PAKPAC

State Muslims rally to denounce terrorism
Saturday, August 6, 2005

By Trip Jennings

HARTFORD -- Waving patriotic placards, Muslims from across the state denounced the murder of innocent people Friday and said they, and not the terrorists who kill indiscriminately, are representative of Islam.

Worried the crimes of a few extremists might distort the Muslim faith for many Americans, participants attending a rally at the Capitol said they took a day off to combat stereotyping by bringing together Muslims of all walks of life to protest atrocities committed in their religion's name.

"The Muslim mother has the same concerns about her children as the Christian mother," said Imam Qasim Sharief of Hartford's Muhammad Islamic Center. "We are all in this together."

Speaker after speaker exhorted the crowd of 150 or so, which occasionally broke into periodic chants, to not let a few terrorists hijack a religion with more than 1 billion adherents globally.

"The ideology of hate cannot be defeated by silence and fear," Sohaib Sultan, a Trinity College chaplain, said to his audience who had braved Friday's muggy heat. "The ideology of hate can be defeated through courage and action. Speaking truth in front of tyranny is the greatest spiritual struggle we can undertake."

Organizers said they planned the rally after last month's bombings in London to offer a competing image of Muslims flashing across television and computer screens in recent weeks. Suspects in the deadly attacks July 7 were linked to extremist Islamic groups.

"It was a feeling where we would sit down together and we would feel so upset about what was happening in the world and what people were claiming to do under the name of Islam," said Saud Anwar, a Pakistani physician who lives in South Windsor and was one of the rally organizers. "These individuals ... are more our enemies than anyone else's."

The attempt to distance Islam from extremists was a common refrain Friday, as was the complaint the media sometimes is complicit in spreading misinformation.

"Call them criminals. But please, please do not call them Muslims," Nilofer Haider of South Windsor said to members of the media, referring to those responsible for Sept. 11 attacks and the London bombings.

While most speakers worried that a few extremists would tarnish the entire Muslim community, Rep. Demetrios Giannaros, D-Farmington, pointed out that would be similar to blaming "all Christians for what Tim McVeigh did."

McVeigh was the young white man executed for the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.

In one way, Friday's rally gave foreign-born Muslims the opportunity to get involved in the broader society after years of keeping to their own communities, conceded Haider, originally from Karachi, Pakistan.

"We haven't done enough to meet our neighbors," Haider said. "We have kept to ourselves like most minority groups. Everyone goes about their lives and you are comfortable, and then (when) something like this happens it propels you to be more active. We are all very, very upset. We want peace. We want harmony."

Friday's rally put on display the diversity of the Muslim community in Connecticut. Homemakers stood next to engineers, lawyers chatted with cab drivers and store owners mixed with physicians.

Foreign-born Muslims from Pakistan and elsewhere, meanwhile, mingled with African American converts.

Also evident were a profusion of different styles of dressing.

A few women in head scarves conspicuously milled around in the crowd.

But so did youths garbed in trendy basketball jerseys.

"This is like Joseph's coat of many colors," Sharief said, alluding to a well-known story found in the sacred texts of Islam, Judaism and Christianity.

"This is America," he shouted to the crowd. "America allows us to participate in rallies like this."

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Profile me, says Lebanese lawmaker from Waterbury
Thursday, August 4, 2005
By Trip Jennings

Security officials stopped Selim Noujaim twice during recent travels -- once in the Netherlands and once in Pennsylvania.
A Lebanese Catholic cognizant of the realities in a post-9/11 world, Noujaim admitted that he felt inconvenienced. But nothing else.
Now, the third-term Connecticut state lawmaker from Waterbury said he may propose legislation next year to subject Middle Easterners like himself to racial profiling by police.
In a world terrified of the next terrorist attack, he said, Middle Easterners like himself must give up a few civil liberties in return for greater security for all.
"If you are an honest person, it is an inconvenience, but if you have nothing to hide you just answer questions," he said.

Noujaim, who came to the U.S. nearly 30 years ago from Lebanon, said he is prepared for the tradeoff after seeing his native Lebanon plunge into a violent, decades-long civil war that often centered on religion, ethnicity and political allegiance.

"We, in the United States, have lived a very peaceful, relaxing life, compared to the rest of the world," Noujaim said.
But not everyone in Connecticut is ready to concede the U.S. is ready for stricter vigilance if it means surrendering certain rights.

"If we are doing what Taliban is doing, isn't there something wrong there," Saud Anwar, the president of the Connecticut chapter of the Pakistani American Public Affairs Committee, said of Noujaim's idea. "Where does it stop? Does that mean that every Italian is a Mafia agent? Every African American is a Black Panther? It's important for lawmakers to do their homework instead of having these knee jerk reflexes."

Politicians and law enforcement authorities in the U.S. and other western countries have found themselves in a similar debate as they attempt to strike the proper balance between security and freedom in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the train bombings in Madrid last year and last month's bombings in London They are not always successful.

Some Muslims in England already worry that officers are using racial profiling in their search for terror suspects, and some law enforcement authorities may be fueling those suspicions. "We should not waste time searching old white ladies," Ian Johnston, chief constable of the British Transport Police, was quoted as saying in an English newspaper earlier this week.

It isn't hard in this country to find a lively, freewheeling debate on whether the government should recalibrate the balance between security and freedom.

To demonstrate what he says are the inherent complexities in distinguishing a Middle Easterner from other individuals, Anwar wondered if authorities could tell a Syrian and Afghani apart, for example, or a Yemeni and a Pakistani, for that matter. Syrians and Yemenis are Middle Easterners; Afghanis and Pakistanis are not.

Data from the 2000 U.S. Census show more than 14,000 people of Middle Eastern ancestry living in Connecticut, including individuals tracing their heritage to pre-dominantly Arab countries such as Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine and Syria. More than 26,000 Pakistanis, Asian Indians and Bangladeshi, and fewer than 100 Afghanis, also live in Connecticut, but they come from different ethnic groups.

Even some Hispanics might be mistaken for Middle Easterners based on their looks, Anwar added.

"Once you think you have that right profile, there are always profile busters," said Roger Vann, executive director of the Connecticut Civil Liberties Union, which objects to racial or ethnic profiling.

Noujaim conceded the point, saying differentiating between a Middle Easterner and southern Italian might pose a problem, too.

But Noujaim said his idea has "much more credibility coming from a person like me" because he is from the Middle East and has seen the type of war America may be in for.

"I was in New York City a year ago in front of St. Patrick's Cathedral and there were soldiers carrying machine guns," Noujaim said. "A person with me said isn't that terrible. And I said you better learn to live like this, because the rest of the world lives like this."

Yes, there is a new world, Vann said, but Connecticut already has settled the question of whether or not to racially profile and should not reopen the topic.

"We have fought this battle before," he said. Six years ago, Vann watched as Connecticut passed legislation prohibiting law enforcement authorities from pulling over or searching a person based solely on racial or ethnic identity. "(Racial profiling) is no more practical now than it was then."

Rep. Michael Lawlor, D-East Haven, and a co-chairman of the legislature's Judiciary Committee, predicted there would be little legislative support for Noujaim's idea if it authorized police to stop someone "solely on the basis that they are from Lebanon."

But Lawlor, who teaches criminal justice as an associate professor at the University of New Haven, added that state statutes already allow police some latitude to make value judgments in their everyday duties. Officers can make note of an individual's behavior, the way they dress and -- as one factor among many -- a person's race or ethnicity.

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Profiling proposal gets swift reaction
Friday, August 5, 2005
By Trip Jennings

HARTFORD -- Critics of a Waterbury lawmaker's idea to authorize the profiling of Middle Easterners based on their ethnicity say it won't make America safer. If anything, such tactics would embolden extremists abroad.

Terrorists trying to recruit martyrs to die for a cause would need only to refer to Americans' treatment of Muslims and cite it as an example of injustice, representatives of local Muslim and national Arab American organizations said.

"Laws like this make my argument weaker when I go to other countries and say this is a country with values, with justice," said Saud Anwar, the president of the Connecticut chapter of the Pakistani American Public Affairs Committee who periodically returns to his hometown of Karachi, Pakistan.

James Zogby, president of the Washington-based Arab American Institute and senior analyst with polling firm Zogby International, said international polling done by his organization backs up Anwar's observation. How Arab and Muslim immigrants are treated here resonates greatly in the Muslim world, he said. What we consider small incidents here may play out as major scandals there. "We end up judging each other by the behavior of extreme elements," he said.

Rep. Selim Noujaim, R-74th District, a Lebanese Catholic, said this week he might propose legislation next year to subject Middle Easterners like himself to racial profiling by police. The responses he received Thursday did nothing to distract him from the goal. The vast majority of the dozen phone calls and a handful of e-mails he received applauded him for the idea, he said.

Noujaim, who came to the U.S. nearly 30 years ago from Lebanon, said he is prepared for the tradeoff of lost liberties for increased safety after seeing his native Lebanon plunge into a violent, decades-long civil war.

“if a policeman pulled a person over and roughed him up, that's not OK," Noujaim said. "But if a policeman pulls someone over and asks for identification, that's called for."

Even if his idea dies next year in the legislature, Noujaim said, he hopes it provokes a debate the state must have in the post 9/11 world over whether to recalibrate the balance between liberties and security in a world terrified of the next terrorist attack.

Many Western countries are now having that debate in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the train bombings in Madrid last year and last month's bombings in London, not always with success.

Some Muslims in England already worry that officers are using racial profiling in their search for terror suspects.

Noujaim's idea reverberated as far away as Washington on Thursday, where staff at the Arab American Institute had noted it by mid-morning before a reporter contacted the staff for reaction.

"It is a national debate that comes and goes," Zogby said. "We had the debate in the 1990s. The (U.S.) justice department resolved the issue by issuing a set of guidelines."

Those federal rules bear a resemblance to a 1999 Connecticut law that prohibits authorities from pulling someone over solely based on their race or ethnicity. The statute does allow police some latitude to make note of an individual's behavior, the way they dress and -- as one factor among many -- a person's race or ethnicity.

"I would suggest he talk to law enforcement authorities first and find that they don't want it," Zogby said of Noujaim. "Law enforcement is the ally. I don't think the American public really understands profiling. If you ask should there be profiling or not -- you get a split verdict."

Zogby said targeting an ethnic group for extra scrutiny, which he called crude profiling, ultimately is a bad law enforcement practice. "It creates a net too large and it wastes too many resources," he said. Also it breaks down the trust needed to do community policing, which is at the heart of all police work, he added.

There also is the question of how to single out a particular ethnic group for extra scrutiny.

"There are a lot of people from Puerto Rico who look like they are from Lebanon," said Rep. William Hamzy, R-Plymouth, who himself is Arab American and believes profiling people based on ethnicity would take Connecticut down a "slippery slope."

"It's a very difficult subject. We're talking about people's security and also about people's constitutional rights," Hamzy said. "But in the world we live in, I do recognize that a lot of people would feel comfortable in other people giving certain liberties in the exchange for feeling safer."

For now, Noujaim is prepared to proceed with his idea. "I think the debate will come," he said. "What happens now is that (my idea) raises awareness to be vigilant."