BRAZORIA COUNTY, Texas — A small community in Brazoria County has been causing a big stir over rumors that it serves as an Islamic terrorist training camp.
The community, called Mahmoudberg, sits along County Road 3 near the town of Sweeny. When an 11 News crew asked to see the property on Monday afternoon, the request was politely declined at the gate.
But Freeport Police Chief Dan Pennington was recently there. “The best description would be just a trailer park in the country,” he said.
Muslim Students and community leaders are protesting a controversial speaker at Embry-Riddle University. Activists organized a news conference Wednesday to highlight their concerns.
UCF Professor Jonathan Matusitz has previously controversially said, “coexistence with Islam is not possible.” That got the Council on American Islamic Relations, or CAIR, involved in an effort to cancel his appearance during a speaker series event this week.
Standing outside The Embry-Riddle Welcome Center, CAIR Florida Director Hassan Shibly says he has no problem with Matusitz, but doesn’t think he should speak at a school where Muslim students may experience backlash. “He certainly has the freedom to promote fear and hatred, but we must recognize that his promotion against American Muslims is not cost free,” Shibly says.
After an escalation of targeted anti-Muslim incidents at the Islamic Center of Bothell (ICOB), located on the second floor of a building on East Riverside Drive, the Bothell Police Department and the FBI have begun an investigation to determine if the events were bias-motivated.
“The reason why we thought this rose to such a level is because there has not been just one or two or three but a series of events that have targeted this community. We took the last one very seriously and called for a federal investigation into the series of events that have taken place,” said Arsalan Bukhari, executive director of the Washington State chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), at a press conference held on February 24.
In November 2012 some books related to Islam had some hate messages written on them and were left in a bag near the women’s entrance to the center. “That incident was not reported to police,” Bukhari said. On September 28, 2013, the A-frame sign along the street was spray painted on both sides with black spray paint smeared all over the signage. A police report was filed in response to this incident. In October 2013, graffiti was found outside of the building’s entrance on the wall. “The vandalism was about three feet tall by two feet wide, and it was male genitalia that was spray painted in black paint,” Bukhari said.
Then, just a couple of weeks ago, on Thursday, February 6, the imam found as he arrived for morning prayers the flag that was posted outside was pulled up and burned. “It seemed to have been done sometime between Wednesday and Thursday, and that was reported to Bothell Police Department,” Bukhari noted.
The latest incident was discovered on Saturday morning, February 22, when 10 booklets related to Islam, each with handwritten hateful messages written inside the front cover, were found strategically placed in a different parking spot in the parking lot.
“That act showed an increased amount of brazenness,” Bukhari said, adding, “Despite signage on the outside of the building saying the property is under camera surveillance, the person took great care to not just throw the booklets out, but to place them carefully in different spots. That caused some extra concern that someone that bold would come to this property and do that in this area.”
St. Paul, Minn. — The St. Paul Police Department is now allowing employees to wear a police-issued hijab headscarf, according to an announcement Saturday.
St. Paul Police Chief Thomas Smith said he knows of only one other department in Washington, D.C., that allows the hijab in the United States, according to the St. Paul Pioneer Press. Cities in Canada and Great Britain allow Muslim officers to wear police-issued hijabs while in uniform, according to the St. Paul Pioneer Press.
The St. Paul announcement comes in tandem with the recent hiring of their first Somali woman, Kadra Mohamed. She serves as a Community Liaison Officer. Although the Twin Cities has the nation’s largest Somali-American population, Garaad Sahal was St. Paul’s first and remains the only sworn Somali-American police officer, joining in late 2012.
The Arizona chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-AZ) today called on the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to apologize for stereotypical statements made about Muslims during recent debate over Arizona Senate Bill 1062, which would have shielded businesses from lawsuits if employees acted on religious beliefs to discriminate against customers.
In testimony before a state Senate committee the ADL’s assistant regional director posed a scenario in which, “A Muslim-owned cab company might refuse to drive passengers to a Hindu temple.”
“It is unconscionable that a group purporting to defend civil rights would resort to religious bigotry to promote its political agenda,” said CAIR-AZ Board Chair Imraan Siddiqi. “The introduction of this stereotypical scenario gave way to the narrative that Muslims are in some way serial abusers of ‘religious freedom based denials of service,’ which is completely baseless.”
Siddiqi noted that Muslims, like the majority of other Arizonans, believe that those serving the public must treat all customers equally, or be prepared to seek another line of work.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations has asked Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University to call off an event featuring UCF Professor Jonathan Matusitz that is scheduled for next week.
The group sent a letter today to Embry-Riddle’s president urging him to withdraw the invitation to have Matusitz speak about a book he wrote on terrorism. Matusitz, an associate professor at University of Central Florida, has been accused of promoting anti-Muslim bigotry.
“We were shocked to learn that Dr. Matusitz would be a part of Embry-Riddle’s 2014 President’s Speaker Series …,” wrote Hassan Shibly, chief executive director of the council’s Florida chapter. “Dr. Matusitz has an extensive history of vilifying Islam and Muslims.”
A spokesman for Embry-Riddle said the university has invited Shibly and other members of the Council on American-Islamic Relations to participate in the event as audience members.
The number of radical-right hate and militia-type “patriot” groups in the United States, which peaked in 2012 after four years of explosive growth, fell significantly last year due in part to the mainstreaming of right-wing ideas, a civil rights group said Tuesday.
The Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center released its annual Year in Hate and Extremism report, which tallied 939 active hate groups and 1,096 patriot groups in 2013, for a total of 2,035, which the organization said remained a relatively high number historically. It represented a 14 percent decline over the 2,367 groups counted in 2012.
The drop came as mainstream politicians began co-opting more right-wing ideas into state legislation which face constitutional challenges, Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the center, said in a teleconference with reporters.
The first legal challenge to the New York police department’s blanket surveillance of Muslims in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks has been dismissed by a federal judge in New Jersey in a ruling that lawyers acting for the plaintiffs have described as preposterous and dangerous.
Judge William Martini, sitting in the US district court for the district of New Jersey, threw out a lawsuit brought by eight Muslim individuals and local businesses who alleged their constitutional rights were violated when the NYPD’s mass surveillance was based on religious affiliation alone. The legal action was the first of its type flowing from the secret NYPD project to map and monitor Muslim communities across the east coast that was exposed by a Pulitzer prize-winning series of articles in 2011 by the Associated Press.
In his judgment, released on Thursday, Martini dismisses the complaint made by the plaintiffs that they had been targeted for police monitoring solely because of their religion. He writes: “The more likely explanation for the surveillance was a desire to locate budding terrorist conspiracies. The most obvious reason for so concluding is that surveillance of the Muslim community began just after the attacks of September 11, 2001. The police could not have monitored New Jersey for Muslim terrorist activities without monitoring the Muslim community itself.”
Baher Azmy, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights that represented the plaintiffs along with attorneys from the civil rights group Muslim Advocates, said that the ruling was dangerous. He equated it with the now widely discredited US supreme court ruling in 1944, Korematsu v United States, that declared constitutional the blanket internment of Japanese Americans during the second world war.
“The dangerous part is that Martini’s ruling sets no limits on racial profiling of Muslims. You don’t have to deeply unpack this to see that it is wrong,” Azmy said.
The Culpeper County Sheriff’s Office in Virginia is planning to host a three-day training by John Guandolo, a notorious Muslim-basher and conspiracy theorist who resigned from the FBI before he could be investigated for misconduct, according to promotional materials.
It’s hard to believe that the Culpeper County Sheriff’s Office would knowingly associate itself with such a disreputable character, who regularly attacks the U.S. government, claims that the director of the Central Intelligence Agency is a secret Muslim agent for the Saudi government and says that American Muslims “do not have a First Amendment right to do anything.”
Josh Glasstetter of the Southern Poverty Law Center writes at Salon, 17 February 2014
