s really flattering,” he says, “but it’s a bit like being named the tallest skyscraper in San Clemente.”

As the former communications director for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Ibish has pioneered a new type of Middle Eastern advocacy and become a hero among civil libertarians and Arab-Americans alike. When the Rev. Jerry Falwell referred to Muhammad the Prophet as a “demon-possessed pedophile” on CNN’s “Crossfire” after the 9/11 attacks, Ibish decided all logical argument was out the window. “I called him an idiot, plain and simple,” says Ibish. He received a standing ovation from the studio audience.

On Alan Keyes’s show, New York Post columnist Daniel Pipes asserted that it was far too dangerous for Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories. Ibish carefully deconstructed the argument until Pipes’s only defense was to yell, “Shut up! Shut up!” And then there was the recent phone call from a political columnist the day after Ibish had appeared on MSNBC with him. By the end of the call the columnist had dropped his dogged assertions that the Saudi government was a terrorist organization and instead asked, “Hussein, why don’t you like me?” “When the other party comes unglued, flails around or loses their cool, you know you’ve won,” says Ibish, who’s now writing a book about the Arab-American experience. “When people get really mad, you know you’ve done a good job. And if you’ve done an excellent job, you’ll receive death threats.”

But the love Ibish receives from those he’s defending, he says, makes it all worth it. “I was in a New York cab and the driver said, ‘You can’t pay. I know who you are. I know what you’re doing for me and my children.’ On the way back the same exact thing happened. It helps to be appreciated. But in the end I volunteered to mud-wrestle in the sewer with half-wits and villains. Somebody has to do it-why not me?”

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Opinion/Commentary/Sep/18/An-idealist-haunted-by-reality.ashx

Edward Said’s last book, “From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map,” published posthumously following his death last year, highlights the dangers of shaping a book out of otherwise unedited newspaper columns: what is perfectly palatable in small doses becomes far less appealing when consumed in large quantities.

“From Oslo to Iraq” is useful mainly because of its first chapter, “Palestinians Under Siege,” Said’s masterful explication, along with the requisite maps, of the topography of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. These physical alterations to the Palestinian landscape, now most dramatically illustrated by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s Great Wall currently snaking its way across the West Bank, constitute what Israeli sociologist Jeff Halper has aptly dubbed a “matrix of control” over the Palestinian people.

Said’s essay, and his maps, expose the absurdity of many of the arguments routinely presented in defense of Israeli actions, such as Alan Dershowitz’s ridiculous formulation that he is opposed to the “occupation of people,” but not to “occupation of the land.” They also demonstrate how deeply entrenched the occupation has become and how complex it would be to dismantle its infrastructure.

The rest of Said’s book consists mainly of his columns from Al-Hayat and the English-language Al-Ahram Weekly, which were certainly not among his finest works. Said returns time and again to themes which were already fully developed in his earlier writings: the suffering of the Palestinians and the nobility of their resistance; the atrocious leadership of Yasser Arafat; and the culpability of the Americans, the Europeans and the Arabs.

There is little to argue with, but almost nothing new either. Long sections of the book are mind-numbingly repetitive, in a way in which the original columns, because they came out periodically in newspapers, were not. The effect is like pouring endless teaspoons of syrup into a large beaker and then expecting people to drink it as they would a glass of beer. One can only assume that, had he lived, Said would have ensured that this effect, which is not to be found in any of his other books, would have been attenuated.

In spite of the extraordinary elegance of much of his prose, like many polemical writers Said was capable of creating a hectoring effect, making even the most sympathetic reader feel oppressed by righteous indignation. His penchant for hyperbole makes repeated appearances, as in his characterization of U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as Bush’s “psychopathic henchman.” Almost any other pejorative would have better described him, and many would have been accurate.

However, two of the columns in “From Oslo to Iraq” do reflect Said at his finest, and it is surely no coincidence that they were both written, back-to-back, in October 2001 in response to the terrorist attacks in the United States and their aftermath. One of the pieces, “Adrift in Similarity,” demolishes in a few short sentences entire discourses in both the Western and Islamic worlds where “hugely complicated matters like an identity and culture exist in a cartoon-like world where Popeye and Bluto bash each other mercilessly.” And can there be any doubt that Said’s plea for the development of “a new secular Arab politics … without for a moment condoning or supporting the militancy (it is madness) of people willing to kill indiscriminately” is as urgent today as when it was written three years ago?

“From Oslo to Iraq” chronicles the final stage in one of the most interesting aspects of Said’s career and intellectual development: his relationship with Palestinian nationalism. He was among the first to call for a two-state solution in the late 1970’s, and then among the first to turn his back on it in the mid-1990’s. Indeed, in most of his writing over the past decade, he has argued that partition of Israel-Palestine under existing circumstances is unworkable, both politically and because of the changing geography he described in “Palestinians Under Siege.”

Instead, Said advocated a binational state for Jews and Arabs that could transform rivals into partners and allow each to express their national identity without excluding or oppressing the other. Said had the intellectual integrity to admit that this was not, as others have disingenuously suggested, a return to previous Palestinian nationalist positions that envisioned a “secular, democratic state” which was also somehow “Palestinian and Arab” at the same time.

Instead, Said spoke in terms of Israelis and Palestinians transcending their ethno-nationalist identities. Unfortunately, neither he nor any other of the small group of thinkers on both sides of the divide who embrace this frankly utopian vision have been able to give us the slightest idea of how such an arrangement might work in practice – let alone how to get from here to there. As it stands today, binationalism exists only as an exceptionally ambitious project to change the way millions of different people think about their societies and the world around them.

Among the most fascinating passages in “From Oslo to Iraq” are the moments where one sees the visionary and the idealist reverting to the rhetoric of partition: “The only negotiations worth anything now must be about the terms of an Israeli withdrawal from all the territories occupied in 1967.” In another column from October 2001, Said demands a return to negotiations, and writes that “the great failing of Oslo must be remedied now at the start: a clearly articulated end to occupation, the establishment of a viable, genuinely independent Palestinian state, and the existence of peace through mutual recognition … have to be stated as the objective of negotiations, a beacon a shining at the end of the tunnel.”

American neoconservatives call this effect “being mugged by reality.” One can read in Said’s essays the ongoing tension between a desire to advocate an essentially undefined political agenda of binationalism and the lure of existing political structures Said understandably despised for being dysfunctional, but which, at least, are real. In the end, his break with the idea of partition and the end of the occupation as the primary goal of the Palestinian national movement was not as absolute as it sometimes seemed.

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Opinion/Commentary/Sep/07/The-political-suicide-of-John-Kerry.ashx

The campaign of Senator John F. Kerry appears to have imploded. With almost two months left before the presidential election on Nov. 2, U.S. President George W. Bush is poised to win an election in which, given his extraordinary record of domestic and international failure, he should certainly have been defeated.

Contrary to conventional wisdom in the American media, Kerry stands on the brink of failure not because of the Republican attacks against him, but because of his own incomprehensible strategic blunders.

This is not to say that the spectacularly dishonest television campaign falsely impugning Kerry’s Vietnam War record – spurred by a thinly veiled Bush campaign front group preposterously named “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” – has had no effect. Such negative campaigning, particularly when the lie being told is so massive that the public cannot imagine anyone being brazen enough to invent it out of whole cloth, has a proven record in American politics. But Democrats can, and indeed have, fought back effectively against these charges, and most voters are not particularly interested in 35-year-old Vietnam-related issues.

The brilliantly staged but vicious Republican National Convention was certainly much more impressive than the Democratic convention a few weeks earlier. It played well to the party base, but the thundering of the self-hating Democrat Senator Zell Miller, the keynote speaker, was not the stuff that turns elections.

Compared to Kerry’s own strategic miscalculations, the Republicans have been a minor problem for the Democratic candidate. What really occurred during August that decisively shifted the momentum in favor of the president was Kerry’s own unfathomable decision to cede to Bush the major issue on which this campaign, and the incumbent’s record, will be judged: the war in Iraq.

Before August, Bush was incredibly vulnerable on Iraq. A majority of Americans considers the war to have been a mistake, resistance to the occupation is intensifying, and virtually everybody concedes that the two reasons the administration gave for the invasion – Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction and the supposed alliance between the regime of Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda – were based entirely on deception, or were illusory.

Hammering Bush on this ill-advised adventure must lie at the heart of any successful challenge of his record. The difficulty is that Kerry voted for the Senate resolution giving the administration the authority to use force in Iraq.

However, Kerry could have used his own vote to emphasize the degree to which the administration manipulated, exaggerated and falsified existing intelligence to misrepresent Iraq as a threat to the United States. He could have taken the issue of his vote for a war he now criticizes and, instead of allowing it to be used by Republicans as evidence of his fickleness and inconsistency, made it the centerpiece of an attack on the administration’s deceptiveness or incompetence.

Kerry should have spent August repeating: “Mr. Bush, I voted for that resolution on the basis of what you and your subordinates were telling the Congress and the country. We now know that the information you gave us was false. Mr. Bush, if you knew it was false, you deliberately deceived us all. If you did not know, then you and your team are incompetent in the extreme, and you must go before you blunder your way into further disastrous and unnecessary conflicts. Mr. Bush, you are either a liar or a fool, and thousands of people have died as a consequence.”

Kerry, instead of mounting this kind of vigorous offensive on the blundering in Iraq, made the fateful error of, in effect, conceding the issue entirely. On numerous occasions in August, the Democratic candidate confessed that if he knew then what he knows now, he would still have voted for the war authorization resolution. However, the coup de grace was delivered by Kerry’s unqualified foreign policy spokesman James Rubin, who told the press that the candidate would have “in all probability” invaded Iraq himself. Rubin later clarified that he “never should have said the phrase ‘in all probability.'”

The Kerry team has become completely entangled in its gnarled inconsistencies on Iraq, like a bull trapped in razor wire – every effort to extricate itself has only trapped it more tightly while opening fresh wounds. Unable to successfully engage Bush on the major issue of the campaign, Kerry is now going to try to shift the debate away from national security issues to a domestic agenda under the rubric: “A stronger America begins at home.”

Relying on those opinion polls showing Americans are most concerned about economic issues, the Democrats have decided not to put up a serious fight over Iraq, but to try to make the election about jobs. This is cowardly, unprincipled and an almost certain recipe for defeat.

Since there will be at least two major televised debates before the November voting, Kerry will have some opportunity to climb out of the formidable hole which he has dug for himself. But given the familiar divisions between Democrats and Republicans on economic policy, and the extraordinary incoherence and contradictions of Kerry’s foreign policy pronouncements, even as poor a debater as Bush ought to be able, at the very least, to hold his own.

There was a disturbing whiff of demagoguery about the Republican National Convention, but the mocking chant of “flip-flop, flip-flop, flip-flop” perfectly characterized Kerry’s political self-immolation at the alter of Iraq.

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Middle-East/Sep/01/Proposed-UN-resolution-shows-deterioration-of-US-Syrian-ties.ashx

A new initiative by the United States and France to seek a UN Security Council resolution condemning Syria for engineering an unconstitutional second-term for Lebanese President Emile Lahoud comes in the context of a long spiral of deteriorating relations between Washington and Damascus. The resolution is expected to pass if introduced, possibly later this week, in spite of pleas from the Lebanese government and others that it would be unhelpful.

“By pressing for such a resolution, the French and Americans will themselves by intervening in Lebanese politics, and thereby defeating their own stated purposed,” Murhaf Jouejati, an adjunct professor at George Washington University and a specialist on US-Syrian relations, told The Daily Star.

Joshua Landis, a Syria specialist at the University of Oklahoma, said: “I don’t think anything is going to stop the deterioration right now; Syria has dug in its heels and the US has set terms that the Syrians can’t possibly meet.”

Landis said that Syria was creating serious problems for itself, because the Lahoud issue would “force many fence-sitters in Lebanon to choose between Lebanese nationalism and some sort of Arab identification.”

“I think Syria is going to lose from this,” he said. “Syria has nothing to gain from driving this fight internationally and in Lebanon.

“On the other hand, the regime has never been stronger domestically and has been able to make peace with a large array of domestic opponents,” Landis added.

The Lahoud affair could be raised bilaterally when US Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs William Burns and a delegation of other senior officials visit Damascus as part of a planned Sept. 8-16 trip that is also set to include Cairo, Jerusalem and London. The trip was planned before the issue of the Lebanese presidency became a diplomatic controversy.

Syria’s role in Lebanon adds another charge in the bill of particulars against Syria being pressed by neoconservatives and supporters of Israel. These already include the charge that Syria harbors Palestinian terrorist groups, that it allows foreign fighters to pass across the border with Iraq, that it has a chemical weapons program, and even – according to the most ardent critics of Syria – that the former Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein may have transferred weapons of mass destruction to Syria prior to the US invasion of Iraq.

“This is yet another hook against Syria, and this administration has been moving from hook to hook, so much so that this is truly a downward spiral in the relationship between the US and Syria,” Jouejati said.

In the year following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, Syria and the US enjoyed an unprecedented spell of cooperation against Al-Qaeda extremists, so much so that the Syrian government was publicly credited by senior US officials, including Secretary of State Colin Powell, as having provided information that saved American lives.

This relationship was described in greatest detail by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker magazine. Hersh wrote, “Syria’s efforts to help seemed to confound the Bush Administration, which was fixated on Iraq. … the Administration was ill prepared to take advantage of the situation and unwilling to reassess its relationship with Assad’s government.” According to Hersh, the administration “chose confrontation with Syria over day-to-day help against Al-Qaeda.”

Since then the accusations against Syria in Washington have only gained momentum, and the man reputed to be the most enthusiastic proponent of cooperation between the US and Syria, former CIA Director George Tenet, has resigned.

“The CIA has been neutralized – the last time it intervened in these matters was when they succeed in altering the language of US Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton’s testimony before Congress about Syria’s weapons of mass destruction and exposed his language as highly exaggerated and containing a political agenda,” Jouejati said. “But since then Tenet is gone, Congress and the Defense Department have got the upper hand, and the only thing that can stop the downward spiral at this point is the Burns delegation and the talks that will occur on Sept. 9.”

According to Landis, “Washington right now is very divided – there are many people who don’t want to repeat what we did in Iraq in Syria, and who want to deal with Bashar, who has many promising qualities and who is trying to take Syria from being an autocratic state to being a liberal dictatorship, like America’s best friends in the Middle East – many realists are ready to embrace this under their traditional mantra of stability.”

“However, the neocons have got Syria clearly in their crosshairs and want to take down the regime,” Landis said. “They established the line early on that Bashar Assad and the Baathist regime are irrational and cannot be dealt with.” Landis said he thinks this is “the worst possible policy” for the US to follow.

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Middle-East/Aug/28/Bush-supporters-face-tough-sell-with-Arab-Muslim-Americans.ashx#axzz2axJWowPa

With the Republican National Convention set to kick-off Sunday, and with US President George W. Bush running in a statistical dead-heat against the Democratic challenger Senator John Kerry, a small but influential group is set to press the president’s case to a deeply skeptical Arab-American community in coming weeks.

Polls suggest that less than a quarter of Arab-Americans are considering voting for the Bush in the November election.

Bush’s Arab-American supporters, including veteran Republican activists like Washington attorney and former Reagan administration official George Salem, admit that they are facing a difficult task in asking the community to support a record defined by the war in Iraq, unflinching support for Israeli Premier Ariel Sharon and the controversial law enforcement policies of Attorney-General John Ashcroft. Yet they insist that a deeper look at the president’s record could change minds.

In particular, they say that Bush has appointed more Arab-Americans and Muslims to senior positions than any other president. These include Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, presidential personnel aide Dina Powell, former head of the Office of Management and Budget Mitch Daniels, General Counsel of the Department of Health and Human Services Alex Azar, Ambassador to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad and the head of the National Institutes of Health Elias Zerhouni.

In addition to this list of appointees, Bush’s supporters essentially make the case that Arab-Americans have the same concerns as most other American constituencies. Since they believe that Bush has performed well over-all, they feel Arab-Americans can be convinced to either overlook specific concerns or rethink their generally critical assessments of his policies.

Randa Fahmy Hudome, a Washington consultant involved in forming a committee in support of the president, told The Daily Star: “I think there is a perception of negativity out there in our community and that when presented with the facts they will see this is just not the case.”

Salem told The Daily Star: “The Arab-American community is a sophisticated, mature ethnic constituency that needs to factor in everything, including economic and tax policies, education polices, and others, as well as foreign policy. In other words, many of us can continue to support Bush in spite of our concerns about civil liberties and foreign policy. Our community is not monolithic and it’s not single-issue.”

“I think both Bush and Kerry are tough sells in our community, and I don’t think that there are any distinguishable differences between them on issues of particular concern to us,” Salem said.

Talking-points for Arab-American supporters issued last week by the Bush-Cheney campaign, raised at least two arguments which could be effective. They cite Bush’s repeated condemnations of post-Sept. 11, 2001, hate crimes, saying: “The president demonstrated his true character when he immediately spoke out in defense of Arab-Americans and asked the rest of America not to harm the Arab-American community.” They also underline that Bush “is the first president to call for an independent and democratic Palestine while in office.”

Salem said: “In my view, a second-term president who has called for a Palestinian state is preferable to someone with a 100-percent pro-Israel voting record. There is the historic precedent that all major progress on the Palestinian issue has been in second terms of presidencies.”

The points also say that “because the United States and our coalition helped to end the violent regime of Saddam Hussein, and because the United States is helping to raise a peaceful democracy in its place, 25 million Iraqis are free and America is safer,” a claim unlikely to meet sympathy outside some sections of the Iraqi-American community.

Four years ago, it was all so different. Then, as now, the relatively small Arab-American and Muslim vote was widely seen as disproportionately important due to its concentration in key battle ground states such as Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Florida.

At that time Arab-Americans had grave misgivings about the presidential ticket of former Vice-President Al Gore and his vocally pro-Israeli running-mate, Senator Joe Lieberman.

In this context, Bush’s unprecedented efforts at outreach to the Arab-American and Muslim communities proved highly effective. In particular, his slightly garbled condemnation of racial profiling against Arab-Americans and secret evidence in the second television debate with Gore seemed to deeply impress its intended audience.

Every sentence in these crucial debates is part of a carefully-crafted strategy, and Bush’s comments were the first by any major presidential candidate that specifically referred to Arab-American concerns. It was justifiably seen as something of a break-through for a constituency still cutting its electoral teeth.

In response to these overtures, in October 2000, the American Muslim Political Coordinating Council, a coalition of the four largest American Muslim political groups, endorsed Bush. Although Bush lost Michigan to Gore, he held Ohio, which proved key to his election victory. Some well-informed observers credited Muslim support for Bush’s narrow victory in 2000, including the noted Republican activist Grover Norquist, who wrote in the ultra-conservative American Spectator magazine, “Bush was elected president of the United States of America because of the Muslim vote.”

Norquist had led the effort in the late 1990s to bring American Muslims into the Republican Party on the grounds that they are “socially and economically conservative in their attitudes,” and that “American Muslims look like members of the Christian Coalition or religiously active Catholics.”

However, over the three years since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, the reputation of the Bush administration with both Arab and Muslim Americans has suffered severely.

Concerns about the use of secret evidence in a handful of high-profile deportation cases in the 1990s have given way to almost universal alarm among Arab and Muslim Americans regarding the USA Patriot Act and other legal changes over the past three years.

Bush is also badly hurt by his seemingly limitless support of Sharon, including an exchange of diplomatic letters which, for the first time, formally committed the United States to supporting Israel’s right to retain some territories occupied in 1967, and opposing the right of return.

In spite of this uphill battle, Bush is persisting in efforts, clearly more focused than those of Senator Kerry, to win back as much Arab-American and Muslim support as possible. The campaign has recently hired two new Muslim staffers to speak at community events. One of Bush’s prominent American Muslim supporters, Malik Hasan, the former chief executive of Foundation Health Systems of Denver, has not only given large donations to the campaign, he and his family have established a “Muslims for Bush” website.

Salam al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, one of the groups endorsing Bush in 2000, told The Daily Star: “There are a lot of people who feel we made a mistake back then, but we were looking for specific things from the Bush campaign, which we got.”

“This year the Bush camp is still trying to reach out,” he said. “But my instinct is that they won’t have a lot of success. They’re going to keep trying to say they have a good record, but I don’t think that’s ever going to match with our perceptions.”

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Middle-East/Aug/26/US-charity-arrests-raise-questions-regarding-war-on-terror.ashx#axzz2axJWowPa

In a case with profound implications regarding the nature and focus of the US “war on terror,” on July 27 US authorities arrested the leadership of one of the largest Muslim charities in the United States, the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development.

Three additional indictments handed down on Aug. 20 were said by US authorities to also be part of efforts to stop the flow of money from the United States to the Palestinian militant group Hamas. A Hamas senior official who was indicted on Aug. 20, Moussa Abu Marzook, told the Associated Press in Syria: “Hamas did not take a penny from the Holy Land Foundation. Hamas has its own means of funding and that is not connected to any institution in the West.”

The 42-count indictment accuses the senior officers and fundraisers of Holy Land of using the charity to “provide financial and material support” in excess of $12.4 million to “Hamas-controlled organizations in the West Bank and Gaza, as well as for direct payment to individuals whom (Holy Land) supported on behalf of Hamas, including family members of martyrs and prisoners.” The case appears to rely heavily on information provided by Israeli intelligence,

with federal authorities citing “critical assistance from our foreign allies and partners.”

Among the accused arrested on July 27 were Holy Land’s founder, Shukri Abu Baker, its executive director Ghassan Elashi, Mohammed al-Mezain, Mufid Abdel-Qader and Abdel-Raham Odeh. Also indicted were Haitham Maghawri and Akram Mishal, both said to be outside the United States. A former fundraiser, Abdel-Jabbar Hamdan, was also detained, and is presumed to be a material witness in the case.

Indicted along with Abu Marzook in the second case, and arrested on Aug. 20, were Mohammed Salah, whose Chicago-based Koranic Literacy Institute was the subject of a controversial civil asset forfeiture in the late 1990s, and Abdel-Haleem Ashqar, who has previously been held on contempt of court charges for refusing to testify in other cases. Neither man has been connected to the charity.

John Boyd, a lawyer for Holy Land, told The New York Times: “This is completely unfounded, and if the Holy Land Foundation is given an opportunity to defend itself, it will be able to rebut every charge made in this indictment.”

The American Muslim community was shocked when the federal government in December 2001, froze the assets of Holy Land, along with two lesser known charities. With outstanding assets estimated to be in excess of $7 million, and having been listed as a suggested charity on the State Department’s website, Holy Land was among with most respected American Muslim institutions.

But for years it had been the subject of accusations, mainly from journalist Steven Emerson and his one-time associate, the self-described “terrorist hunter” Rita Katz, that it was a “front” or fundraising arm of Hamas-related social service organizations. These charges were not taken seriously by many people, because of the long history of false accusations from Emerson and his associates against Arab and Muslim Americans.

Holy Land challenged the seizure of its assets, filing a suit in federal court against the government in March 2002. In response, the government declared its intention to re-designate Holy Land as a “terrorist organization” itself, rather than merely treating it as a supporter or fundraiser. Lawyers for the charity say they were given two weeks to challenge the accusations in a voluminous memo from the Justice Department. They say they declined to try to meet what they call an impossible deadline. In May 2002, the government officially re-classified the group a “specially designated terrorist.”

Holy Land’s lawsuit proved a complete failure, as neither the federal district court judge nor the appellate court would allow the charity to introduce evidence challenging the government’s claims. Though these rulings created a minor uproar among legal scholars, the Supreme Court refused to hear Holy Land’s appeal and the rulings stood.

Civil liberties groups insisted that since Holy Land had never been allowed to defend itself, the government should either bring criminal indictments against its leaders, or unfreeze the assets. On July 27, the indictments came.

The accusations against Holy Land and the other charities have created a conundrum for American Muslims regarding how to perform their religious obligation of zakat – charitable giving – when some of the best known charities, implicitly endorsed by the State Department and enjoying federally-approved tax-free status, are now accused of being criminals.

Arab-American and Muslim groups have repeatedly suggested that the government provide some mechanism to assure Muslim donors that the groups to which they contribute are not suspected of any crimes, but to no avail. Additionally, the effort, spearheaded by Salam al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, to get the remaining Holy Land funds, estimated to be about $5 million, released to a mutually acceptable third party charity has met with little success.

Central to the Holy Land case are key civil liberties and foreign policy issues defining development of the US war on terror.

Free speech and freedom of conscience in the United States could be compromised if giving money to humanitarian operations overseas run by people with the wrong opinions becomes a serious crime. Few Americans are aware of the vast social-service network run by Hamas in the Gaza Strip, and – like the Israeli government but unlike many others – US authorities seem to recognize no difference between the humanitarian, political and para-military branches of the movement.

The indictments against Holy Land suggest the money in question was allegedly passed to “charitable fronts” for Hamas, and in part provided as aid for the families of its activists who were jailed or killed. “In this manner, defendants effectively rewarded past, and encouraged future, suicide bombings and terrorist activities on behalf of Hamas,” the government says.

If the case proves to be based solely on support for humanitarian groups run by people with the wrong opinions or the wrong associations, or aid to people who have the wrong relatives, then otherwise lawful activity will be a crime more because of the opinions being implicitly expressed than any violent acts. Since “material support” laws were enacted, civil liberties scholars have warned that they could develop into a form of “thought crime” in the US.

In July, the US government was rebuffed by a jury in Idaho that acquitted a Saudi student of “supporting terrorism” by setting up websites that allegedly praised terrorism in Chechnya and Israel. He was charged under a provision of the US Patriot Act makes that makes it illegal to provide “expert advice or assistance” to terrorists.

The recent arrests suggest that just as US foreign policy has become difficult to distinguish from Israeli attitudes, US law enforcement increasingly sees little difference between nationalist groups fighting Israeli occupation and Al-Qaeda’s worldwide terrorist network.

Opponents of Israel are thus increasingly treated as opponents of the US by American law enforcement, while the same standard is not applied to other nationalist groups such as Irish, Basque, Tamil, Iranian, Colombian that engage in terrorism.

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Middle-East/Aug/24/Book-seems-to-urge-discrimination-in-US-against-Arabs-Muslims.ashx

A new book by right-wing columnist Michelle Malkin, “In Defense of Internment,” argues in favor of extensive discrimination and racial profiling against Arab-Americans and Muslims in the United States, and passionately defends the imprisonment of tens of thousands of Japanese Americans during World War II.

A rising star on the US extreme right, Malkin specifically denies advocating the mass imprisonment of Arabs and Muslims, but the logic of her book strongly contradicts these apparently pro forma disavowals.

“Make no mistake: I am not advocating rounding up all Arabs or Muslims and tossing them into camps, but when we are under attack, ‘Racial profiling’ – or more precisely, threat profiling – is justified,” she argues. However, given her full-throated defense of the wartime imprisonment of tens of thousands of Japanese-American men, women and children on the supposition that their ethnicity made them a security threat, her book does seem to constitute the brief for the potential internment of Arab- and Muslim-Americans.

The daughter of Filipino immigrants, Malkin has made a career out of being among the strongest critics of immigration and immigrants’ rights. Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks she has been one of the most hostile commentators toward the Arab- and Muslim-American communities, consistently arguing in favor of discrimination and profiling, and describing the backlash of hate crimes and discrimination against the communities as a “myth.”

Whatever reservations Malkin may have about a mass incarceration of Arab- and Muslim-Americans are confined to a single sentence: “In part because of the geographical dispersion of the current threat of Islamofascism, it is hard to imagine parallel circumstances under which America would be compelled to replicate something on the scale of the West Coast evacuation and relocation during World War II.”

Her only apparent concerns, therefore, have to do with practicality and scale, not any consideration of the legal and constitutional rights of Arab- and Muslim-Americans, or the moral implications of locking up large numbers of people based solely on their identity – a situation she repeatedly characterizes as an ” inconvenience.” Even without another mass internment, she insists, “there is much else we can learn from the past if it is viewed without a knee-jerk impulse to cry ‘racism’ at every turn.”

Malkin calls for extensive, systematized discrimination, arguing that “it is of questionable wisdom to continue allowing Muslims to serve in the US military in combat roles in the Mideast and to have access to classified information, except under extraordinary circumstances and after thorough background checks.” She calls for “the strictest scrutiny” for “Muslim chaplains in the military and prisons,” and urges across-the-board profiling on the basis of “race, ethnicity, religion and nationality.”

Unfortunately for Malkin, the senior-most officials in charge of US national security are increasingly acknowledging that the approaches she advocates, which boil down to little more than the crudest stereotyping, are completely ineffective.

The latest senior official to express such reservations was none other than the Secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, who on Monday explained: “There was a legitimate concern right after Sept. 11 that the face of international terrorism was basically from the Middle East.  We know differently. We don’t have the luxury of kidding ourselves that there is an ethnic or racial or country profile.”

In an effort to justify the politics of racial, ethnic and religious discrimination, Malkin’s book argues that one of the most egregious instances in US history, the mass internment of Japanese-Americans, was a military necessity.

Malkin says she was drawn to the subject because critics of post-Sept. 11 profiling persistently cited the Japanese internment as an example of the logical conclusion of security measures based on ethnic stereotyping. Her book presents no new information regarding the World War II internments and relies heavily on a set of decrypted cables, which indicate that the Japanese government intended to establish a spy network in the US in the buildup to the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. However, the cables express more interest in recruiting non-Japanese spies.    None of the “evacuated and relocated” Japanese-Americans were ever arrested or even accused of being a spy or saboteur.

There were very few instances of Japanese-American disloyalty; on the contrary, thousands served in the military with the greatest distinction.

Her thesis that the internments were a bona fide military necessity directly contradicts a national consensus defined by the conclusion of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, which said in 1981 that “it should be common knowledge that the detention of Americans of Japanese ancestry during World War II was not an act of military necessity but an act of racial discrimination.”

Malkin condemns the apology issued by President Ronald Regan and the compensation paid to the detainees, and dismisses the commission’s work as replete with “injustice, irony, intellectual dishonesty and incompetence.”

Some scholars have already passed a similar judgment on “In Defense of Internment.” Eric Muller, a law professor at the University of North Carolina who has written extensively on the subject, told The Daily Star, “Malkin’s argument depends on a studied ignorance of the overwhelming evidence in the historical record, documented by dozens of scholars, of the impact of racism and wartime hysteria on those who conceived of and planned and implemented the incarceration of Japanese-Americans in World War II.”

Another leading scholar of the internments, Greg Robinson, author of “By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans,” told The Daily Star that, “there was a climate of racism against Japanese-Americans on the West Coast that began well before Pearl Harbor – fears about Japanese-American farmers about to poison vegetables or training with foreign armies long before the war started.

“You can’t extricate these fears from the decisions that were made, and Malkin shows bad faith by excluding this history … from her arguments.”

Both Muller and Robinson agreed that while Malkin specifically says she is not advocating the mass incarceration of Arab- or Muslim-Americans, the logic of her arguments and the evidence she presents would make it almost impossible for her to object to such internments were they to be implemented today.

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Middle-East/Aug/18/Nader-draws-ire-of-pro-Israeli-Americans.ashx

Independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader is again receiving considerable support from Arab-American activists, spurred in part by his bold criticism of the US role in the Middle East and Israel’s role in the United States.

Surveys suggest that Nader received about 14 percent of the Arab-American vote in 2000, and stands to do at least as well in the vote this November.

Perhaps more than any other important national political figure in the United States of Arab origin, Nader really has begun to sound like a representative of his community on issues such as Palestine and Iraq.

For decades as a consumer advocate and social justice activist, and even during his 2000 presidential campaign, Nader downplayed his ethnic background and offered few observations on foreign policy issues important to the Arab-American community.

However, since his first major address on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the national convention of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee in June 2003, Nader has become sharply critical of US support for Israeli policies.

On June 29, Nader called both Democratic and Republican leaders “puppets of Israel,” saying, “the Israeli puppeteer travels to Washington and meets with the puppet in (the) White House. He then goes down Pennsylvania Avenue and meets with the puppets in Congress.”

As a result, Nader has faced a barrage of criticism, mainly from the Anti-Defamation League, one of the most influential pro-Israel Jewish organizations in the United States.  The ADL’s National Director, Abraham Foxman, said Nader’s comments “smack of bigotry.”

Nader responded with a lengthy letter, asking Foxman, “have you ever disagreed with the Israeli government’s treatment of the Palestinian people in any way, shape or manner in the Occupied Territories?”

“As you know there is far more freedom in the media, in town squares and among citizens, soldiers, elected representatives and academicians in Israel to debate and discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than there is in the United States,” Nader’s letter stated.

In an unsigned editorial on Aug. 14, The Washington Post acknowledged that “Mr. Nader has a point,” but denounced his language as “poisonous,” compared his comments to those of neo-Nazis, and accused him of playing on “the age-old anti-Semitic stereotype of powerful Jews dominating politics and manipulating hapless non-Jewish puppets for their own ends.”

His frank criticism of US Middle East policy has certainly ruffled pro-Israeli feathers, but it has ensured Nader’s continued appeal to many Arab-Americans, especially given widespread disapproval of US President George W. Bush’s foreign policy, and disappointment that Senator John Kerry seems to offer few alternatives, especially with regard to Israel.

Nader told The Daily Star that while he has been getting considerable support, “too many Arab Americans have equipped themselves with microscopes, desperately trying to find differences between (President) Bush and Kerry on foreign policy, and there is none – they are both trying to run to the right of each other.”

“We are the only anti-war candidacy and have a lot more knowledge of the Middle East than the other two,” he said.

He urged Arab-Americans to “deny Bush their vote, and send a message to Kerry by voting for us, because when you are taken for granted, you are taken.”

Some prominent American Muslim leaders who supported Bush in 2000 are known to be quietly but strongly supportive of Nader, but are keeping a low profile because they do not wish to be seen as indirectly supporting Bush again.

Naseem Tufaha, an Arab-American activist in Seattle, is among those involved in creating an “Arab-Americans for Nader” website, which seeks to generate support for the campaign in the community through online activism. He dismisses the idea that supporting Nader is simply an indirect way of supporting Bush, telling The Daily Star, “the Arab-American vote is being taken for granted by Bush and Kerry – we need to create an environment where candidates feel they have something to lose and something to gain from paying attention to our views.”

Many Democrats allege that in 2000 Nader siphoned off voters almost entirely from former Vice-President Al Gore, ensuring the election of George W. Bush, and express deep anxiety that Nader’s candidacy this year might similarly doom Kerry’s aspirations. Nader has persisted in running despite intense criticism from Kerry supporters, and a series of setbacks, including not being re-adopted as the candidate of the Green Party – which has an extensive grassroots network – and failing to get on the ballot in a number of states, including California.

Nader said his participation in the upcoming televised candidates’ debates is “all important – it’s the only way to reach tens of millions of people, unless you are a billionaire.  We call ourselves the greatest democracy in the world, and a private corporation created and controlled by the two parties since 1987 – the Commission on Presidential Debates – determines who reaches the tens of millions of voters.”

In an effort to create a non-partisan forum for the debates this year, a group of 17 American civic leaders from a range of political perspectives have founded a new organization called Open Debates. The group’s executive director, George Farah, recently announced that Open Debates has scheduled five presidential and one vice-presidential debates in the coming weeks.

Although Nader has welcomed this development, it remains to be seen whether Kerry or Bush will agree to participate in any of these citizen-organized debates.

Albert Mokhiber, a Washington attorney supportive of Nader and a former president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, told The Daily Star, “there aren’t two candidates, there are three, and the other two are exactly the same on foreign policy. … Would you rather have arsenic or cyanide?” he asked rhetorically.

“I’d rather have a vitamin, and Nader is a vitamin.”