Category Archives: State Oppression

Dearborn residents on terrorist watch list second only to New York, report says

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Among the U.S. cities that have the most residents on the government’s terrorist watch list is one that stands out because of its comparatively small population: Dearborn.

Dearborn, a suburb of Detroit, was described by The Intercept, an online news site that reports on issues of national security, as having the second-highest concentration of people designated by the government as “known or suspected terrorists.”

The Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, along with other civil rights organizations, will hold a press conference Aug. 8 at Dearborn City Hall to call for a congressional inquiry into how the government could label Dearborn as such.

The report said that Dearborn’s ranking, just behind New York City and ahead of Houston despite their significantly larger populations, has to do with its concentration of Arab and Muslim Americans.

“Given that there has not been a Dearborn resident who has ever committed an act of terrorism in the homeland, nor any significant pattern of residents being involved in international terrorism, we have serious concerns that federal law enforcement views Dearborn as a suspect community primarily based on its Arab and Muslim demographics,” said CAIR-MI Executive Director Dawud Walid in a news release.

Dearborn has the largest percentage of Arab Americans in the country, according to The Intercept report. “At 96,000 residents, Dearborn is much smaller than the other cities in the top five, suggesting that its significant Muslim population – 40 percent of its population is of Arab descent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau – has been disproportionately targeted for watchlisting,” the report said.

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Abbott defends new anti-terrorism laws as Islamic groups warn of ‘witchhunt’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Tony Abbott announces anti-terrorism measuresTony Abbott has defended the need to force people returning from declared conflict zones to prove they were there for legitimate purposes, saying Australian-born fighters were “exultantly holding up the severed heads of surrendering members of the Iraqi security forces”.

The prime minister intensified his rhetoric over planned national security reforms on Wednesday, as some members of the Islamic community warned of the potential for a “witchhunt” against Muslims and of the practical difficulties flowing from the effective reversal of the onus of proof.

Labor remains in a holding pattern, reluctant to express a clear position before a government briefing expected to occur within the next few days, although the shadow attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, said the new criminal offence of travelling to a designated area without a legitimate purpose rang “alarm bells”.

The Greens argued the government was “trashing long-established legal norms”.

There remains uncertainty over elements of the government’s planned reforms, including the range of customer information that internet service providers would be be forced to store under a mandatory data retention scheme. The human rights commissioner, Tim Wilson, handpicked by the federal government to defend freedom, said the proposed data retention scheme was “a very serious threat to privacy”.

Abbott announced on Tuesday his plans to broaden the listing criteria for terrorist organisations, lower the threshold for arrest without warrant for terrorism offences, extend police and intelligence agencies’ powers to stop, question and detain suspects, and make it easier for the Australian federal police (AFP) to seek control orders on returning foreign fighters.

The foreign affairs minister, Julie Bishop, would be able to designate an area where terrorist organisations were conducting hostile activities, such as parts of Iraq and Syria, and it would become an offence to travel to those areas “unless there is a legitimate purpose”.

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‘Trojan Horse’ inquiry: Clarke report based on uncorroborated smear, anecdote, hoax, chatroom gossip and neoconservative assumptions

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Letter in today’s Guardian:

The new secretary of state for education, Nicky Morgan, makes various pledges following the “Trojan horse” reports on Birmingham schools. Several of her pledges are valuable. The basis for them, however, is unsound. Peter Clarke’s report is not “forensic”, as Nicky Morgan claims (Report, 22 July), but a biased mix of uncorroborated smear, anecdote, hoax and chatroom gossip.

It reflects neoconservative assumptions about the nature of extremism; ignores significant testimony and viewpoints; implies the essential problem in Birmingham is simply the influence of certain individuals; discusses governance but not curriculum; ignores the concerns and perceptions of parents and young people; and is unlikely to bear judicial scrutiny.

The Trojan horse affair has done much damage in Birmingham, both to individuals and to community cohesion. Political leaders have key roles in the urgent process of restoration and support for curriculum renewal. Alas, they will not be much helped by the official reports of Clarke, Ian Kershaw and Ofsted.

They will, though, be helped by the unique strength and goodwill of people in Birmingham itself.

Tim Brighouse, Gus John, Arun Kundnani, Sameena Choudry, Akram Khan-Cheema, Arzu Merali, Robin Richardson, Maurice Irfan Coles, Gill Cressey, Steph Green, Ashfaque Chowdhury, Ibrahim Hewitt, Baljeet Singh Gill, Arshad Ali, S Sayyid, Massoud Shadjareh, Abdool Karim Vakil and Tom Wylie

‘Trojan horse’ scandal wrecked community cohesion – study

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Birmingham Mail jihadist plotA new study into the effects of the “Trojan horse” scandal in Birmingham finds 90 per cent of the city’s Muslims feel community cohesion has been damaged by the way the affair was handled.

It began with an anonymous letter that is widely now believed to have been a hoax. But the Trojan horse allegations, that a group of hard-line Salafis were plotting to impose a strict interpretation of Islam in secular state schools, exploded into one of the biggest scandals Birmingham has ever seen.

There were four separate inquiries, one led by the former head of counter-terrorism in the UK, and dozens of reports in 25 schools. It also led to a political fall-out at the heart of government and contributed to the demotion of the education secretary, Michael Gove.

Every morning as they started their school day, children in the city, and their parents, had to contend with camera crews and journalists waiting outside the gates, filming them and asking for interviews.

Now a study by Birmingham City University, released exclusively to Channel 4 News, has looked at the impact this had on those children. The study, by criminologist Imran Awan, found some worrying evidence that Muslim communities have been left feeling targeted and stigmatised.

“Previous studies have shown that British Muslims felt very comfortable with their identity, they felt well integrated and proud to be British citizens,” Mr Awan told me. “But much of this has been undone by what they feel has been relentless, unfair criticism.”

One mother said: “What’s the point of us trying to integrate, every time we do we are somehow told it’s not good enough, or we’re not getting it right.”

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Regulator’s views on Islam come under close scrutiny

Posted on by Bob Pitt

William ShawcrossIn April, the chair of the Charity Commission told The Sunday Times: “The problem of Islamist extremism is not the most widespread problem we face in terms of abuse of charities, but is potentially the most deadly. And it is, alas, growing.”

William Shawcross might have had in mind Abdul Waheed Majeed, who travelled from the UK with a charity aid convoy to Syria and drove a truck packed with explosives into the wall of a prison in Aleppo in February. This was believed to be the first suicide attack carried out in Syria by a Briton, but whether this on its own justifies the “most deadly” assessment is up for debate.

Since February, the Charity Commission has hosted meetings for charities that work in Syria, joined a national police campaign to protect young people from the dangers of travelling there and issued 10 tips to help Muslims give safely during Ramadan. It has also opened monitoring cases and statutory inquiries into Muslim charities working in Syria, and into other Muslim charities.

Of the 20 most recent statutory inquiries announced by the commission, five involved Muslim charities. This is hugely disproportionate: out of more than 180,000 charities registered with the commission, there are perhaps 2,000 that can be defined as Muslim or Islamic.

It is hard to see where risk-based monitoring ends and bias begins. The accusation of bias was raised by Sir Stephen Bubb, head of the charity leaders group Acevo, who said last month that the chief executives of Islamic Relief and Muslim Aid, and the head of the Muslim Charities Forum, had told him the regulator was “targeting Muslim charities in a disproportionate way”.

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Muslim Council of Britain rejects findings of Trojan horse report

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Birmingham Mail jihadist plotThe Muslim Council of Britain has warned education authorities “not to be sidetracked by culture wars initiated by divisive commentators”, as it rejected many of the findings of a government-commissioned report that found a co-ordinated effort by extreme Muslims to take over some Birmingham schools.

The MCB said the report, written by Peter Clarke, the former Met counter-terror chief, was guilty of “conflating conservative Muslim practices to a supposed ideology and agenda to Islamise secular schools”.

Clarke’s report highlighted a pamphlet published by the MCB in 2007 and co-authored by the former chairman of Park View Educational Trust, Tahir Alam, one of the figures most criticised in the recent raft of government reports. The report alleged that the pamphlet set out a blueprint for the takeover of schools by Muslims.

Alam retaliated early on Wednesday by claiming that Clarke had not even visited some of the schools mentioned in his report. In an interview on Radio 4, he said the Clarke report was “commissioned as part of a campaign, really, an offensive against our school, which was politically motivated”.

The MCB said the pamphlet was “under routine review” and was always aimed at being advisory in nature, helping schools engage with Muslim parents. It added it was “patently absurd” to suggest the MCB was part of a movement to take over schools or promote a “particular hardline strand of Sunni Islam that raises concerns about their vulnerability to radicalisation in the future”.

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Salma Yaqoob: Stigmatising Muslims won’t solve problems in Birmingham schools

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Salma_YaqoobThe residents of Birmingham ought to be able to sleep more easily tonight. Peter Clarke’s 129-page report into the city’s schools found no evidence of plots to indoctrinate, groom or recruit school pupils to an agenda of radicalisation, violent extremism or terrorism. This is also the key finding of the reports commissioned by Birmingham city council and Ofsted.

Clarke, a former counter-terror police chief, found that a small number of governors in a small number of schools have sought to influence curriculums with bigoted views. He says: “There has been coordinated, deliberate and sustained action, carried out by a number of associated individuals, to introduce an intolerant and aggressive Islamic ethos into a few schools. The effect has been to limit the life chances of the young people in their care and to render them more vulnerable to pernicious influences.”

Some of the views expressed are clearly unacceptable. There should be no place in our schools for the promotion of intolerance, division, sexism or homophobia. But these are problems that are capable of being solved without the inflammatory rhetoric most associated with the recently sacked Michael Gove. There is no natural spectrum that takes a person from observing a faith to extremism, to violent extremism.

Unfortunately, a great deal of damage has been done by politicians who whip up hostility towards migrants coming to this country or towards a Muslim community that is very much part of Britain. Viewing the problems of governance through the prism of “culture wars”, with Birmingham schools as the battlefield, was bound to leave many casualties. The reality on the ground is a huge increase in bullying – including in one case Muslim children having a dog set on them – and being taunted with accusations of learning to make bombs at school. The impact of this stigma on a whole generation of the city’s Muslim students when applying to universities and jobs cannot be overstated.

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US terrorism prosecutions: Trials of American Muslims rife with abuse

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Illusion of JusticeThe US Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have targeted American Muslims in abusive counterterrorism “sting operations” based on religious and ethnic identity, Human Rights Watch and Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute said in a report released today. Many of the more than 500 terrorism-related cases prosecuted in US federal courts since September 11, 2001, have alienated the very communities that can help prevent terrorist crimes.

The 214-page report, “Illusion of Justice: Human Rights Abuses in US Terrorism Prosecutions,” examines 27 federal terrorism cases from initiation of the investigations to sentencing and post-conviction conditions of confinement. It documents the significant human cost of certain counterterrorism practices, such as overly aggressive sting operations and unnecessarily restrictive conditions of confinement.

“Americans have been told that their government is keeping them safe by preventing and prosecuting terrorism inside the US,” said Andrea Prasow, deputy Washington director at Human Rights Watch and one of the authors of the report. “But take a closer look and you realize that many of these people would never have committed a crime if not for law enforcement encouraging, pressuring, and sometimes paying them to commit terrorist acts.”

Many prosecutions have properly targeted individuals engaged in planning or financing terror attacks, the groups found. But many others have targeted people who do not appear to have been involved in terrorist plotting or financing at the time the government began to investigate them. And many of the cases involve due process violations and abusive conditions of confinement that have resulted in excessively long prison sentences.

The report is based on more than 215 interviews with people charged with or convicted of terrorism-related crimes, members of their families and their communities, criminal defense attorneys, judges, current and former federal prosecutors, government officials, academics, and other experts.

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City in Tarragona passes bylaw banning burqas and niqabs in public places

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Alicia Alegret with Carles PellicerThe Reus city council, in the Catalan province of Tarragona, on Friday approved new bylaws that will ban people from wearing a burqa, niqab or any other kind of full face veil in public places.

The measure is the first to go so far in Spain, given that other such local legislation had only banned such clothing on municipal-owned premises.

The measure was passed thanks to votes from the coalition government in the city council, made up of the conservative Popular Party (PP) and the Catalan nationalist bloc CiU. The opposition parties – including the Catalan Socialists, PSC – all voted against the measure.

The local government had called for the prohibition based on criteria of “security” and “coexistence.”

CiU and the PP initially wanted to introduce fines of €750 for wearing this clothing, but the mayor, Carles Pellicer (CiU), and the deputy mayor, Alicia Alegret (PP), [pictured] admitted that they would not be able to apply such penalties. The police will simply have powers to identify anyone who has their face covered in public spaces.

“According to a sentence from the Supreme Court from February 13, 2013, municipal powers do not allow for fines for people with their face covered due to religious reasons,” a juridical report commissioned by the PSC reads. “If the municipal authority does not observe this limitation to its powers to levy fines, it could be committing the offense of perversion of justice.”

Reus says that it is backed by a recent sentence issued by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, which backed a similar ban in France.

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