CAIR and the American Civil Liberties Union, Why?

[Elisheba]

On August 6, 2004, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) issued a news release to announce that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) will provide free legal advice to Muslims questioned by the FBI.

This is the first paragraph of CAIR’s news release:

“A prominent national Islamic civil rights and advocacy group today announced that it is teaming up with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to offer free legal advice and support to Muslims who are approached by the FBI for voluntary interviews.”

Notice that the lead paragraph acknowledges in the last sentence that the interviews are “voluntary”.


This raises several questions:

- Why doesn’t CAIR promote the idea that the FBI is defending America from Islamist terrorists and encourage Muslims to share information? Engy Ebdelkader, CAIR Civil Rights Director, "CAIR's partnership with the ACLU will help Muslims who are unaware of their legal rights or who just have concerns about being approached by the FBI."

Is there any evidence that the FBI has abused these interviews to take unfair advantage of any Muslim? If so, where is it? CAIR’s animosity towards the FBI is well known, why do they insist on poisoning the Muslim community’s attitude toward the FBI? Is CAIR upset that the FBI has been one of the lead agencies responsible for jailing so many CAIR officers?


- Why is the ACLU involved with CAIR? Dalia Hashad, ACLU Arab, Muslim and South Asian advocate: "This dragnet technique used by the FBI is simply racial profiling and violates our most cherished fundamental freedoms."

“Dragnet technique”? Is Hashad of the opinion that the FBI has enough agents that they can sweep into any town or city in the United States and simply interview every Muslim? If so, she is either sadly misinformed or deliberately inflaming Muslims. Which is it?

In opposition to questioning American Muslims, the ACLU issued this ridiculous statement: “...the FBI questioned more than 8,000 Muslim and Arab men in 2001 and 2002, but that questioning did not yield a single arrest of a suspected terrorist.”

Really? Does the ACLU now run the FBI?

It seems that the ACLU has now adopted CAIR’s editorial line: Throw out a lie and see if anyone is stupid enough to fall for it. Americans are waking up and the lessons of 9-11 are finally beginning to sink in…Americans will not simply walk to their graves dug by the likes of CAIR and the ACLU.


We are at war and we simply do not have time for this silliness.


http://www.anti-cair-net.org/press_028_04

[andak01]

We are at war and we simply do not have time for this silliness.

Yes of course, civil liberties, freedom...bah, who needs it!

[Elisheba]

Yes of course, civil liberties, freedom...bah, who needs it!

Please borrow a dictionary and look up the word, CONTEXT. Perhaps you will gain an understanding of the issue; if not, don't hesitate to ask someone who has more intelligence than you (that's an easy one ... that would be pretty much anyone.).

[MichaelC]

Yes of course, civil liberties, freedom...bah, who needs it!

Plotting muslim killers.....bah, who needs needs them!

Oh yeah....fifth columnists slithering in to muddy the waters...bah, who needs you!

[Mediocrates]

I think he meant in general not specifically in this case or that. It's a question really; which personal liberties and how much of them are you willings to give up? While I am not a person who thinks that terrorists have any sense of irony or that they care if we become repressive regimes, because all they are interested in is victory plain and simple, it should be of some concern to us, what steps we're willing to delegate our government to partake. For about the last thousand years; xenophobia both real and imagined threats to the homeland have been used as triggers to usher in various authoritarian governments. Sometimes certainly it's a necessary evil for the greater good. But we should be very alert to aggregating power in the hands of any government which is loathe to surrender that power later on.

[Elisheba]

That's because you are a good and kind man, mediocrates; however, that seems to blind you to some people's motivations on this forum.

Yo, MichaelC: You got it!

[Mediocrates]

I still want to know what domestic rights and freedoms Americans are willing to piss on in the name of security. I suspect that if my grandparents ran screaming from the Kulaks a hundred something years ago to what we have today they would be met by an America that they didn't want and didn't want them. The Bill of Rights is not a recommended suggestions document and we should be very leery of even temporarily suspending, bending or ignoring parts of it.

[Elisheba]

I still want to know what domestic rights and freedoms Americans are willing to piss on in the name of security. I suspect that if my grandparents ran screaming from the Kulaks a hundred something years ago to what we have today they would be met by an America that they didn't want and didn't want them. The Bill of Rights is not a recommended suggestions document and we should be very leery of even temporarily suspending, bending or ignoring parts of it.

I'd say that Americans can do with all the freedom and security that there is in Israel.

In other words, apropos of the CAIR position, how is it giving up rights and freedoms when one is simply taking note of just who is blowing up whom and acting on it?

It wasn't Irishmen who flew planes into the WTC, after all; and that's just one example!

[Mediocrates]

I think being rounded up for questioning is more than that. Under the current rules we can, essentially detain anyone, US citizen or not, for an openended period of time and without access to counsel, without charge or acknowledging that the person is held. That kind Lubyanka sh**t should worry people. The first time that results in an 'accidental' death while in detention we start to look a lot like an Argentine Junta. I'm not saying that we don't or shouldn't take steps to garner whatever information is relevant, I'm just maintaining that we already have reasonably efficient ways to do that and procedural or command failures and weakness should never be a rationale to crimp the law. Fix the agencies and the managers first, then if all else fails, by all means suspend habeus corpus, hell put a tank in front of every bowling alley. I'll root for that when we run out of more creative things to do.

BTW 'Administrative Detention' a.k.a. proscriptive arrest and detention should worry the Israelis too. They are planning an expansion of that and not just for suspected Palestinians operatives but for their own Jews in Yesha as well.

[MichaelC]

http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/Rea...e.asp?ID=14564

Jackie Mason Turns Serious
By Don Feder

FrontPageMagazine.com
August 9, 2004

I thought of comedian Jackie Mason last week, when two leaders of an Albany, New York, mosque were arrested and charged with trying to buy a shoulder-launched missile to assassinate Pakistan’s ambassador to the U.S. What better way for disciples of a Religion of Peace to celebrate harmony and coexistence than with a Stinger missile?

Two weeks ago, Mason got in hot water (a place where he seems quite comfortable) by telling a radio audience that "the whole Muslim religion" is a "murderous organization" that instructs its followers in "hate, terrorism and murder." Filling in for syndicated talk show host Jim Bohannon, Mason said terrorists are "following the orders of the religion directly from the Koran." Also: "The Koran…is 50 versions of hate, venom, hostility and murder…dedicated to terrorism. I don’t know how we can call it a religion in the traditional sense. It should be called a murderous organization that’s out to kill people."

This provoked the predictable self-righteous demands for an apology (and, possibly, castration?) by the Council on American- Islamic Relations (CAIR), which fancies itself a Muslim Anti-Defamation League. In a letter to Westwood One, which syndicates Bohannon’s show, CAIR decried Mason’s "Islamophobic smears." (Jackie has an unreasonable fear of shoulder-launched missiles?) "It is this type of hate-filled propaganda that was used by the Nazis as justification for their persecution of the Jewish community in Germany," CAIR claimed.

Say something critical of Islam, and in CAIR’s eyes you’re a Nazi preparing to push innocents into gas chambers – just like the Kosovar Muslims recruited by the S.S. to help carry out the Holocaust.

But Mason is merely the latest in a long line of Islamophobes.
A 20th century politician made comments far more damning of Islam than Jackie Mason. This world leader said Islam "above all others was founded and propagated on the sword." Moreover, it provided "incentives to slaughter, and in three continents has produced fighting breeds of men – filled with a wild and merciless fanaticism." By CAIR's logic, that makes Winston Churchill a "Nazi." Winnie and Jackie Mason: odd Nazis, indeed.

But seriously, folks – as standup comics like Mason say – I don’t know of anyone, including Islam’s most trenchant critics, who’s advocating the mass murder of Muslims. Most of us would be content if zealous Muslims would stop killing – or trying to kill – us.

Which brings me to the Albany arrests.

The accused are two immigrants from Jihadistan – Yassin Aref, imam of Albany’s Masjid As-Salam Mosque (ironically, it means, "House of Peace" mosque) and Mohammed Hossain, owner of a pizzeria.

Fresh from confronting the malicious Mason, CAIR expressed concern that the accused are victims of racial profiling and entrapment. "There’s always a concern that people may be targeted for a sting operation like this solely because they are Moslems," declared Ibrahim Hooper, CAIR’s indefatigable spokesman. "It’s a perplexing case, and the question we have is whether the government got these men to do something they otherwise wouldn’t have done."

Just picture it: The innocent imam and pure pizza man are walking down a street in Albany one day, when suddenly a sly undercover agent approaches the pair and entices them into buying a shoulder-launched missile.
Agent: "Like to buy a Stinger? Great for taking out Pakistani ambassadors or killing infidels."

Mohammed and Yassin: "Gosh, we’d never thought of that! Hmmm, that might not be a bad idea. Say, it could come in handy, if the Zionist entity ever invades America."

Jackie Mason couldn't write funnier satire than CAIR has.

That CAIR should be skeptical of allegations of terrorist activities is understandable. The organization is an offshoot of the Islamic Association for Palestine – identified as a Hamas front by two former heads of the FBI’s counter-terrorism section. In April, Randall Todd (Ismail) Royer, a staffer in CAIR’s national headquarters, pleaded guilty to conspiring to train Americans for jihad. Yep, just think of CAIR as part ADL – and part Stern Gang.
Jackie Mason seems only to be observing the evidence all around him. Curiously, two men are arrested in a sting operation trying to buy the type of weapon used to take down airplanes, and – Guess what? They’re not Baptists! Gunmen burst into a church in Pakistan and fire round after round into the prostrate bodies of women and children. The perps aren’t Scientologists or Latter-Day Saints. A Jewish kid is stabbed outside a yeshiva in Brussels, and the gang of youths believed responsible don’t belong to the local Buddhist temple. Churches and monasteries are torched in Kosovo; not the work of Hindus.

Judaism, Christianity and Islam – all have had a profound impact on Western civilization. One faith was founded by a lawgiver who led his people out of tyranny. One religion was established by a man of peace, who wouldn’t even resist his own execution and asked God to forgive his executioners. The last was started by a man who personally led his adherents into battle. The faith did not spread from the Pyrenees to the Philippines within 100 years of Mohammed’s death, by peaceful proselytizing. There are over 120 chapters (suras) in the Koran calling on believers to fight Jews and Christians, subjugate them, murder them, break treaties that are made with them, cut off their heads, lips and the tips of fingers, crucify them – and other acts of conciliation. A review of the actual history of Islam for past 1,400 years shows the religion has interpreted these texts just as today's "radicals" do.
In his opus, The Clash of Civilizations And Remaking of World Order (1996) Samuel Huntington spoke of Islam’s "bloody borders" – meaning that wherever a significant Muslim population comes into contact with others, violence ensues. Wherever Muslims are living in proximity with Christians, Jews or Hindus – someone is getting shot, bombed, burned alive, stoned to death, forcibly converted, ethnically cleansed, uprooted, jailed or otherwise persecuted. Where Muslims are in the majority, other faiths are proscribed (Saudi Arabia), severely circumscribed (Egypt) or subjected to relentless persecution (Pakistan, Indonesia, the Sudan and Northern Nigeria). Where Moslems are a substantial minority (Serbia, Macedonia, The Kashmir, Israel, Chechnya) there’s intifada – terrorism in pursuit of succession.

The rationalization usually offered for the above is that a small but energetic group of fanatics have grossly distorted the tenets of their benign religion to wreck bloody mayhem. But many of the most renowned Muslim religious authorities enthusiastically endorse holy war (jihad) and terrorism – including Grand Mufti (supreme religious authority) of Egypt Sheikh Ahmed Al-Tayyeb, the imam of Mecca’s main mosque and the scholars of Al-Azhar University. These are hardly fringe figures in Islam. If their views are a corruption, there is indeed corruption in high places.

If these views are so atypical, why do some American converts to Islam try to destroy the society that nurtured them? One thinks of the Beltway sniper, John Allen Muhammed, who killed 10 people at random in 2002, or American Taliban John Walker Lindh. Why on September 11, 2001, did Moslems from Brooklyn to Ramallah, and Dar es Salaam to Jakarta, take to the streets to celebrate the deaths of 3,000 Americans and extol Osama bin Laden's death squads?

In her book The Rage And The Pride, Oriana Fallaci mentions seeing a member of one of these mobs interviewed by a reporter who asks him "Who is, for you, Osama bin Laden?" The old man replies "A hero, our hero!" Why not, he overcame 3,000 infidels in the course of a holy war.
Someone should tell CAIR if they sue for libel, Mason may have more than enough evidence to persuade a jury of his opinion by a preponderance of evidence.

I have no inherent animus against Islam. All other things being equal, it makes no difference to me that close to one billion inhabitants of planet Earth Mohammed was the "seal of the prophets." But it does concern me when the bulk of them are taught that 72 olive-eyed virgins await them in Paradise if they kill me. (What do Muslim women get – 72 sexually inexperienced men?)
I don’t agree with the central tenet of Christianity. Nevertheless, if I mention that to a Christian, he’ll tell me Jesus still loves me and that Christian will say a prayer for me. There is no equivalent imperative to bloodshed in Christianity.

Hinduism, Buddhism and The Book of Mormon are all alien to my faith tradition. But did you ever hear of a Hindu hijacker, a Buddhist suicide bomber, or a Mormon elder issuing a fatwah (putting out a hit on someone for insulting Joseph Smith)?

Try as we might, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to deny that this extreme view of Islam represents a major portion – or perhaps even most? – of the world's Muslims.

An August 8th New York Times story on fighting in Najaf, Iraq (where more than 300 have died) is headlined – "Marines Pushing Deeper Into City Held by Shiites." Strange that all of those currently killing Americans (including hostages Nick Berg and Paul Johnson) in Iraq and Afghanistan seem not to be Rotarians, 33rd degree Masons or members of a Salvation Army, but Muslims. It hardly seems coincidental that this is the case.

It’s takes a strenuous act of will to suppress an awareness of the religious dimension of terrorism’s war on the West.

[Mediocrates]

I would agree that terrorists find justification in the Qoran where they look for it.

factoid:
Mr. Mazur and his 3 brothers, one of whom, Gabe, I know, are all rabbis or cantors. A more dedicated and peaceful bunch you can't find.

[MichaelC]

I must concur that it is problematic to round up suspects in this new kind of war that we are in. The Front Page article just posted is very relevant to the suspicions of many in this country, suspicions that are well founded. Is it wise to wait for more carnage before doing anything ? Or should we be proactive and sensible and protect ourselves?

Every war has required sacrifice. Every war has employed measures that impinged on civil liberties. Abraham Lincoln invoked martial law and suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War and though the Supreme Court Justice at the time issued a writ of habeas corpus in one instance, attempting to command the appearance before him of an individual being held by the military, the military ignored him as did Lincoln (Incidentally, there were some 13,000 people jailed without recourse to habeas corpus at the time).

Lincoln was able to convince the public to support his wartime measures and get reelected in 1864, which just goes to show that people do what they must when they must.

In 1866, The Supreme Court officially restored habeas corpus, in Ex parte Milligan, 71 U.S. 2. Such precedents may indicate to us the fallaciousness of arguments that drastic measures taken by the government in time of crisis are irreversible.

None of this is to say that we should not keep an eagle eye on procedures and demand accountability, but knee jerk reactions and loose slandering of those who see the necessity for drastic measures in our current unprecedented conflict seem overblown and obstructionist to me.

If we all wake up one day to find an American city nuked, all I can say is “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet” in comparison to the type of civil liberty infringement that will become reality at that point.

I think being rounded up for questioning is more than that. Under the current rules we can, essentially detain anyone, US citizen or not, for an openended period of time and without access to counsel, without charge or acknowledging that the person is held. That kind Lubyanka sh**t should worry people. The first time that results in an 'accidental' death while in detention we start to look a lot like an Argentine Junta. I'm not saying that we don't or shouldn't take steps to garner whatever information is relevant, I'm just maintaining that we already have reasonably efficient ways to do that and procedural or command failures and weakness should never be a rationale to crimp the law. Fix the agencies and the managers first, then if all else fails, by all means suspend habeus corpus, hell put a tank in front of every bowling alley. I'll root for that when we run out of more creative things to do.

BTW 'Administrative Detention' a.k.a. proscriptive arrest and detention should worry the Israelis too. They are planning an expansion of that and not just for suspected Palestinians operatives but for their own Jews in Yesha as well.

[Elisheba]

I must concur that it is problematic to round up suspects in this new kind of war that we are in. The Front Page article just posted is very relevant to the suspicions of many in this country, suspicions that are well founded. Is it wise to wait for more carnage before doing anything ? Or should we be proactive and sensible and protect ourselves?

Silly MichaelC, can't you see that he wants us to wait for more carnage?

[KSO]

BTW 'Administrative Detention' a.k.a. proscriptive arrest and detention should worry the Israelis too. They are planning an expansion of that and not just for suspected Palestinians operatives but for their own Jews in Yesha as well.

Well I think it is a big issue especialy for the Israeli left, because now they can need to make their choise, stand up for people who completely oppose them (and probably wouldn't mind if every one of them be held for a year or two in AD) or to stay silent (like most of them are silent about this happening in the territories) and lose everything that is still left of their descency.

[Mediocrates]

Silly MichaelC, can't you see that he wants us to wait for more carnage?

That's not right. But I would hate to wake up in some Orwellian future and realize that terrorism runs unabated anyway. We actually here in the US don't live the reality that Israelis experience so it's debateable whether being more aggressive than even they are is actually worth it. Maybe it is, but I'm not convinced.