Despite a wealth of soccer talent that has come from the Ivory Coast, including legendary Chelsea striker, Didier Drogba, the team disappointed at last summer’s World Cup, and has yet to bring home hardware worthy of its talent. And follow up last year’s disappointment with a horrific five month post-election crisis, and the mood in Cote D’Ivoire has been dour. But the country was uplifted by the recent Under-17 World Cup in Mexico. There, a 16-year-old striker, by the name of Souleymane Coulibaly, dubbed “The New Didier Drogbaâ€, scored nine goals in four games for Ivory Coast, including a hat-trick against Brazil and a four goal game against Denmark in consecutive matches. Coulibaly ended up tying the tournament goal-scoring record set by former Liverpool player Florent Sinama-Pongolle, but in three games fewer than the Frenchman. Souleymane in fact ended up scoring nine of his entire team’s tournament total of 11 goals. And for his efforts, Coulibaly was awarded the Golden Boot as the tournament’s best player.
Coulibaly currently lives with his father in Italy where he plays for Italian team Siena. But that is about to change, as Coulibaly was chased down by all of the big clubs after his record-setting tournament. After being courted by the likes of Real Madrid, Coulibaly settled on Tottenham of the English Premier League, where he is expected to move very quickly to the first team.
“I want to thank all those who said good things about me,†Coulibaly told Fifa.com after receiving the Golden Boot Award. “My team-mates and I had a wonderful moment in Mexico. The defenders ignored some spaces which I exploited to score those goals. But mostly, this recognition goes to my team-mates who assisted me.
Coulibaly himself humbly acknowledges Drogba’s clear physical advantage. “Drogba is taller than me, he’s more physically built than me and he’s better with air balls than me. If I can become a quarter of him I’d be so happy,†Coulibaly recently told Ivorian newspaper Frat Mat.
The Ivory Coast may not have brought home the Under-17 World Cup title. But Souleymane Coulibaly gave his country-people something to be proud of. And he should continue to do so in England.
Barcelona have reopened contract extension negotiations with Muslim left-back Eric Abidal. This was reported by Barcelona’s sporting director Andoni Zubizarreta earlier this week. Just four months ago, Abidal was fighting for his life after a tumor was discovered in his liver. He subsequently underwent surgery in March to have the tumor removed. And he was able to recover so remarkably quickly that he was able to return to action on May 3rd. And he even made an appearance in Barcelona’s Champions League final win over Manchester United later that month.
Abidal was born in Lyon, France, but is of Martinique descent. Before joining Barcelona in 2007 he played for Lyon and Lille in France, and Monaco before that. He has 55 caps for the French national squad, having made his international debut in August of 2004. He most recently played center back for France in their disappointing 2010 World Cup campaign.
Currently, Abidal only has one year remaining on his current contract, and Barcelona appears eager to retain the 32-year-old defender’s services. “We made Abidal the offer of a new contract before his illness,†said Zubizarreta during a press conference. “Discussions have started again and we will try to come to an agreement. It will take time but we hope that we can conclude a deal and make an announcement soon.â€
Reports in the Spanish press are that Barcelona had initially offered Abidal the two-year deal that he wanted, only to withdraw the offer and come back with a proposal to give him a rolling one-year contract instead. Such rumors could make for a contentious negotiating environment, but both sides seem to have avoided stirring controversy. “Eric has stated on numerous occasions that he wants to stay at Barcelona and finish his career at the club,†the player’s agent David Venditelli told Catalan television station TV3 last month.
Badr “The Golden Boy†Hari made his triumphant return to the world of kickboxing after approximately one year away from the sport. This past May, Hari took on Tony Gregory on the It’s Showtime card in Lyon, France in the Super Heavyweight division. The crowd enthusiastically welcomed Hari from an exile that he claims was self-imposed. However, his return came in the wake of his infamous disqualification in a fight against Hesdy Gerges in May of 2010 in Amsterdam, in which Hari was disqualified after kicking Hesdy in the face.
Born in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and of Moroccan descent, Hari is a former K-1 heavyweight kick-boxing champion. As of May of this year, the 26-year-old Hari was ranked as the number two kick-boxer in the world by LiverKick.com. He has also been officially praised by the king of Morocco, Mohammed VI, for his outstanding accomplishments in the sport.
On this day in May, in France, however, Gregory never truly posed a threat to the great Badr Hari. Despite being booed out of the ring at the end of his last fight, Hari was this time welcomed openly by a raucous crowd that was eager to get re-acquainted with the exploits of kick-boxing’s bad boy. Despite being one of the greatest kick-boxers in the world, Hari has unfortunately has been involved in a number of controversies involving unsportsmanlike conduct in the ring and alleged violent assaults outside of the ring.
Nonetheless, Hari has side-stepped the controversy, and on this day in Lyon, he brushed aside yet another challenger, as Gregory went down and went down hard. Though many have called for a rematch with Hesdy Gerges for the It’s Showtime heavyweight title, it has been announced that Bari’s next fight will be against Romanian Daniel Ghita in September. Ghita has been ranked as one of the top five kick-boxers in the world. Ghita lost a controversial decision to Gerges earlier in the year and should provide stiff competition for Hari. But Badr Hari has been through plenty and should be ready for the challenge.
On June 15, 2011, the Michigan Senate publicly announced a fifteen-bill package concerning elder abuse. The purpose of the legislation is to help strengthen penalties against perpetrators of elder abuse while also preventing future exploitation, according to the Senate.
The abuse issues facing the elderly have recently risen to new heights. Those fortunate enough to live long are forced to guard against the growing crime since their age makes them especially susceptible to financial victimization. Although the pending Senate package covers physical, emotional, and financial abuse, financial abuse of the elderly can be prevented with the help of attorneys.
The National Center on Elder Abuse (NCEA), reports that approximately 80,000 Michigan residents are affected by elder abuse. With the United States on the verge of its largest senior citizen population due to baby-boomers reaching retirement age, the problem is only going to be exacerbated.
New Legislation Against Elder Abuse
In mid-June, Senate Bills 454-468 were introduced, and referred to the Senate Committee on Families, Seniors and Human Services, by Michigan State Senators Tonya Schuitmaker, Goeff Hansen, Mike Nofs, Rick Jones, and Steve Bieda.
Senate Bills Directly Related to Financial Exploitation
Senate Bill 455 was introduced by Sen. Tory Rocca, which establishes sentencing guidelines for penalties imposed by Senate Bill 459 for crimes of financial exploitation or embezzlement of a vulnerable adult’s assets. Specifically, Senate Bill 455 states that the sentence maximums for a person who embezzles from a vulnerable adult are: 5 years for embezzlement of $1,000 to $20,000; 10 years for embezzlement of $20,000 to $50,000; 15 years for embezzlement of $50,000 to $100,000; or 20 years for embezzlement of $100,000 or more. Serious violations as defined in Senate Bill 459, would be subject to civil fines of up to the greater of $15,000, or triple the value of the targeted assets. Additionally, the sentencing guidelines for financial exploitation of vulnerable adults were revised, and penalties increased, for perpetrators in Senate Bill 465, introduced by Sen. Dave Hildenbrand.
Senate Bill 463 introduced by Sen. Coleman Young expands the current law to require employees of banks and financial institutions to report financial exploitation of an incapacitated vulnerable adult.
“There are tens of thousands of Michigan seniors who have been criminally abused yet their pain and suffering is rarely reported and has largely gone unnoticed,†stated Schuitmaker. The Michigan Senator sponsored Senate Bills 461, 464, and 466. Senate Bill 461 protects the elderly from exploitation while also prescribing a detailed list of rights retained by the appointed guardian or conservator. And, if passed, Senate Bills 464 and 466 will increase coordination between state and local authorities and develop protocols for interviewing and investigating elder abuse.
Nofs stated that he experienced first-hand the impact of elder exploitation as a state police trooper, according to the State News Service. Nofs sponsored bill 454, which allows victims of elder abuse to give testimony through a multimedia format. However, due to constitutional issues, this evidence would be limited to criminal cases where circumstances meet those required by the U.S. Supreme Court.
According to Elder Law of Michigan, although adults 60 and older comprise only 15% of the population, they account for nearly 30% of fraud victims. Consumer fraud robs people of $50 billion per year, and between 1 and 2 million Americans age 65 or older have been injured, exploited, or otherwise mistreated by someone on whom they depended on for care or protection. In 1996, the NCEA reported that almost 90% of elder abuse cases come from family members of the victim, and two-thirds of the perpetrators were adult children or spouses of the victim.
Furthermore, according to the NCEA, there are signs family members can look for to help identify a possible scenario where an elder family member is being financially exploited:
Abrupt changes to estate planning documents;
Sudden appearances of previously distant, uninvolved relatives, who are claiming their rights to an elder’s possessions and assets;
Unexplained sudden transfer of assets to a family member or someone outside the family.
As Mary Alban, the executive director of the Area Agencies on Aging Association of Michigan said, “This is the year to end the abuse.â€
Adil Daudi is an Attorney at Joseph, Kroll & Yagalla, P.C., focusing primarily on Asset Protection for Physicians, Physician Contracts, Estate Planning, Business Litigation, Corporate Formations, and Family Law. He can be contacted for any questions related to this article or other areas of law at adil@josephlaw.net or (517) 381-2663.
Muhammad Yunus was born in 28 June of 1940 in the village of Bathua, near Chittagong, what was then Eastern Bengal. He studied at Dhaka University, East Pakistan now Bangladesh, and graduated with MA degree in economics. He qualified for Fulbright scholarship to study economics at Vanderbilt University and received his Ph.D. in economics in 1969. The following year he became an assistant professor of economics at Middle Tennessee State University. Returning to Bangladesh in 1972 Dr.Yunus headed the economics department at Chittagong University.
His father was a successful goldsmith who always encouraged his sons to seek higher education. But his biggest influence was his mother, who always helped any poor that knocked on their door. This inspired him to commit himself to eradication of poverty. In 1974, Professor Muhammad Yunus, led his students on a field trip to a poor village. They interviewed a woman who made bamboo basket, and found out that she had to borrow the equivalent of 10 cent to buy raw bamboo for each basket made. After repaying the middleman, sometimes at rates as high as 10% a week, she was left with a few cent in profit. Had she been able to borrow at lower rates, she would have been able to make some money and raise herself above subsistence level.
Dr.Yunus took matters into his own hands, and from his own pocket lent money equivalent $27 to basket-weavers. He found that it was possible with this tiny amount not only to help them survive, but also to create the spark of personal initiative and enterprise necessary to pull themselves out of poverty.
Against the advice of banks and government, Yunus carried on giving out micro-loans, and in 1983 formed the Grameen Bank, meaning village bank founded on principles of trust and solidarity. In Bangladesh today, Grameen Bank has 2,564 branches, with 19,800 staff serving 8.29 million borrowers in 81,367 villages. On any working day Grameen Bank collects an average of $1.5 million in weekly installments. Of the borrowers, 97% are women and over 97% of the loans are paid back, a recovery rate higher than any other banking system. Grameen methods are applied in projects in 58 countries, including the US, Canada and France.
Muhammad Yunus has shown himself to be a leader who has managed to translate visions into practical action for the benefit of millions of people, not only in Bangladesh, but also in many other countries. Loans to poor people without any financial security was an impossible idea. From modest beginnings three decades ago, Yunus has, first and foremost through Grameen Bank, developed micro-credit into an ever more important instrument in the struggle against poverty.
Dr. Muhammad Yunus was the first Bangladeshi to get a Nobel Prize in 2006. After receiving the news of the award, Yunus announced that he would use part of his share of the $1.4 million award money to create a company to make low-cost, high-nutrition food for the poor; while the rest would go toward setting up an eye hospital for the poor in Bangladesh. He has earned many prestigious awards.
July 14, 2011 – Representing a growing movement of Americans concerned that the Administration and Congress are enacting a budget deal that will place an undue burden on the poor “while shielding the wealthiest from any additional sacrifice,†ISNA leadership and other leaders representing Christian and Jewish faiths today launched a new campaign to encourage policymakers to maintain a robust U.S. commitment to domestic and international poverty programs.
More than 25 heads of communion and national religious organizations are spearheading an 18-month faith-based public policy campaign to urge Congress and the Administration to exempt programs that assist at-risk families and children in the U.S. and abroad from budget cuts. The campaign will consist of high-level meetings with policymakers, a Washington fly-in of religious leaders and daily prayer vigils among other actions.
The daily prayer vigils are being held on the front lawn of the United Methodist Building (100 Maryland Avenue, NE, Washington, DC) near the U.S. Capitol Building. Led by a different religious organization each day at 12:30 p.m. EDT, the prayer vigils will continue throughout the White House led budget negotiations. ISNA led a prayer vigil for the leaders on Tuesday, July 12.
More than 25 heads of communion and national religious organizations are spearheading an 18-month faith-based public policy campaign to urge Congress and the Administration to exempt programs that assist at-risk families and children in the U.S. and abroad from budget cuts. The campaign will consist of high-level meetings with policymakers, a Washington fly-in of religious leaders and daily prayer vigils among other actions.
In their letters to President Obama and Congress, the religious leaders stated, “People who are served by government program – those who are poor, sick, and hungry, older adults, children, and people with disabilities – should not bear the brunt of the budget-cutting burden.â€
They further explained that “Houses of worship and communities of faith cannot meet the current need, much less the increased hardship that would result from severe cuts in federal, and consequently, state programs. We need the public-private partnership that has for decades enabled us as a nation to respond to desperate need, both human and environmental.†During the briefing, Dr. Sayyid M. Syeed, ISNA National Director of Interfaith and Community Alliances, spoke first about our responsibility to stand up for those who cannot speak for themselves. He said, “It is our religious duty as part of the faith communities to convey our concerns about the problems of the budget cuts that will directly impact low income individuals and the dispossessed. We are asking for a budget that should be just and equitable. It is our Islamic duty because this is one of the pillars of Islam.â€
Christian, Jewish and Muslim institutions and faith-based organizations, united by shared beliefs to lift up the nation’s most vulnerable, are mobilizing across the country to impact the national budget dialogue by demonstrating that America is a better nation when we follow our faiths’ imperative to promote the general welfare of all individuals.
Contact: Adam Muhlendorf, Rabinowitz/Dorf Communications adam@rabinowitz-dorf.com; (202) 265-3000
TMO Editor’s Note: This is the first-place essay, by Aqeela Naqvi.
The date is December 5, 2000, my birthday. I walk through the hallways to my third grade classroom, trying not to notice the butterflies in my stomach. People turn to say “Hi†and do a double-take. I walk into my classroom; even my teacher gives me a funny look. “Aqeela?†I look up at her and try to control the nervousness in my voice as I say “Good morning.†Throughout the day, some of my classmates shoot indiscreet glances in my direction, while others stare shamelessly. Today is the first day I began wearing the Hijab, a head-covering that is required to be worn in my religion for all girls at the age of nine. Today, I walked into school with palms sweating, ears burning, and a heartbeat so loud it could be heard a mile away.
It has been nearly nine years since that day – nine years in which I have received stares for looking different, been called “towel-head†and “terrorist,†been judged based on first impressions, and was once, after September 11th, a ten-year old scared to walk out her front door simply because of a cloth on her head. Throughout my life, I had always assumed that prejudice against people of other backgrounds was something that existed in the past: something that had been buried long ago by the dreams of people such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who believed in a day where all people would be judged solely on the content of their character. It was not until I began to wear a hijab, however, and began to experience blatant discrimination, that I realized that the works of past human rights activists had not completely healed the defects in society–they had simply covered its wounds with bandages that were slowly beginning to peel away.
From the day I wrapped a scarf around my head, “diverse†became my middle name. The more I was told that I couldn’t participate in certain activities, the more involved in them I became. I strove to prove that no matter how different I looked, I was still the same as everyone else. I could still participate in athletic activities; I could still be involved in public speaking; I could still perform community service activities; I could still be me. I began to understand that Society was a machine that attempted to create perfect porcelain dolls: the chipped, the flawed, the ones that were the wrong shade or the wrong size, the ones that were different, were all regarded as useless and thrown aside. I understood that I was seen as one of those throwaway dolls, but I refused to let society’s definition of me as such rule my life.
When I first began wearing a hijab, that cold December day in third grade, I did not fully understand its symbolism. I took it simply as something I had to do for my religion. As the years passed, I slowly became involved in my local community, donating my time and energy to volunteer at places such as my local soup kitchen, and getting involved in interfaith dialogue and charitable opportunities, and I began to realize that the hijab I wore on my head was not just a cloth; it was a mark of my strength.
It forced the people I encountered to get to know and understand me on a mental level before they judged me on a physical level. To me, everything that the hijab entails, the long sleeves and pants, the piece of cloth I wrap around my head, the aura of modesty – is all a sign of inner beauty. I have come to believe that all of us, regardless of our race or religion, have our own “hijabs†that set us apart from the crowd. All of us come from different backgrounds and have different experiences that cause the canvas of our lives to hold colors unique from everyone else. We all have a hijab that allows each and every one of us, down to the most fragile and faded porcelain doll, to have something that makes us absolutely and irreplaceably beautiful.
During the 2010 midterm election campaign, virtually every hard-charging candidate on the far right took a moment to trash a Muslim, a mosque, or Islamic pieties. In the wake of those elections, with 85 new Republican House members and a surging Tea Party movement, the political virtues of anti-Muslim rhetoric as a means of rousing voters and alarming the general electorate have gone largely unchallenged. It has become an article of faith that a successful 2010 candidate on the right should treat Islam with revulsion, drawing a line between America the beautiful and the destructive impurities of Islamic cultists and radicals.
“Americans are learning what Europeans have known for years: Islam-bashing wins votes,†wrote journalist Michael Scott Moore in the wake of the 2010 election. His assumption was shared by many then and is still widely accepted today.
But as the 2012 campaign ramps up along with the anti-Muslim rhetoric machine, a look back at 2010 turns out to offer quite an unexpected story about the American electorate. In fact, with rare exceptions, “Islam-bashing†proved a strikingly poor campaign tactic. In state after state, candidates who focused on illusory Muslim “threats,†tied ordinary American Muslims to terrorists and radicals, or characterized mosques as halls of triumph (and prayer in them as indoctrination) went down to defeat.
Far from winning votes, it could be argued that “Muslim-bashing†alienated large swaths of the electorate — even as it hardened an already hard core on the right.
The fact is that many of the loudest anti-Muslim candidates lost, and for a number of those who won, victory came by the smallest of margins, often driven by forces that went well beyond anti-Muslim rhetoric. A careful look at 2010 election results indicates that Islamophobic talking points can gain attention for a candidate, but the constituency that can be swayed by them remains limited, although not insignificant.
A Closer Look
It’s worth taking a closer look. In 2010, anti-Muslim rhetoric rode in with the emergence that July of a “mosque†controversy in lower Manhattan. New York Republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Lazio, facing indifference to his candidacy in the primary race, took up what right-wing anti-Muslim bloggers had dubbed “the Mosque at Ground Zero,†although the planned cultural center in question would not have been a mosque and was not at Ground Zero. With a handy alternate reality already sketched out for him, Lazio demanded that Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Cuomo, then state attorney general, “investigate†the mosque. He implied as well that its leaders had ties to Hamas and that the building, when built, would somehow represent a threat to the “personal security and safety†of city residents.
A fog of acrid rhetoric subsequently enshrouded the campaign — from Lazio and his Tea Party-backed opponent, Carl Paladino, a Buffalo businessman. Paladino beat the hapless Lazio in the primary and was then handily dispatched by Cuomo in the general election. Cuomo had not joined the Muslim bashing, but by the end of the race, dozens of major political figures and potential Republican presidential candidates — including Newt Gingrich, Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, Sarah Palin, and Rick Perry — had denounced the loathsome Mosque at Ground Zero and sometimes the whole of Islam. What began as a local issue had by then become a national political litmus test and a wormhole to the country’s darkest sentiments.
But the hard reality of election results demonstrated one incontrovertible fact. Both Lazio and Paladino, heavily invested in portraying Muslims as somehow different from everyone else, went down to dismal defeats. Nor could these trouncings simply be passed off as what happens in a relatively liberal northeastern state. Even in supposed hotbeds of anti-Muslim sentiment, xenophobic rhetoric and fear mongering repeatedly proved weak reeds for candidates.
Take Tennessee, a state in the throes of its own mosque-building controversy (in Murfreesboro) at the height of the 2010 campaign.
There, gubernatorial candidate Ron Ramsey couldn’t slam Islam often enough. Despite raising $2.7 million, however, he went down to defeat in the Republican primary, attracting only 22 percent of the vote.
During the campaign, Republican victor Bill Haslam, now governor, simply stated that decisions about mosques and religious construction projects should be governed by local zoning ordinances and the Constitution.
In another 2010 Tennessee race, Lou Ann Zelenik, a Tennessee Republican congressional candidate and Tea Party activist, denounced the Murfreesboro mosque plans relentlessly. Zelenik ran her campaign like an unreconstructed Indian fighter, with Muslims standing in as opponents in a frontier war. As she typically put the matter, “Until the American Muslim community find it in their hearts to separate themselves from their evil, radical counterparts, to condemn those who want to destroy our civilization and will fight against them, we are not obligated to open our society to any of them.â€
It didn’t work. Zelenik, too, was defeated, attracting 30 percent of the vote in a three-way primary race; the winner, state Sen. Diane Black, edged her out with 31 percent. Black declined to denounce the Murfreesboro mosque project and went on to win the general election.
Islamophobic Failures Around the Country
The impotency of anti-Muslim rhetoric was not some isolated local phenomenon. Consider this: in the 2010 election cycle, anti-Muslim Senate candidate Sharron Angle was defeated in Nevada, and the similarly inclined Jeff Greene lost his Senate bid in Florida. A slew of congressional candidates who engaged in anti-Muslim rants or crassly sought to exploit the Mosque at Ground Zero controversy also went down, including Francis X. Becker, Jr., in New York, Kevin Calvey in Oklahoma, Dan Fanelli and Ronald McNeil in Florida, Ilario Pantano in North Carolina, Spike Maynard in West Virginia, and Dr. Marvin Scott in Indiana.
Not all candidates bad-mouthing Muslims failed, of course. Renee Ellmers, a nurse running in North Carolina’s 2nd District, won her race by about 1,500 votes after airing an incendiary television spot that likened the lower Manhattan cultural center to a “victory mosque†and conflated Islam with terrorism. But Ellmers’ main campaign talking point was the abomination of health-care reform. That “victory mosque†was only a bauble-like embellishment, a dazzling attention grabber.
Similarly, Republican Rick Scott, running for governor in Florida, featured a deceptive television ad that referred to the New York project as “Obama’s mosque†and, like Ellmers’s ad, seamlessly fused Islam, terrorism, and murder. Tea Party favorite Scott, however, had a slight advantage in gaining a victory margin of about one percentage point over Democrat Alex Sink: he poured a staggering $73 million of his own money into the race in which he largely painted Obama as an anti-business incompetent. Despite lavishing more personal cash on the race than any candidate in Florida history, Scott won by less than 100,000 votes, falling short of 50 percent of the total. He was only the second Florida governor to take office without the backing of a majority of the electorate.
If some virulent political rhetoric was credited with bringing victory to candidates at the time, its effect in retrospect looks more questionable and less impressive. Take the victorious campaign of Republican Allen West for Florida’s 22nd Congressional District. A Tea Party favorite quick to exploit anti-Muslim fears, he was also a veteran of the Iraq War and had been fined by the Army for the beating and threatened killing of an Iraqi prisoner.
During the campaign, he made numerous statements linking Islam with terrorism and weighed in loudly on the proposed Manhattan Islamic center more than 1,000 miles away. In an open letter to his opponent, two-term incumbent Democrat Ron Klein, he noted that “the mosque symbolizes a clear victory in the eyes of those who brought down the twin towers.†Klein then caved and joined West in opposing the cultural center, claiming that Ground Zero should only be “a living memorial where all Americans can honor those who were killed on September 11, 2001.â€
In the election, West reversed the results of his 2008 race against Klein and ever since, his victory has been seen as one of the triumphs of anti-Muslim trash talking. A look at the numbers, however, tells a slightly different story. For one thing, West, too, had a significant financial advantage. He had already raised more than $4 million as the campaign began, more than four times his total in 2008 and twice as much as Klein. Much of West’s funding came from out-of-state donors and conservative PACs. For all that money, however, West won the election by not “losing†as many votes as Klein did (when compared to 2008). In 2010, West won with about 115,000 votes to Klein’s 97,000; in 2008, when Klein had the funding advantage and a presidential year electorate at his back, he beat West, 169,000 to 140,000.
Off-year elections normally mean lower turnouts, which clearly worked to West’s advantage. His victory total amounted to about a third of the 2008 total vote. And there’s the point. The motivated, far-right base of the Republican Party/Tea Party can, at best, pull in about a quarter to a third of the larger electorate. In addition, West became the Definer: He blocked out the issues, agitated his base, and got people to the polls. Klein ceded the terms of the debate to him and failed to galvanize support. Did anti-Muslim rhetoric help West? Probably. Can it work in a presidential election year when substantial turnout ensures that the base won’t rule? Unlikely.
Nevertheless, candidates on the right are already ramping up the rhetoric for 2012. Herman Cain, the pizza king who would be president, is but one obvious example. He says he may not know much, but one thing he knows for sure: when he’s elected, no Muslims will find their way into his administration.
As he put it in an interview with Christianity Today, “Based upon the little knowledge that I have of the Muslim religion, you know, they have an objective to convert all infidels or kill them.†Cain told the Web site Think Progress that he’d brook no Muslim cabinet members or judges because “there is this creeping attempt, there’s this attempt to gradually ease Shariah law and the Muslim faith into our government. It does not belong in our government.â€
Before a national television audience at a recent Republican presidential debate, however, Cain proceeded to say that he really hadn’t said what he had, in fact, said. This is called a “clarification.†What he meant, Cain reassured television viewers, was that he would only bar disloyal Muslims, the ones “trying to kill us.â€
It almost seems as if candidates defeated in 2010 when using over-the-top anti-Muslim rhetoric are expecting a different outcome in 2012. Lawyer Lynne Torgerson in Minnesota is a fine example of this syndrome. In 2010, she decided to take on Keith Ellison, the first Muslim member of Congress, pounding him relentlessly for his supposed “ties†to “radical Islamism.â€
“And what do I know of Islam?†she wrote on the “issues†page of her 2010 campaign Web site. “Well, I know of 911.†Alas for Torgerson, the strategy didn’t work out so well. She was crushed by Ellison, garnering only 3 percent of the vote. Now, Torgerson is back, her message even more extreme. Ellison is no longer simply tied to “radical Islamism,†whatever that may be; he has apparently used his time in Congress to become a “radical Islamist†pushing, she claims, nothing less than the adoption of “Islamic Shariah law.â€
Shariah Is the New Mosque at Ground Zero
Shariah has become 2012’s Mosque at Ground Zero, with about 20 states considering laws that would ban its use and candidates shrilly denouncing it — a convenient way, presumably, to keep harping on nonexistent, yet anxiety-producing, “threats.†Since no one knows what you’re talking about when you decry Shariah, it’s even easier than usual to say anything, no matter how bizarre or duplicitous.
So be prepared to hear a lot about “Shariah†between now and November 2012.
Going forward, a few things seem clear. For one, the Islamophobic machinery fueled by large right-wing foundations, PACs, individuals, and business interests will continue to elaborate a virtual reality in which Muslim and Islamic “threats†lurk around every American corner and behind every door. It is important to realize that once you’ve entered this political landscape, taking down anti-Muslim “facts†with reality is a fool’s errand. This is a realm akin to a video game, where such “facts†are dispatched only to rise again like so many zombies. In the world of Resident Evil, truth hardly matters.
But bear in mind that, as the 2010 election results made clear, that particular virtual reality is embraced by a distinct and limited American minority. For at least 70 percent of the electorate, when it comes to anti-Muslim slander, facts do matter. Failure to challenge the bogus rhetoric only allows the loudest, most reckless political gamer to set the agenda, as Ron Klein discovered to his dismay in Florida.
Attacks on the deadly threat of Shariah, the puffing up of Muslim plots against America, and the smearing of candidates who decline to make blanket denunciations of “Islamism†are sure to emerge loudly in the 2012 election season. Such rhetoric, however, may prove even less potent at the polls than the relatively impotent 2010 version, even if this reality has gone largely unnoticed by the national media.
For those who live outside the precincts where right-wing virtual reality reigns supreme, facts are apparently having an impact. The vast majority of the electorate seems to be viewing anti-Muslim alarms as a distraction from other, far more pressing problems: real problems.
Stephan Salisbury is cultural writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer and a TomDispatch regular.
When an upstate imam named Yassin Aref was convicted on a suspect terrorism charge, he was sent to a secretive prison denounced by civil libertarians as a Muslim quarantine.
By Christopher S. Stewart
File: Yassin Aref. (Photo: Will Waldron/Albany Times Union)
July 11, 2011 “New York Magazine†— - On August 4, 2004, Yassin Aref was walking along West Street in a run-down part of downtown Albany. It was about 11 p.m., and he had just finished delivering evening prayer at the storefront mosque around the corner, where he had been the imam for nearly four years. Caught up in his thoughts, he might not have noticed the car parked across from his two-story building if a man hadn’t called out his name.
Aref instantly recognized the FBI agents inside the darkened vehicle. They had been monitoring him for years now, maybe longer. Sometimes they stopped and asked questions about his views on Saddam Hussein or the mosque. As part of Bush’s war on terror, the FBI had been talking to other Muslims in Albany, too. When Aref climbed into the back seat, he figured that the agents simply wanted to talk some more. Instead, they told him he was under arrest.
It took a long time for this to settle in. Aref was silent as they drove to FBI headquarters, a fortlike concrete-and-glass building on the south side of town. The agency has spoken only vaguely about what happened when they questioned him, and there are no recordings, though Aref would later describe the time as the “hardest, darkest, and longest night of my lifeâ€â€”scarier, he said recently, than the hardships he and his wife suffered as Kurds in ÂSaddam Hussein’s Iraq.
His hands and feet were chained. One of the agents spoke some Kurdish. Aref heard questions about terrorism, money laundering, a missile launcher. He refused a lawyer, believing that he had nothing to hide. “It is against my religion to lie,†he told them. The interrogation lasted much of the night. He says he never heard specific charges. At some point they told him his house and mosque were being raided, and all he could think about was his wife and three children, who had arrived in Albany with him as U.N. refugees in 1999.
When morning broke, he was loaded into another car, bleary-eyed and weakened, and taken to the federal courthouse. As the vehicle moved through the streets, Aref was astonished by the sudden commotion. Helicopters swarmed overhead. There were scores of local and national news reporters, cameras angling to get his picture. He saw snipers.
During his three-week trial in 2006, he learned that he was the target of a controversial FBI sting, which involved a Pakistani informant with a history of crime. In the end, he was convicted of, among other things, conspiracy to provide material support to a terrorist organization and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. He spent weeks in solitary confinement, days shackled in different vehicles, which shuffled him from prison to prison. Time coalesced, became unrecognizable, until, in the spring of 2007, Aref landed at a newly created prison unit in Terre Haute, Indiana, that would change his life again. It already had a nickname: Little Gitmo.
Aref didn’t know anything about Little Gitmo, or a Communication Management Unit (CMU), as it’s formally called. Once a death-row facility where Timothy McVeigh was executed, the Terre Haute CMU was quietly opened by the Bush administration in December 2006 to contain inmates with links, in particular, to “terrorist-related activity.†A year later, another unit opened in Marion, Illinois.
Although inmates and guards refer to CMUs as Little Gitmos, the comparison to Guantánamo is imprecise: The units are not detention centers, and the inmates inside have already been convicted of crimes in the U.S. legal system. But what differentiates CMUs from all other facilities in the U.S. are the prisoners. The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) estimates that 66 to 72 percent of them are Muslims, a staggering number considering that Muslims represent only 6 percent of the entire federal-prison population.
As of June, there are 82 men in the two CMUs, according to federal-prison officials, including a man convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the American Taliban John Walker Lindh, and the lone survivor of an EgyptAir hijacking in 1985. All inmates are kept under 24-hour surveillance in near-complete isolation. “If the government has intelligence that links you to terrorist activity, then that’s something that the prison authority should be able to take into account,†says Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, in defense of the measures. “We give them an array of privileges that most other places in the world are shocked by.â€
Legal activists agree that restrictive rules can be applied to high-security prisoners, but many in the CMUs, they say, are low-security inmates. One Muslim man was placed in a CMU for perjury, while another was locked up, in part, for violating U.S. sanctions by donating to a charity abroad without a license. According to CCR, many don’t fully know why they ended up in the segregated units or how they might appeal their placement. In the words of Kathy Manley, one of Aref’s defense attorneys, the CMUs are a “quarantine,†and Alexis Agathocleous, a lawyer at CCR, calls them “an experiment in social isolation.†“There is this story being told in this country now about the threat of homegrown terror and of radicalization related to Muslim prisoners, and the CMU is a story about law enforcement controlling that dangerous threat,†says Rachel Meeropol, a lawyer at CCR. “An allegation that someone is somehow connected to terrorism, without evidence and without an actual conviction [for terrorism], allows them to be treated in this whole different system of justice.â€
To gather intelligence from CMU inmates, correspondence is combed through by a counterterrorism unit in West ÂVirginia. Regular group prayer is prohibited, and communications must be in English unless there’s a live translator. Phone calls are limited to two fifteen-minute conversations a week (most maximum-Âsecurity prisoners get 300 minutes a month). Immediate families of CMU inmates can visit only twice a month for a total of eight hours (general-population prisoners at Terre Haute get up to 49 hours of visits a month), and those conversations are monitored, recorded, and conducted through Plexiglas. Physical contact is forbidden, a permanent ban not imposed on most violent felons in maximum-security prisons.
As a result, critics say, those familiar markers—family, language, and religious identity—are being stripped away. “This is more than just being cut off from the world,†says Nina Thomas, a psychologist-psychoanalyst at NYU who has studied the CMUs. “Inmates are being shut into a very narrow universe.â€
While the stated purpose of the CMUs, according to prisons spokesperson Traci Billingsley, is to “protect the public,†Meeropol thinks that they “spread fear.†Shamshad Ahmad, a physics lecturer at the University of Albany and president of Aref’s mosque, says that CMUs “send a message that the whole justice system [is] geared to take revenge of the events of 9/11 on anyone belonging to the Muslim communityâ€â€”a message that, essentially, any Muslim could become Aref.
And especially because Aref’s conviction is itself a matter of controversy, CCR has chosen the imam to become its lead plaintiff in a case against the CMUs, one of the major lawsuits, including the ACLU’s in Indiana, meant to challenge the units and change the way they operate. Along with five other plaintiffs, Aref now sits at the center of a civil-Âliberties battle against the prison system. To a growing number of supporters in Albany—who have rallied to get him out; have published his pre-CMU memoir, Son of ÂMountains; have raised money for his family—he is a symbol of the inequities Muslims still endure as collateral damage in the war on terror.
Aref was born in a mountain village in northern Iraq, where he lived through Saddam’s genocide on the Kurds and met his wife, Zuhur. They fled to Syria, where he finished his religious studies, worked at the office of the Islamic Movement of Kurdistan (IMK), and had three kids. Under a U.N. asylum program, the family learned in 1999 that they were going to Albany, a place the 29-year-old Aref had never heard of.
Although he couldn’t speak or understand much English, he managed to support his family as a hospital janitor for more than a year before he became the imam of ÂMasjid As-Salam, the city’s only mosque. During his four years as imam, Aref regularly discussed his anti–Iraq War sentiments and grew to represent the spiritual voice of many Albany Muslims. “People hesitated to criticize the government publicly,†says ÂAhmad. “But he didn’t.â€
It is believed that the FBI decided to target Aref in the summer of 2003, after the American military stormed an armed camp in Iraq and discovered a notebook with his name and number in it, along with the word kak, which the FBI translated as “commander†(the prosecution would later admit that the term actually translates to “misterâ€). The camp was alleged to be affiliated with Ansar al-Islam, a terrorist organization founded by Mullah Krekar, who was once a member of the IMK, where he had met Aref. Aref’s backers argue that the camp was filled with refugees and that the notebook could have belonged to anyone. Aref claims that he met Krekar only in passing and that he left for Albany long before the mullah founded Ansar al-Islam.
That Aref had a past connection to Krekar was perhaps enough to attract the FBI’s attention, though likely not enough to mount a legal case against him. So, working with expanded surveillance powers, the FBI went about setting up an operation.
Since 9/11, the FBI had begun relying more heavily on informants, under a controversial policy of preemptive prosecution—taking down those thought to possibly become terrorists in the future. It has resulted in the conviction of more than 200 individuals, including four Muslims in Newburgh convicted of plotting to bomb two Bronx synagogues; a 19-year-old Somali charged with attempting to blow up a Christmas-tree-lighting ceremony in Portland, Oregon; and a man caught plotting an attack on Herald Square. “These types of operations have proven to be an essential law-enforcement tool in uncovering and preventing potential terror attacks,†Attorney General Eric Holder said at a dinner this winter in defense of the tactics.
Critics, however, point out that in many operations, it’s difficult to determine whether anyone is truly culpable—or inherently dangerous. And intentionally or not, it’s very easy to round up Muslims. “There is a massive ideological, military, and intelligence infrastructure committed to the domestic and international wars on terror. These wars depend on maintaining Muslims as the primary threat to national security,†says Amna Akbar, a senior Âresearch scholar at NYU’s Center for Human Rights and Global Justice. “The U.S. government seems to rely on widespread use of informants … sending them into mosques and other community spaces without any concrete suspicion of criminal activity.â€
In order to pursue Aref, the FBI employed a Pakistani informant named ÂShahed Hussain, known as Malik, the same informant later used in the Newburgh trial and a man once described by the defense in that case as “an agent provocateur who earned his keep by scouring mosques for easy targets.†Malik had made a deal to avoid years in jail and deportation for helping people cheat on driver’s-license exams. He was also arrested in Pakistan on a murder charge. The operation, scripted by the FBI, started with Mohammed Hossain, a Bangladeshi immigrant who owned a local pizzeria and helped found Aref’s mosque.
Over several months, Malik moved into Hossain’s life, bringing his kids toys and expressing interest in religion. Malik, who claimed to be working for the Islamic terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohammed, or JeM, eventually said he was buying a shoulder-firing missile launcher to kill then–Pakistani president Pervez MusharÂraf during a visit in New York City. To complete the purchase, he needed Hossain to launder $50,000 for him. In return, Hossain, whose business was on the skids, would earn $5,000.
Hossain then asked Aref to be the witness to the loan, a tradition in Islamic culture (as the only imam in Albany, Aref had notarized many loans). There were additional months of transactions where Aref documented Hossain’s loan payments to ÂMalik. During those months, Malik would occasionally mention the missile, using the code word chaudry. The government argued that this was evidence that Aref knew about Malik’s terrorist connection, and the jury agreed. Aref was charged with ten of the 30 total counts, and the jury found him guilty of money laundering and supporting a known terrorist organization. “Did [Aref] actually engage in terrorist acts?†William Pericek, assistant U.S. Attorney, asked during a post-sentencing press conference. “Well, we didn’t have the evidence of that. But he had the ideology.â€
“Family, language, and religious identity are being stripped away.â€
o outside observers of the case, the details that emerged during the trial were troubling. The FBI testified that Aref knew the code word, linking him to the conspiracy, but according to recorded conversations, there was no evidence that either Malik or Hossain informed him of the term. And though Malik had shown a fake missile to Hossain, the FBI decided against showing it to Aref because they worried that he would be “spooked.â€
The case, observers noted, ultimately lacked definitive evidence that Aref knew the true nature of the transaction, and the jury was directed to ignore the motives of the FBI’s investigation. As Judge ÂThomas J. McAvoy instructed them, “The FBI had certain suspicions, good and valid suspicions for looking into Mr. Aref, but why they did that is not to be any concern of yours.â€
“I’m not only surprised that the jury convicted him, but I’m sure the judge was surprised too,†says Stephen Gottlieb, a professor at Albany Law School and author of Morality Imposed: The Rehnquist Court and Liberty in America. “They basically turned two decent men into criminals.â€
Manley believes he lost on emotional grounds. “I think the fear got to [the jury]. They ended up convicting him out of fear that he might be some kind of shadowy bad guy.†Steve Downs, another member of Aref’s legal team, attributes it to what he calls “the Muslim exception.†The emotion and politics of 9/11 had, they argue, altered the threshold for what constituted reasonable doubt.
In the years since Aref’s trial, critics have identified a pattern. “A whole range of policing, prosecution, and incarceration policies seem to take as a starting point that Muslims pose a particularly uncontainable threat meriting extreme and exceptional treatment by the government,†says Akbar. “Because national security has become an area in which the government is granted an extraordinary amount of deference, these policies are often allowed to stand without much scrutiny.â€
After the jury reached a verdict, two local papers published editorials asking for leniency. The editors at the Albany Times Union called the case “unsettling,†with no clear answer to why the men were targeted, and wondered what lives Hossain and Aref would have “continued to lead if they had never been lured into a sting operation.â€
The judge sentenced Aref to fifteen years and recommended a local federal prison. Instead, he was sent to the CMU, with little explanation, no hearing, and no obvious way to appeal.
The first time Aref wrote to me, in a heavily monitored e-mail exchange, he said, “I am not spending my time, time is spending me. My family’s situation is driving me insane and eating my patience.†His world was falling apart at the CMU. “It’s really hard for me to talk about what happened,†he wrote.
When Aref was sent to the Terre Haute CMU in May 2007, he was 37 years old. “I arrived to find a small Middle Eastern community,†he said. There were about twenty others inside. The idea of being called a terrorist sickened Aref. Every day he wondered why he was there, and he hoped someone would eventually realize that a mistake had been made. “I don’t understand how the jury found me guilty,†he wrote at one point.
His cell unlocked at 6 a.m., and he could circulate through the small unit comprising a few dozen cells and a common room. At 9 p.m., he’d be locked in for the night. On occasion, he heard screaming, and one day he saw a grown man drop to the floor and begin uncontrollably shaking and sobbing. When Aref asked a nurse later what had happened, she told him, “It’s all fear and stress.â€
A peculiar loneliness consumed him. As an imam, Aref was naturally social. He helped solve people’s problems and guide them through their tangled lives. But at Terre Haute, he became reticent, curled inside himself. It was hard to know whom to trust. The FBI was sending agents to the unit to ask questions, and new inmates came every few weeks or so.
All along, he felt his family drifting away. That one fifteen-minute phone call a week (a second call per week was added in January 2010) was never enough. What could you really say in fifteen minutes divided up among at least four people? He tried to be upbeat, avoiding talk of the CMU. With the kids, he spoke about school, a kind of dinner talk. When his wife got on, the reality of their separation was oppressive.
Zuhur “almost lost her mind,†as Aref put it. The case had turned her upside down. Worried about wiretaps, she had disconnected the Internet, TV, and phone. She didn’t have a job and relied on friends and the mosque to pay her rent and buy food. She rarely interacted with strangers, afraid that they might be informants setting her up.
Talking to Aref was a project that required a friend to lend a cell phone to the family on the days he called. And when he spoke to Zuhur, she mostly cried. In the four years that he has been at the CMU, she has cried during every single call.
One of the hardest things was thinking about his young daughter, Dilnia. She was born while Aref was in jail. All he was to her was an abstract concept. “Whenever anyone asks her, ‘Where is your daddy?’ she will point or run to the phone and say, ‘That is my daddy,’ †Aref said.
His two boys visited that first summer. With surveillance cameras zeroing in on them, it was difficult to be intimate. Salah was 10, Azzam 7. As Aref spoke through the Plexiglas, every word, every gesture was being mined for information.
His demeanor changed dramatically when his boys stepped away and Downs stepped in. Downs had made the two-day car trip with the kids from Albany. “They abuse me,†Aref said. When Downs asked him to explain, Aref wouldn’t. Then suddenly the meeting was terminated. According to Downs, a guard falsely claimed that he was using a pen “as a secret recording device.â€
“I’m convinced that they understood I was trying to get info about the CMU,†Downs says. “And they did what [the CMU] was set up to do—prevent information [about the CMU] from getting out.â€
The entire family arrived in a minivan the next summer, in 2008. It had been roughly four years since they’d all been together. But seeing his 2-year-old girl on the other side of the glass gave Aref tremendous pain. She didn’t recognize him.
The family spent a total of four hours together, and all seemed well until Zuhur suddenly snapped. In front of the kids, she made an announcement: She wanted to go back to Kurdistan. She felt her safety was at risk in America, even more than in the region from which she had fled.
Aref didn’t want to argue. A part of him understood. “I am not dead in order for them to forget me,†he said to me, “and not really alive to benefit them.†That was the last time he saw his family. They didn’t visit again. Zuhur wouldn’t let them.
On March 27, 2009, at about 4 a.m., a guard entered Aref’s cell and told him to pack. He was being transferred to the second CMU, at the state penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, which had opened a year before. Until recently, Marion had been one of the nation’s only supermax facilities, replacing Alcatraz in 1963.
The move came at a particularly fraught moment for the CMUs. When President Obama came into office in 2009, many hoped the units would be shut down. The Bureau of Prisons wouldn’t say if the new administration had reviewed the units, but they remained open, and their expansion soon inspired a fierce legal battle. In the summer of 2009, the ACLU’s National Prison project filed a lawsuit on behalf of an inmate that disputed the legality of the creation of the units, among other things. Soon after, the ACLU of Indiana filed another lawsuit, about the restrictions on Muslim prayer.
In the meantime, “balancers,†as CMU guards call them, were reportedly blended into the population—environmental activists, sexual predators, bank robbers, people who, prison officials claimed, “recruit and radicalizeâ€â€”in order to address the criticism that CMUs were housing only Muslims. The Bureau of Prisons says it doesn’t use race or religion to decide placement, and it rejects claims of adding balancers, though Muslim inmates continue to be in the majority.
In April 2010, CCR, with Aref, filed its suit, challenging the constitutionality of the place: the harsh restrictions on phone calls and visits, the ban on physical contact, the alleged absence of due process, and cited growing evidence suggesting that prisoners were being targeted for their religious and political beliefs.
To CCR, Aref’s case was especially Âpoignant. “Aref came to the United States as a refugee and was then subject to a dubious conviction,†says Agathocleous. “Despite the fact that he engaged in no violence, that the prosecution acknowledged at trial that it was not seeking to prove he was a terrorist, and that his conduct in prison was spotless, he has been subject to these incredibly restrictive conditions at the CMU … It just doesn’t make any sense.â€
In Marion, Aref’s single cell was just as small as the former one, and his family was just as far away. But something had changed. He began to dread the phone calls with his family. “For many prisoners, the phone call is a big relief, and they get strength from it,†he said. “But each time I call and hear my wife crying and I learn what my children are going through, it stresses my mind.â€
“I am not spending my time, time is spending me.â€
After a motion for a new trial was dismissed and the appeal to his original case was rejected, a part of him became resigned to the situation, friends say.
Then on April 13, I received a surprise e-mail from Aref. “How are you doing?†he asked. And then he told me the news. “For real, I am no longer in CMU!â€
“My father is a very religious man,†Aref’s 15-year old daughter, Alaa, says one recent summer night. “He has a beard and wears Arab clothes and has an accent. But when you talk to himâ€â€”she pauses as if conjuring her father—“you know he’s not a terrorist.†She has trouble saying this word. Terrorist. It doesn’t sound right in her mouth. And she tries it another way. “Baba didn’t hate anyone.â€
On this June night, Aref’s four kids sit barefooted on the carpet of a classroom on the second floor of the Central Avenue mosque in Albany, where their father was once the imam. Some of the doors are still broken from the FBI raid almost eight years ago.
The two boys, Salah, 14, and Azzam, 11, sit on either side of Alaa. Dilnia, who is now 5, sits off to the side, reading a book with a family friend. Zuhur stayed home. “She sometimes is depressed and doesn’t go out,†Alaa says.
Friends of the family say that Zuhur still talks about returning to Iraq, though she doesn’t have the money for a plane ticket or travel documents. Her crying hasn’t abated. When she does leave the house, she occasionally visits Aref’s lawyers and asks, “What did Yassin do wrong?†or “When is he coming home?â€
Since being placed in a general-Âpopulation prison, Aref remains cautious. Without much explanation, he was moved out of the CMU, where he had been separated from the world for four years, and he could just as easily be moved back, like officials had done recently to an environmental activist named Daniel ÂMcGowan. Aref’s lawyer speculates that my requests to visit Aref in a CMU and the CCR lawsuit had placed pressure on prison officials, which might have had something to do with his sudden transfer out. (It’s a tactic that’s worked for CMUs in the past. With one of the ACLU lawsuits, a plaintiff was moved from a unit to a general-population prison and the case was dismissed.)
Last April, four years after the first CMU opened and days following CCR’s suit, the Bureau of Prisons began a public discussion of the units, a move, advocacy groups say, the prison system was legally obligated to make before the CMUs ever opened.
Many of the comments that flooded in focused on the lack of meaningful appeal—that inmates are stuck in the units—and in particular, how the units were ruining the men and their families.
Once Aref entered the general-population prison, he assumed that things would get better—that he would be able to embrace his wife and hug his kids, and that he might even be transferred again to a prison closer to home.
But so far, none of that has changed.
The FBI investigation and the CMUs have so alienated his family, especially Zuhur, who has still not visited her husband since his transfer. She hasn’t allowed the kids to go, either—though supporters are working to set up a trip for this summer.
None of Aref’s kids know exactly why their father is in jail.
Azzam, playing with the yellow gum in his mouth, says, “Money laundering or something, right?â€
“It was an FBI sting,†Alaa says. “They kind of set him up for missiles or something.â€
Salah, who looks most like his father in his long white shirt, nods.
“I miss him,†Alaa says. Turning to Steve Downs, who has been sitting quietly against the wall, she asks, “When my father gets out, they can deport him right away?â€
Downs nods. Aref will be deported the day he is released from prison. Among them, Dilnia is the only American citizen, which means that all the others could be deported on that day too, or shortly after. Zuhur was recently denied citizenship.
Alaa will turn 18 before her father is released, and she could apply for citizenship. If it’s granted, she could become the guardian of the others.
I ask whether what’s been done to their father makes them angry. The boys are silent. “I’m upset,†Alaa says. “But my dad taught us never to hate.â€
The fly, name commonly used for any of a variety of winged insects, but properly restricted to members of the order Diptera, the true flies, which includes the housefly, gnat, midge, mosquito, and tsetse fly. All have sucking or piercing-and-sucking mouthparts and, except for a few wingless species, bear one pair of wings. The hind wings are reduced to knobbed balancing organs called halteres. All flies undergo complete metamorphosis, i.e., a four-stage development. The larvae, which occupy a wide variety of ecological niches, typically require a moist environment such as rotting flesh, decaying fruit, or the internal organs of other animals (see blowfly; botfly; fruit fly; tachinid fly). Adults often feed on nectar and plant sap, but some, such as the female horsefly and female mosquito, feed on blood; the adults of some species do not feed at all. A few species are found worldwide, often dispersed by humans; more than 16,000 species are found in North America. Many flies are harmful either as carriers of disease or as destroyers of crops. Some parasitize harmful insects. Some, such as the fruit fly, are important in laboratory studies.
Flies have a mobile head with eyes, and, in most cases, have large compound eyes on the sides of the head, with five small ocelli on the top. The antennae take a variety of forms, but are often short, to reduce drag while flying.
Because no species of fly have teeth or any other organ or limb that allows them to eat solid foods, flies consume only liquid food, and their mouthparts and digestive tract show various modifications for this diet. Female Tabanidae use knife-like mandibles and maxillae to make a cross-shaped incision and then lap up the blood. The gut includes large diverticulae, allowing the insect to store small quantities of liquid after a meal.
Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (R) meets his Pakistani counterpart Asif Ali Zardari during an official meeting in Tehran June 24, 2011.
REUTERS/Raheb Homavandi
Before the end of 2011, Pakistan will start working on its stretch of the IP (Iran-Pakistan) gas pipeline – according to Asim Hussain, Pakistan’s federal minister for petroleum and natural resources. The 1,092 kilometers of pipeline on the Iranian side are already in place.
IP, also known as “the peace pipelineâ€, was originally IPI (Iran-Pakistan-India). Although it badly needs gas for its economic expansion, faced with immense pressure by the George W Bush – and then Barack Obama – administrations, India still has not committed to the project, even after a nearly miraculous agreement for its construction was initialed in 2008. More than 740 million cubic feet of gas per year will start flowing to Pakistan from Iran’s giant South Pars field in the Persian Gulf by 2014. This is an immense development in the Pipelineistan “wars†in Eurasia. IP is a major node in the much-vaunted Asian Energy Security Grid – the progressive energy integration of Southwest, South, Central and East Asia that is the ultimate mantra for Eurasian players as diverse as Iran, China, India and the Central Asian “stansâ€.
Pakistan is an energy-poor, desperate customer of the grid. Becoming an energy transit country is Pakistan’s once-in-a-lifetime chance to transition from a near-failed state into an “energy corridor†to Asia and, why not, global markets.
And as pipelines function as an umbilical cord, the heart of the matter is that IP, and maybe IPI in the future, will do more than any form of US “aid†(or outright interference) to stabilize the Pakistan half of Obama’s AfPak theater of operations, and even possibly relieve it of its India obsession.
Another ‘axis of evil’?
This Pipelineistan development may go a long way to explain why the White House announced this past Sunday it was postponing US$800 million in military aid to Islamabad – more than a third of the annual such largess Pakistan receives from the US.
The burgeoning Pakistan-bashing industry in Washington may spin this as punishment related to the never-ending saga of Osama bin Laden being sheltered so close to Rawalpindi/Islamabad. But the measure may smack of desperation – and on top it do absolutely nothing to convince the Pakistani army to follow Washington’s agenda uncritically.
On Monday, the US State Department stressed once again that Washington expected Islamabad to do more in counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency – otherwise it would not get its “aid†back. The usual diplomatic doublespeak of “constructive, collaborative, mutually beneficial relationship†remains on show – but that cannot mask the growing mistrust on both sides. The Pakistani military confirmed on the record it had not been warned of the “suspensionâ€.
No less than $300 million of this blocked $800 million is for “American trainers†– that is, the Pentagon’s counter-insurgency brigade.
Moreover, Islamabad had already asked Washington not to send these people anymore; the fact is their methods are useless to fight the Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaeda-linked jihadis based in the tribal areas. Not to mention the preferred US method is the killer drone anyway.
The wall of mistrust is bound to reach Himalaya/Karakoram/Pamir proportions. Washington only sees Pakistan in “war on terrorâ€, counter-terrorism terms. Since the coupling of the AfPak combo by the Obama administration, clearly Washington’s top war is in Pakistan – not in Afghanistan, which harbors just a handful of al-Qaeda jihadis.
Most “high-value al-Qaeda targets†are in the tribal areas in Pakistan – and they are, in a curious parallel to the Americans, essentially trainers. As for Afghanistan, it is most of all a neo-colonial North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) war against a Pashtun-majority “national liberation†movement – as Taliban leader Mullah Omar himself defined it.
Asia Times Online’s Saleem Shahzad – murdered in May – argued in his book Inside al-Qaeda and the Taliban (full review coming later this week) that al-Qaeda’s master coup over the past few years was to fully relocate to the tribal areas, strengthen the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (Pakistani Taliban), and in a nutshell coordinate a massive Pashtun guerrilla war against the Pakistani army and the Americans – as a diversionist tactic. Al-Qaeda’s agenda – to export its caliphate-bound ideology to other parts of South and Central Asia – has nothing to do with the Mullah Omar-led Afghan Taliban, who fight to go back to power in Afghanistan.
Washington for its part wants a “stable†Afghanistan led by a convenient puppet, Hamid Karzai-style – so the holy grail (since the mid-1990s) can be achieved; the construction of IP’s rival, the TAPI (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) gas pipeline, bypassing “evil†Iran.
And as far as Pakistan is concerned, Washington wants it to smash the Pashtun guerrillas inside their territory; otherwise the tribal areas will keep being droned to death – literally, with no regard whatsoever to territorial integrity.
No wonder the wall of mistrust will keep rising, because Islamabad’s agenda is not bound to change anytime soon. Pakistan’s Afghan policy implies Afghanistan as a vassal state – with a very weak military (what the US calls the Afghan National Force) and especially always unstable, and thus incapable of attacking the real heart of the matter: the Pashtunistan issue.
For Islamabad, Pashtun nationalism is an existential threat. So the Pakistani army may fight the Tehrik-e-Taliban-style Pashtun guerrillas, but with extreme care; otherwise Pashtuns on both side of the border may unite en masse and make a push to destabilize Islamabad for good.
On the other had, what Islamabad wants for Afghanistan is the Taliban back in power – just like the good old days of 1996-2001. That’s the opposite of what Washington wants; a long-range occupation, preferably via NATO, so the alliance may protect the TAPI pipeline, if it ever gets built. Moreover, for Washington “losing†Afghanistan and its key network of military bases so close to both China and Russia is simply unthinkable – according to the Pentagon’s full-spectrum dominance doctrine.
What’s going on at the moment is a complex war of positioning.
Pakistan’s Afghan policy – which also implies containing Indian influence in Afghanistan – won’t change. The Afghan Taliban will keep being encouraged as potential long-term allies – in the name of the unalterable “strategic depth†doctrine – and India will keep being regarded as the top strategic priority.
What IP will do is to embolden Islamabad even more – with Pakistan finally becoming a key transit corridor for Iranian gas, apart from using gas for its own needs. If India finally decides against IPI, China is ready to step on board – and build an extension from IP, parallel to the Karakoram highway, towards Xinjiang.
Either way, Pakistan wins – especially with increasing Chinese investment. Or with further Chinese military “aidâ€. That’s why the Pakistani army’s “suspension†by Washington is not bound to rattle too many nerves in Islamabad.
The Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) of UNESCO on its 50th Commemorative Anniversary, held on 22nd June 2011 at the UNESCO Headquarters, Paris , awarded Professor Dr. S.M.Haq of Pakistan a Commemorative Medal for his outstanding contributions to the program activities of the Commission in Ocean Science and Services.
Dr. Haq is the first Pakistani to have received this award from the IOC of UNESCO.
Dr. Haq’s involvement in the IOC program and activities dates back to 1961, when he, at the invitation of the IOC/ Scientific Committee of Oceanic Research (SCOR) of ICSU, participated in its meeting held in Delhi to finalize the arrangements for the launching of the International Indian Ocean Expedition (IIOE ; 1960-65) with IOC as the coordinating body. As part of Pakistan’s participation in the IIOE activity, Dr. Haq, with the support of the University of Karachi and in close cooperation with and support of the Directorate of Hydrography of the Pakistan Navy, led oceanographic cruises, consisting of a team of young national scientists, on board the P.N.S. Zulfiquar, covering the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal. The data collected during the cruises were later incorporated in the Indian Ocean Atlas, published by the IOC.
Serving as Head of the Capacity Building program activities of the IOC, (1978-1990) Dr. Haq was responsible for the introduction and implementation of a wide range of measures to enhance marine science capacity of a number of coastal and island states of the Caribbean, Western Pacific, Indian Ocean, and East and West African coasts. These activities were timely, considering the adoption by the international community of the final text of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS : : 1982) and, later, the provisions adopted by the UN Conference on Environment for Development (UNCED : 1992), which triggered national interest world-wide for marine sciences in new and extended areas of national jurisdictions offshore.
The overall result of these contributions was seen in the progressive involvement of developing countries in regional and global scientific program as well as their increased awareness of the importance of coastal and ocean sciences in the context of national development.
Born in Hyderabad (India) and educated at the Osmania University, Dr. Haq immigrated to Pakistan in 1954. He is now a US citizen, residing permanently in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Dr. Haq obtained his Ph.D. in 1960 in Marine Science from the Marine Science Centre of University of N. Wales. He was a post-doctoral Fulbright Fellow at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Mass., (1963-65) and a recipient of the post-doctoral Nuffield award at the Marine Biological Association of the U.K. (1973). His scientific work covered the vast areas of the Irish Sea, the Indian Ocean, the Western Atlantic, the Arctic Ocean as part of his research studies. He Published numerous scientific pares in international journals, including as joint editor of a book on “Coastal Management imperative for Maritime Developing Nations,†published by the Kluwer Academic Publishers of the Netherlands.
At the national level (Pakistan), Dr. Haq served as the founder-director of the Institute of Marine Biology at the University of Karachi, 1970-78. He was a member of the Pakistan Delegation to the Third UN Conference on the Law of the Sea (1976), where he made important contributions to the negotiating text dealing with the role of Marine Scientific Research in the New Ocean Regime.
Umar bin al-Khattab (may Allah be pleased with him) relates that: “I heard The Prophet, peace be upon him, saying, “Verily actions are by intentions, and for every person is what he intended…†(Bukhari; Muslim)
In a hadith Qudsi, the Prophet, peace be upon him, tells us that Allah (SWT) said,
“And My servant does not draw near to Me with anything more loved to Me than the religious duties I have obligated upon him.
And My servant continues to draw near to me with nawaafil (extra good) deeds until I Love him.
When I Love him, I am his hearing with which he hears, and his sight with which he sees, and his hand with which he strikes, and his foot with which he walks.
Were he to ask [something] of Me, I would surely give it to him; and were he to seek refuge with Me, I would surely grant him refuge.†(Bukhari)
Ibn Al-Qayyim said, “Those who are the closest to Allah are the ones who have their Mubaah (allowed acts like sleep) turned into acts of worship and into a means of approach to Allah, on account of their good intention (Niyyah). They no longer have a Mubaah that is equal on both sides (where doing or abandoning it are the same). All their deeds are leaning to one side, (that is, they always gain a reward).â€
Practical Steps
The first thing we need to do in preparing for the month of Ramadan is renewing our intentions, yes all the way from now! One of my teachers in Egypt had mentioned to me that the companions in order to increase the amount of reward they would get for a single good deed, would compete in seeing who can come up with the most amount of good intentions for that deed. Our practical tip for the day in renewing our intentions is two-fold:
1- The first part is to make a list of all that you want to accomplish in Ramadan. This includes doing acts that are obligatory, recommended, and allowed as well as staying away from discouraged and prohibited acts.
This list should cover every aspect of your life: your spiritual relationship with Allah, your knowledge, your activism and volunteering in teamwork in the community, your relationships (family, bonds of brotherhood, sisterhood, your neighbors, etc.), your speech and character, your career, your finances, everything. And think about making each goal something you seek sincerely for Allah (SWT)’s pleasure. Make your goals challenging but within reach. If they are too easy you will take them for granted and if they are too difficult then they may discourage you. It has to be doable for you.
After you make your list, spend a few minutes making dua that Allah (SWT) grants you success in achieving each and every intended act, and in achieving sincerity in them all. Give yourself at least 15-20 minutes for this tip! Also keep in mind, some of the goals you have will be covered in our Count-Down, and some won’t be. Try to practice in a gradual way the goals you have set for yourself all throughout the Count-Down days, and as such you will have habituated your soul on the good action even before entering Ramadan insha Allah!
Just by renewing your intentions constantly, you will also find yourself speaking to Him more and making more dua
2- The second part is something you can practice today and continue practicing during the count-down. That is try to renew your intention for everything you have to do today as many times as possible.
When you eat, seek Allah’s pleasure by intending to gain energy through the food in order to serve Him better. When you sit down at the internet, seek to gain or deliver beneficial knowledge that would draw you and others closer to Him (SWT). When you send an email, seek to increase your bonds of ukhuwwah (brotherhood) and better the relationship with the other person for the sake of Allah (SWT). When you pray, seek to have the most concentration in order to increase the reward of that prayer, etc. etc. etc.
You will find, insha Allah—the more you renew your intentions, the better each act becomes, and the more blessings you find in them. Even chores will have a sweetness to complete when the remembrance of Allah (SWT) is present in the heart. You will find that just by renewing your intentions constantly, you will also find yourself speaking to Him more and making more dua. Remember and rejoice in Allah’s Generosity! There is reward and Allah’s pleasure just in having good intentions, even if we were not able to accomplish the specific actions we wanted!
In a hadith Qudsi, the Prophet, peace be upon him, mentioned,
“He who has intended a good deed and has not done it, Allah (SWT) writes it down with Himself as a full good deed; but if he has intended it and has done it, Allah (SWT) writes it down with Himself as from ten good deeds to seven hundred times, or many times over.
But if he has intended a bad deed and has not done it, Allah (SWT) writes it down with Himself as a full good deed, but if he has intended it and has done it, Allah (SWT) writes it down as one bad deed. (Bukhari and Muslim)
May Allah (SWT) bless both the quantity and quality of our intentions, and grant us success in them in this life and in the hereafter.
With Islamophobia rampant in the United States, programs and people to combat it are essential. While there are very many with the knowledge, faith, and desire to be warriors in this mission, one essential ingredient is often missing. That is the practical knowledge of how to form teams to fight Islamophobia. This past Saturday that problem was remedied in a practical, “how-toâ€, nitty gritty session which gave these willing warriors their tools.
The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) California and the Muslim American Society held a leadership training program this past Saturday at the Islamic Center of Reseda in Reseda, Ca. Titled: Leadership Summit Summer 2011, the event was well attended and enthusiastically received. The speakers were highly motivational and well versed in the field of leadership training and its application to Islamic activity.
Mohammad Abbasi, the first presenter, is a Regional Director for Keller Williams Realty Group Greater New York area. His experience in the field of leadership training is vast, and he devotes his time to serving his community. In addition to his experience, he is able to teach in a way that captivates his audience. The message is well structured and comprehensive, educating the listener while making him enjoy the lesson.
Leaders make themselves leaders and consciously develop the necessary qualities for leadership, he began. They are not born, and no one can force leadership onto a person. To the surprise of the audience, he continued, in any group one can tell the leader because he or she is the one who talks the least. If the leader has formed efficient teams, the leader will be the least missed in the event of his absence. Leadership is about team building.
Brother Abbasi told of his visit to one of his companies after an absence The receptionist said upon seeing him: “May I help you?â€. That is when he knew he was a success. He was a good leader because the company was able to function without him.
He spoke of former General Motors CEO Lee Iacocca whom the public perceived as being a great executive. On the contrary, Brother Abbasi insisted, he was a failure. The company could not sustain itself without him. As a leader he was a failure.
Speaking of the Arab world he described Arab leaders as being insecure. The do not reward success on the part of others for fear of the competition these successful people would present.
He also referenced President FDR and called him insecure. He chose a weak Vice President, Harry S. Truman, because he could not stand competition. English Prime Minister Winston Churchill, on the other hand, was secure and cultivated others to replace him throughout his entire political life.
A Board of Trustees, a position he favors, determines the course of funding and defines the group’s mission. In the United States we have the government sector, the private business sector, and the non-profits (known often as NGO’s – non government organizations). In the Middle East the NGO is absent and is very much needed. He made the point that a member of a non profit is not motivated by the chance to be elected to public office or by the paycheck he will receive. He is motivated by idealism. Because of this his dedication should be greater. He gave as an example the late Mother Theresa and her organization, Sisters of Charity. The audience seemed surprised to discover that there is a six month probationary period for her volunteers. People work for non profits because they have high ideals, and they will only work for organizations that have high standards.
After a lunch break CAIR representative Adel Syed spoke to the group. Brother Adel is the Government Relations Coordinator for CAIR – LA. His function is to strengthen working relationships between Muslims in the Los Angeles area and government officials and organizations.
Brother Adel referenced literature that had been given attendees upon registration. The discussion began with the problem of Islamophobia. He showed a map of the United States with many marked areas where opposition to the building of mosques took place.
“I never realized it was that bad†said one young woman looking at the well marked map.
“I knew about Park 51 and Temecula†said another “But I never knew there were this many.â€
Also discussed were anti Islamic hate web sites: Brigitte Gabriel, Robert Spencer, and Pamela Geller, to name but a few. On the positive side in the news, again to name but a few, were Jon Stewart, the web site loonwatch (which tracks hate sites), and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (for his strong support of the proposed Park 51 Islamic Center).
Islamophobia was defined as was the term “close minded†and the term “open minded. To take a soft stance on Islamophobia is to accept a form of second class citizenship for Muslims. Civic engagement is primary. It is best not to begin with grandiose plans, as that will inevitably lead to disappointment. At the local level one might begin by becoming a county commissioner. Invite community members to mosques, Eid events, Ramadan Iftar, and to your homes. Engage in coalition building. Organizations such as CAIR and MAS are indispensable to this. After each success – or failure – analyze to decide what the next step should be.
“Reinforce positive norms for working together and continue to cultivate new leaders.â€
We will know we have achieved success when being Muslim is considered an asset for a public official, and when those who associate with anti-Muslim hate groups will be de facto discredited.
Mitch Krayton, a noted author, coach and motivational speaker gave the day’s final presentation. He specialty is training people to be effective and confident public speakers.
Following is a statement from Brother Fiaz Zubair Syed of MAS who was one of the organizers of the day’s event.
“In the Quran, chapter 33 line 22, God says “For you the life of the Prophet (s) is a good model of behavior.â€
One of the major roles of Prophet Muhammad (s) was to lead mankind toward a just society who strives toward God Consciousness. The purpose of this program is to understand what leadership is, it’s qualities, and every persons role of being a leader. This Leadership Summit is one in a series of many that will be introduced to the community where different skill sets will be shared, workshops will be conducted as well as opportunities to be active in our society and cause positive change. We believe in development of individuals through education and practice and that is why we (Muslim American Society) have partnered with CAIR (Council on American Islamic Relations) to begin training a group of young Muslim Americans to fulfill the mission of MAS and ultimately of Islam which is to: “To move people to strive for God consciousness, liberty, and justice, and to convey Islam with utmost clarity.â€â€
Egypt’s former agriculture minister, Youssef Wali, arrested over charges that he allowed the import of cancer-causing pesticides. (File Photo)
CAIRO, July 10 (Reuters) – An Egyptian investigating judge ordered a former agriculture minister detained for questioning over accusations that he allowed the import of cancer-causing pesticides, the state news agency MENA reported on Sunday.
The agency said Youssef Wali, who served as agriculture minister under former President Hosni Mubarak from 1982 to 2004, was also suspected of squandering 200 million Egyptian pounds ($33.6 million) of state funds by selling a plot of land to businessman Hussein Salem for less than the market price.
MENA said Wali is accused of “bringing in 37 brands of pesticides that were proven to cause cancerâ€. It said the chemicals had been banned from entering the country in 1996, but were allowed entry in 1998 under Wali until 2004.
Wali has denied the charges.
Prosecutors have been investigating business transactions of officials under Mubarak since mass protests forced him to resign on Feb. 11.
A prosecutor froze Wali’s assets in April in connection with the sale of 100,000 feddans (420 million square metres) of land to Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal in a deal which Egyptian authorities suspected had also violated the law.
Salem, a close aide to Mubarak, was arrested in Spain last month on an international warrant, suspected of squandering public funds by selling gas to Israel below market prices.
Every living thing has an ideal destiny, because God created us to grow, learn, enjoy life, and improve our intellect, so that we may understand Reality, just like He wants the flowers to bloom. God made every living being with a blueprint of its true nature within its DNA. Sometimes flowers wilt, sometimes people become depressed, but that is not their true nature. Some kind of deficit has occurred, like lack of rain prevents the flower from living up to its natural potential. Unlike flowers we have choices, and the moral responsibility for those choices. We also have human rights.
In Islam, a woman has the moral responsibility for the spiritual status of herself, and her children. On the Day of Judgment a man will however be asked about the level of his wife’s faith. A woman will not be held morally responsible to the same degree if her husband went astray. That is because man has a degree of power over his wife that she doesn’t have over him, by nature. A parent only has moral responsibility up to a point. When the child becomes of age, he is responsible for his own choices. Prophet Noah (as) had to go through the heartbreak of enduring a disobedient son and then, he had to live with the knowledge his son had drowned in the Flood. What a terrible burden! But Allah relieved him of that burden.
He (God) said, “O Noah, in fact, he (your son) is not a part of your family. Indeed, he is (a man of) bad deeds. So do not ask Me something of which you have no knowledge. I exhort you not to be among the ignorant.†(Quran 11:46)
Allah said it is ignorance to love and consider as family a man of bad deeds. The most sacred bonds such as between a parent and a child can be destroyed by bad deeds. When we continue to pray for something in a relationship that is not possible, we are living in ignorance. Yet, at other times, when we should be doing something quite possible, but we did not make the effort, we are also living in ignorance. How do we know if a situation is salvageable? How do we know when to give up on a person or whether to try harder to reach them? As long as we are acting from ego, we will never know.
Even our Prophet (s), as an example for us, asked for protection against his own ego, even for the blink of an eye; although he is perfect and preserved from sin by God, he taught us to be careful of our own egos. Prophet David (as) used to follow his prayers with supplications begging forgiveness for the inadequacy of his previous prayers, in case there was any pride mixed in for having performed them.
Every struggle, whether a relationship problem, cancer, or a war, presents us with opportunities to learn and grow, and to purify our souls. There is a special dwelling place in Paradise for those who are able to praise God in every circumstance no matter what. We will always experience hardship and loss and fear. Our ego can get in the way and make us afraid to take risks or conversely, make us react emotionally and destructively. Real devils will interfere in our lives and zap our ability to understand what’s going on.
Everyone has something that they are destined to fulfill in this life. Sometimes we stop the process of our own growth and degrade ourselves; sometimes we allow someone else to degrade us – because we have been allowing our ego to cover up the Truth deep inside that God wants us to be happy and healthy. It’s a delicate balance we must maintain, and it has to move with every wave, like a surfer. But if we can maintain that balance within, we can then with a clear head make the best decision for what will help us blossom in our true lives.
The Prophet Muhammad (s) said the struggle will go on until the Day of Judgment, like the ocean waves. There will never be a time when we don’t have to face trouble and make decisions about how to deal with these challenges. Until we get our own egos under control, we will face the same trouble over and over and over, regardless of how many times we run away from our problems.
All human beings are in a state of total confusion until we accept Grace. Verily all men are in a state of loss! Except those who accept that sunshine and rain from the sky, and share this Truth with others. They are the ones who can bloom. They are the ones who have learned to collect Power from the universe, circulate it within, and emit Light. They are the glowing ones.
When you see someone who is glowing, you know they are not wasting their day nursing resentments, you know they are keeping their minds clear and clean. They probably have a regular spiritual practice, because glowing takes regular practice. It doesn’t just “happen†just like music doesn’t just “happen.†Unless a musician regularly exercises the tiny muscles in his fingers, he will not be able to play you a song, let alone put feeling into that song. We must constantly work on perfecting ourselves, but we will never be perfect. We can never give up trying to be the best we can be, because that is the whole point of our life’s journey.
Karin Friedemann is a Boston-based freelance writer.
As I drive down the streets of my neighborhood on any given United States federal holiday, I acknowledge the homes and tree lawns displaying the American flags, whose owners proudly flaunt their perception of patriotism. “Old Gloryâ€, they call it…the historical Stars and Stripes… a concept by General George Washington, Colonel Ross, and Robert Morris, who recruited Philadelphia seamstress Mrs. Betsy Ross to apply her talents to stitch. In the years since that morning in 1777, and stars were added to correspond with the addition of each new state to the union, the sentiment surrounding the flag increased, giving birth to songs, and the nearly sacred Pledge of Allegiance.
During my Christian life as well as deep into my Islamic life, I too enjoyed showing my “American pride†by displaying the American flag on my house, automobile, and clothing. I would stand, placing my hand over my heart to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, assuming I was making a statement by slightly adjusting the recitation to say, “….and one nation, under Allah….â€. I would use my inherited melodic baritone voice to impress audiences with the National Anthem, accepting all of their compliments with pride. I recall even once trying to convince boxing promoter Don King to contract me to sing The Star Spangled Banner at a Mike Tyson fight. (By the way, he refused, telling me that I wasn’t famous enough.) Yes, even as a devout Muslim, I was about as typically American as baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet.
In the meantime, Imam Warith Deen Mohammed, (RA), inspired by his father’s (RA) vision, also designed a flag, originally calling it the “New Flag for the Nation of Islamâ€, but more importantly, making a statement of devotion to the book that is the epitome of the oneness of Allah and loyalty to His final Messenger (SWS)….The Qur’an Kareem. It would be an original flag…something the Muslims could truly call their own. It would be a flag amazingly not stigmatized by the media’s warped portrayal of Islam by a handful of radical Muslims who wave flags bearing the Arabic inscriptions of “No God but Allah, Muhammad is the Messenger of Allahâ€, while contradicting the spirit of Al-Islam with unjustified violence, corruption, and other haraam (forbidden) acts.
For many years after the introduction of the flag designed by Imam Mohammed (RA), I proudly displayed it alongside the American flag, almost as if they were equal. For many years I considered myself an “American Muslimâ€, insinuating that I am an American who happens to be a Muslim. Since then I have arrived to the realization that much more importantly, I must be a “Muslim Americanâ€â€¦.that I am a Muslim who happens to be an American, because my Islamicity must come first.
Only out of sincere respect for what it means to others, do I show respect for the American flag…and stand for the National Anthem and Pledge of Allegiance, however without saluting or placing my hand on my heart. I say only out of respect for what it means to others, because to me, the American flag does not represent the good people of America….the good, the honest, the law abiding citizens who fear The Creator of us all. To me, the American flag does not represent the good people of America who cry at the news of suffering of complete strangers…or the good people of America who wish the bad people would either change or go away…or the good people of America who pray daily for the trillion dollar wars around the world to stop….or the good people of America who are tired of spending billions of dollars annually on security systems for their homes, cars, and businesses….the good people of America who have to stand by struggling to take care of their families while legislators with almost unlimited expense accounts take our tax dollars to give themselves raises. No, brothers and sisters, to me, the American flag does not represent the good people of America, instead it seems to represent an unjust and contradictory government that although it is of the people and by the people…it is not for the people. When I see the American flag, with all the respect that I show it, I don’t think about the American people any more than I think about the people who designed it.
Proudly displayed on the front of my home from dawn until sunset is an Islamic flag, designed by Imam W. D. Mohammed, yet admittedly that display is not a salute to him, nor do I think of him when I look at my flag. To me, the Islamic flag I display is a salute to the inscription emblazoned in bright gold letters, surrounded by a green silhouette of the Qur’an Kareem, casting a glowing ray onto a crimson background…it is a flag that represents everything that I live and work for…La illaha ilAllah, Muhammadur Rasulullah, There is nothing worthy of worship except Allah, Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah! Although this is the testimony that was introduced to me by Imam W.D. Mohammed (RA), yet whose interpretation of patriotism I may not completely agree with….when I raise that flag….when I gaze upon its flowing beauty in the wind, gracing the front of my dwelling place that I have made into a place of worship, I only think about Allah t’Ala and His Messenger (SWS). This wonderful design, that I display, that I salute, that I pledge allegiance to in the same language that is bound upon it, that represents everything that I am about… this Shahada-tain, to this Muslim American patriot, is my flag, my deen, my life.
Admitting that “some will call me a torturer†is a surefire way to cut yourself off from anyone’s sympathy. But Glenn Carle, a former CIA operative, isn’t sure whether he’s the hero or the villain of his own story.
Distilled, that story, told in Carle’s new memoir The Interrogator, is this: In the months after 9/11, the CIA kidnaps a suspected senior member of al-Qaida and takes him to a Mideast country for interrogation. It assigns Carle — like nearly all his colleagues then, an inexperienced interrogator — to pry information out of him. Uneasy with the CIA’s new, relaxed rules for questioning, which allow him to torture, Carle instead tries to build a rapport with the man he calls CAPTUS.
But CAPTUS doesn’t divulge the al-Qaida plans the CIA suspects him of knowing. So the agency sends him to “Hotel California†— an unacknowledged prison, beyond the reach of the Red Cross or international law.
Carle goes with him. Though heavily censored by the CIA, Carle provides the first detailed description of a so-called “black site.†At an isolated “discretely guarded, unremarkable†facility in an undisclosed foreign country (though one where the Soviets once operated), hidden CIA interrogators work endless hours while heavy metal blasts captives’ eardrums and disrupts their sleep schedules.
Afterward, the operatives drive to a fortified compound to munch Oreos and drink somberly to Grand Funk Railroad at the “Jihadi Bar.†Any visitor to Guantanamo Bay’s Irish pub — O’Kellys, home of the fried pickle — will recognize the surreality.
But Carle — codename: REDEMPTOR — comes to believe CAPTUS is innocent.
“We had destroyed the man’s life based on an error,†he writes. But the black site is a bureaucratic hell: CAPTUS’ reluctance to tell CIA what it wants to hear makes the far-off agency headquarters more determined to torture him. Carle’s resistance, shared by some at Hotel California, makes him suspect. He leaves CAPTUS in the black site after 10 intense days, questioning whether his psychological manipulation of CAPTUS made him, ultimately, a torturer himself.
Eight years later, the CIA unceremoniously released CAPTUS. (The agency declined to comment for this story.) Whether that means CAPTUS was innocent or merely no longer useful as a source of information, we may never know. Carle spoke to Danger Room about what it’s like to interrogate a man in a place too dark for the law to find.
Wired.com: Do you consider yourself a torturer? At the end of the book, you wrestle with the question.
Glenn Carle: According to Justice Department lawyer John Yoo’s August 2002 memo on interrogation, the answer is no. As one can see from the entire book, I opposed all these practices and this approach. I was involved in it, although I tried to stop what I considered wrong. I feel I acted honorably throughout my involvement in the CAPTUS operation, and tried to have him treated properly, but much of it was disturbing and wrong.
Wired.com: You’re maybe the only CIA officer to publicly describe a “black site†prison, your Hotel California. What was it like to be inside a place completely off the books from any legal accountability? Did it make you feel like you could act with impunity? How did you restrain yourself?
Glenn Carle: No, I never, never felt like I could or should act with impunity. No one I know felt that way. We all felt we were involved in an extraordinary, sensitive operation that required very careful behavior. What was acceptable was often unclear, despite the formal guidance that eventually was developed.
“How did I restrain myself†implies perhaps that I was inclined to act in unrestrained ways. I never, ever was; nor were, in my experience, my colleagues. From literally the first second I was briefed on the operation, I was acutely aware that I would have to weigh every step I took, and decide what was morally, legally acceptable. There was never the slightest thought that I or anyone could act with impunity. We were acting clandestinely; but never beyond obligations to act correctly and honorably. The dilemma comes in identifying where those lines are, in a situation in which much was murky.
Wired.com: You came to believe that the man you call CAPTUS “was not a jihadist or a member of al-Qaida.†Well, even so, was he still dangerous? Did you ever feel he duped you? You write that he lied to you, after all.
Glenn Carle: CAPTUS himself was not a terrorist, or a dangerous man. He had been involved in activities of legitimate concern to the CIA, because they did touch upon al-Qaida activities. That’s a fact. But he was not a willing member of, believer in, or supporter of, al-Qaida. He was not a terrorist, had committed no crimes, had not intentionally supported jihad or terrorist actions.
Did he dupe me? He evaded and lied on occasion, yes. And I always wrestled with the question of whether he was duping me. In the end, I had to decide, though, and I decided he was, fundamentally, straight with me. Never totally, but fundamentally, yes. This is not a black and white-hat situation. I try to make that as clear as can be in the book. Little was simple — thus, my descriptions of the “gray world†in which knowledge is imperfect, motivations and actions are sometimes contradictory — in which CAPTUS, perhaps, was truthful, innocent, disingenuous, and complicit simultaneously.
Wired.com: Did you ever feel, at Hotel California or before, that interrogating CAPTUS put you in legal jeopardy down the road?
Glenn Carle: I think everyone was concerned with this, at every level, and at every second of one’s involvement in interrogation operations. We all worked very hard to act legally.The challenges are how to reconcile contradictory laws, which are morally repugnant, perhaps, and which leave room for broad interpretation and abuse.
No one consciously broke the law, ever, in my experience or knowledge. But what should one do? How could one follow one’s orders and accomplish one’s mission, when it was flawed, objectionable, and perhaps itself legally, albeit “legally†ordered. That’s the supreme dilemma I wrestled with, and others did, too.
Wired.com: When you first interrogate CAPTUS, you write that you tried to establish a rapport with him — even as you kept him fearful that you controlled his fate. When that didn’t get the intelligence CIA HQ wanted, they shipped the both of you to Hotel California. Did CIA consider the possibility that he wasn’t who they thought he was?
Glenn Carle: I had slow, partial, success during my time of involvement in bringing colleagues and the institution to see him more as I did. But I failed, ultimately. The view that he was a senior al-Qaida member or fellow-traveler remained decisive for a long, long time. The agency or U.S. government didn’t change its views for eight years. Perhaps it never did.
Wired.com: Run me through how CAPTUS was treated at the Hotel.
Glenn Carle: The objectives are to “dislocate psychologically†a detainee. This is done through psychological and physical measures, primarily intended to disrupt Circadian rhythms and an individual’s perceptions. So, noise, temperature, one’s sense of time, sleep, diet, light, darkness, physical freedom — the normal reference points for one’s senses are all distorted. Reality disappears, and so do one’s reference points. It is shockingly easy to disorient someone.
But that is not the same as making someone more willing to cooperate. The opposite is true — as the CIA’s KUBARK interrogation manual cautions will occur, as I predicted and forewarned and as occurred in my and other officers’ experiences.
Wired.com: In 2003, according to declassified documents, your old boss, George Tenet approved the following “enhanced interrogation techniques†for use on high-value detainees: “the attention grasp, walling, the facial hold, the facial slap (insult slap), the abdominal slap, cramped confinement, wall standing, stress positions, sleep deprivation beyond 72 hours, the use of diapers for prolonged periods, the use of harmless insects, the water board.†Were any of these used on CAPTUS? Did you take part in any of their use?
Glenn Carle: No. These measures were formally set out, I believe, after my involvement in interrogation. And in any event, from my first second of involvement in the CAPTUS operation I simply would not allow or have anything to do with any physical coercive measure. I would not do it. That point I was certain of instantaneously. I also had literally never heard of waterboarding until the story about it broke in the media.
Wired.com: Did you get any useful intelligence out of CAPTUS? If so, what interrogation techniques “worked�
Glenn Carle: Oh, yes, CAPTUS definitely provided useful intelligence. The methods that worked were the same ones that work in classic intelligence operations: establishing a rapport with the individual, understanding his fears, hopes, interests, quirks. It is a psychological task, very similar to what one should do when establishing any human relationship.
The plan was to be a perceptive, and sometimes manipulative, thoughtful, knowledgeable, and purposeful individual who understood the man sitting opposite him, and earn his trust.
Wired.com: You came to question whether even the mild psychological disorientation you induced on CAPTUS was too severe an interrogation method. Why? Did you sympathize with CAPTUS too much?
Glenn Carle: There is always a danger for a case officer to “fall in love†with his “target.†That’s the term we use. Any good officer guards against that, and always questions his own perceptions. Always. But I was the one who looked in CAPTUS’ eyes for hours and hours and days and days. It was I who knew the man, literally. I’m confident in my assessment of him.
And yes, I at first accepted my training: that psychological dislocation induced cooperation, and would not be lasting or severe, therefore could be acceptable in certain circumstances. I came quickly to conclude that this was founded on erroneous conclusions — nonsense, actually — about human psyche and motivation. [It] did not work, was counterproductive and was, simply, wrong in every way. So, I came to oppose it.
Wired.com: How did the CIA react to you publishing this book? Huge sections of it are blacked out.
Glenn Carle: The agency redacted about 40 percent of the initial manuscript, deleting entire chapters, almost none of which had anything to do with protecting sources or methods. Much of it was so the agency could protect itself from embarrassment, or from allowing any description of the interrogation program to come out. One would infer, obviously, that large segments of the agency would have preferred to leave CAPTUS’ story in the dark, where it took place.
Wired.com: David Petraeus, the incoming CIA director, suggested to Congress that there might be circumstances where a return to “enhanced interrogation†is appropriate. What would you say to him?
Glenn Carle: That there is almost no conceivable circumstance in which the enhanced interrogation practices are acceptable or work. This belief is a red herring, wrong, and undoes us a bit. We are better than that. Enhanced interrogation does not work, and is wrong. End of story.
Wired.com: The Justice Department decided on June 30 to seek criminal inquiries in two cases of detainee abuses — out of 101. Was that justice, a whitewash or something in between?
Glenn Carle: It wasn’t a whitewash. It’s in general better not to seek retribution, but to seek to inculcate correct values and behavior going forward.
Wired.com: Did you ever learn what happened to CAPTUS’ treatment after you left at Hotel California? Why was he was released? Have you tried to find him? What would you tell him if you saw one another?
Glenn Carle: No. I left the case and knew nothing about him for years. I presume he was released because the institution, at last, accepted what I had argued as strongly as I had been able to do so. He was ultimately let go, I hope, because the institution and U.S. government, at last, came to accept my view of CAPTUS. His release validates — substantiates — everything I argued.
I came to respect CAPTUS. We are from such different worlds, and his and my circumstances — he a detainee and I one of his interrogators — are so radically different that conversation would be awkward if we ever met again. It is natural that he feel resentment. And little was ever clear in the entire operation. That’s the nature of intelligence work. He is not a total innocent, I don’t think. But his rendition was not justified by the facts as I came to learn them, which was at odds with the agency’s assessment of him.
Wired.com: Finally, how many CAPTUSes — people you believe to be innocent men swept up in the CIA “enhanced interrogation†system — are there?
Glenn Carle: I do not know.
Note: For more on secret prisons, see my articles transcribing the sections dealing with US secret detention after 9/11, which were part of a UN report on secret detention that was published last year: UN Secret Detention Report (Part One): The CIA’s “High-Value Detainee†Program and Secret Prisons, UN Secret Detention Report (Part Two): CIA Prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq and UN Secret Detention Report (Part Three): Proxy Detention, Other Countries’ Complicity, and Obama’s Record.
Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo†(co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here — or here for the US), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation. Wired
Tunis / Tunisia–About one and one half months ago, I was allowed to sit through the comments of a Professor Alfred Stefan here in Tunis via the miracle of cyber transmission. He has held Professorships in the United States, the United Kingdom and the Continent. Amongst many other remarkable accomplishments, he was the founder (in 2006) and currently is the Director of the Center for the Study of Democracy, Tolerance and Religion housed at New York City’s Columbia University. He has authored or co-authored many books. Of the most interest to our audience is Democracy, Islam and Secularism: Turkey in Comparative Perspective (Columbia University Press, forthcoming in 2012)which he co-edited and his manuscript which he, also, co-edited — that is under consideration at the same academic press — Indonesia, Islam, and Democracy: Comparative Perspectives.
Stefan, was invited to Tunis by the Washington “think tank†the Center for the Study of Democracy and Islam whose founder / Director, Radwan Masoudi, is a natal son of Tunisia, chaired the event. Now, the Tunisians were not only the first nation that overthrew their North African ancien regime, but have been the most successful of the emerging democracies within the Arab “Spring.†As Egypt, Algeria, Syria, Libya and Iraq went through a period of Arab-palatable socialism during the post-revolutionary period from the (former) Colonial powers which helped these nations lunge developmentally forward from their independence. These regimes, however, became more autocratic as time progressed with their increased wealth, but to hold on to power the succeeding elites increased repression and corruption against their own citizens. Yet their populations desired evermore a greater share of the wealth.
With the overthrow of the (comparatively) liberal monarchy in (non-Arabic but Islamic) Afghanistan during the 1970s, and the invasion subsequent invasion of the Hindu Kush Mountains by Moscow at the end of that decade to bolster the Communist-controlled system there from increasing resistance to the Afghan Communist Party-controlled system by civil society there. Consequently, a War of resistance ensued in which a large number of Arab “mercenaries†entered the mountainous battle theater – many of those from the very oppressive nations that they were previously battling that fell or may fall to this Arab “Spring.â€
As civil society in Islam now believes Socialism to be “godless,†and that and the traditional monarchies to be corrupt, bourgeois democracy (there has always been an Islamic “capitalismâ€) now has its appeals as offering a better way to achieve the hopes and aspirations of Muslims in the region. Yet, what truly is the Islamic path to such a future political ascendancy?
Alfred Stefan began his proposals by questioning the acceptance for the democratic within the Arabic-speaking world. If the Tunisians can become successful, it will make an impression upon the North American peoples of a sea-change over much of the North African / Middle Eastern world. Further, it would disprove the Israeli propaganda that Arabs are incapable of democratic governance. The truth is that 483 million Muslims are under democratic administrations already.
As your author has been heard to say on these pages previously, Stefan, also, whose English-language books have been translated into Arabic, and, whose ideas are known amongst the intelligentsia within the Punic space stated that there cannot be a singularity of democracy or even of modernity itself. That is, as your reporter and he , further, holds Westminster or Jeffersonian democracy are not the only molds that can enfold equality, but there are other possible forms for the diverse Islamic peoples, too — not limited to the Arabic but to every ethnic sub-grouping within that religious classification. In fact Stefan and your journalist, also, have determined that this prerequisite for the success of democracy to take root under any particular soil is the opening for such a diversity of possibility. Democracy is unique to any time or place or the uniqueness of its religious environment. Although it is not necessary for “Church†and State to be synonymous, but rather the religious aspirations of the populace are vital to the form of its flowering. Muslim Indonesia is the largest Islamic country in world, and the most emancipated within ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations). Succinctly, Stefan declares “There is nothing that can keep countries from having a democracy… Militaristic Turkey is the most secular country within Dar al Islam, but the present government’s dominating party is reversing much of Ataturk’s policies. Under the traditional modern State’s regulation there, a parliamentarian cannot repeat the word ‘hajib’ while in the legislature, yet 50% of Turkish women wear one! Still, students with religious training’s application to any of Ankara’s universities will be rejected.†There are many incorrect assumptions about Islam’s relationship with democracy within the Occident.
Most Islamic nations respect other religions. There are up to 90 paid religious holidays per annum, depending upon the nation-state within Europe, but not one public holidays is for a non-European religious observance while Indonesia has public religious celebrations for its varied belief fabric. There is a co-celebration between faith communities on the Archipelago, too.
A 100% of Christian-majority European countries support Christian religious schools. These institutions are at least partially subsidized by the State.
“In your nation [Tunisia], you have a history… of toleration.†Tunisia’s modern structure has come from France, and speaks in terms of Parisian democratic forms in the same breath with the nation’s similarities with Sub-Saharan Senegal.
“Any country that develops democracy has to develop toleration!..Democracy has to cultivate a high-level mutual toleration…If Tunis develops democracy, she will realize the possible,†and America will learn about the Maghreb (finally). “Tunisia has the best chance democratizing than anywhere else within the Arab ‘Spring.’â€
Whether democracy will envelop or not over the expanse, “things will never be the same.â€
Authoritarianism has gone and won’t come back. Hundreds of millions of persons watched the Tunisian and Egyptian “revolutions†while several decades ago we turned our backs on the then Algerian elections wherein the Islamists won leading up to an unbelievably brutal Civil War. Yet, the recent two civil insurrections over Northern Africa have changed U.S. impressions.
Democracies are created through elections. “Parties must trust each other. If not, there is only a minute possibility for democracy…They will find themselves in non-democratic situations. The democratic means that a party will hold power only temporarily. After the initial period, voters will re-evaluate, and the power structure may shift.â€