American Muslim group rises up to face the hate
WASHINGTON— A man from Sacramento is screaming down the phone.
“Tell me one time, just one time a mullah stood up against ISIS and said ‘stop!’ ” And so it goes. Since 9/11, ignorance, intolerance and hate have flared around the modest red-brick office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, better known as CAIR — the uber-group defending civil rights and lobbying for Muslims in the United States.
But even for these battle-hardened activists, nothing compares with now.
In the aftermath of the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif., Donald Trump has led a virulent, no-holds-barred attack on Muslims. His rhetoric has escalated from urging forced registration, to erroneous accusations of Muslims cheering the World Trade Center attack, to an outlandish call to bar Muslims from the country entirely. It all has CAIR’s phones humming with hate. Even before Trump’s latest incendiary remarks, more than 30 mainly Republican state governors had pronounced that no Syrian refugees would cross their borders. And the U.S. House of Representatives over- whelmingly endorsed a law to halt President Barack Obama’s resettlement plan for 10,000 war-battered Syrians.
At CAIR, a few blocks from the U.S. Congress, the man charged with fighting the anti-Muslim firestorm is in full first-responder mode.
National spokesman Ibrahim Hooper is simultaneously fielding hate calls, doing network interviews, tracking slurs and attacks against American Muslims and whipping out press releases that deplore the Islamic State violence — and the ugly backlash at home.
A Regina-born convert to Islam, and one of the 21-year-old council’s original employees, he has long since learned to keep calm and carry on.
It’s not easy. Another staffer rushes in with the latest bizarre rant: “A guy phoned to say that a female ISIS suicide bomber touched off her bomb with her moustache.”
Hooper shakes his head. Yet another caller is demanding that American Muslims take action against the Islamic State threat, which is now on America’s doorstep.
“If there’s a march with 10,000 Muslims, they’ll complain that 100,000 should have turned out,” he says with a sigh.
“If we get 100,000, they’ll be calling for a Million Man March. No matter how many times we decry, deplore and protest the violence it’s never enough. What do they want — for me to personally go to Syria and kill (Islamic State leader) Abu Bakr alBaghdadi?”
This is the damned-if-you-do damned-ifyou-don’t dilemma faced every day by CAIR — and by millions of Muslims in the United States. Trump's rhetoric casts them as covert enemies — even though Muslims are disproportionately victims rather than perpetrators of international terrorism.
It was because of “stereotyping and defamation having a devastating effect on our children and paralyzing adults from taking their due roles in civic affairs." that CAIR was founded in 1994, rector Nihad Awad.
But since then, the task of defending Muslims has grown exponentially.
Today is especially intense for Hooper, an ebullient 59-year-old whose crisp shirt and
“Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” TRUMP IN A CAMPAIGN STATEMENT “They have to be.” TRUMP ANSWERING A QUESTION ABOUT THE PROSPECT OF A DATABASE OF MUSLIMS, AND WHETHER THEY SHOULD BE REQUIRED TO REGISTER
tie and neatly trimmed beard make him indistinguishable from political staffers on Capitol Hill. But in his office hang a handful of other ties, printed with slogans, sent to him by the right-wing Fox News network. They are “radical ties,” of which it has accused CAIR. Fox’s idea of a joke.
One, imprinted with skulls, worried staff enough to be sent to the police: just one of a number of perceived threats received by CAIR personnel. And the reason why the building’s entrance has double doors, each floor its own electronic security code. Nobody is admitted without prior notification.
Most of the attacks, says staff litigation director Jenifer Wicks, are through the Internet and voice mail, and a man was recently convicted of issuing death threats against Awad. He was previously charged with attempted murder of a Muslim imam.
“Every staff member gets a fair amount of hate,” Wicks says. “A lot of bigoted people take the time to call, write and send disgusting pictures. They’re often misinformed by Islamophobes who spend their lives trying to smear Muslim Americans, and CAIR, with misinformation.”
CAIR has spent years battling opponents, including American politicians and pundits, who have accused it of supporting terrorism and labelled it an extremist or even terrorist organization.
Its funding has been questioned, including $500,000 from Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. CAIR says that money was donated to a library project to distribute books on Islam, “a majority of which were written by non-Muslim academics.”
CAIR will accept foreign donations as long as there are “no strings attached.” Its annual budget is $3 million, mostly from American Muslims, but also other individual donors. Its chapters across 20 states have their own donors and budgets.
CAIR’s most lengthy struggle is against its naming as an “unindicted co-conspirator” — along with some 250 Muslim organizations — in a case that convicted an Islamic charity of funding militant groups. The U.S. government said the organizations were named in order to gather evidence, and a federal appeals court ruled that disclosing the list was a mistake.
As reports of Islamist terrorism escalate, Muslims across America feel more threatened than at any time since 9/11. And many are weary of apologizing for the excesses of an extremist fringe of their faith, whom they believe are discrediting it.
“Islamophobia goes in cycles,” says national legislative director Corey Saylor.
Since 9/11, he says, the worst was in 2010, when three tempests came together in a perfect storm: the “Ground Zero Mosque” controversy, Florida pastor Terry Jones’s widely tweeted plan to burn copies of the Qur’an, and a midterm election.
Now, the latest wave is cresting with the California killings and Trump’s rants.
For Muslims, it’s all the more important to gain political clout at a time when many feel they are losing their footing on the landscape of American citizenship.
The most pressing issues are building political opposition to increased surveillance, as well as watch lists, no-fly lists and “violent extremism” programs that focus largely on them, although Muslims commit only a minority of terrorist crimes in the U.S.
In spite of the overheated Republican rhetoric, lawmakers are becoming more receptive to their Muslim constituents, says Robert McCaw, CAIR’s government affairs manager.
“Islamophobia surrounds us, but I think there is also wide support for Muslims,” says McCaw. America has the ability to overcome the negativity, he insists. “I’m not pessimistic about the future, and that is what drives my work every day.”
As CAIR’s full-to-overflowing day is ending, the news from Europe is bad: the far right party of Marine Le Pen has made substantial gains in France. In the United States, the FBI is still uncovering details of radicalization in the San Bernardino slaughter. A severed pig’s head has been dumped at a Philadelphia mosque. ACNN camera man is on his way. And the phone is ringing. And ringing.
“There were people over in New Jersey that were watching it, a heavy Arab population, that were cheering as the buildings came down. Not good.” TRUMP ALLEGING WITHOUT EVIDENCE THAT MUSLIMS REJOICED AS THE WORLD TRADE CENTER COLLAPSED