A humiliating experience opened my eyes to discrimination that has become common in post-9/11 America under the pretext of safety and security
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Posted by Frieda in Racism & Islamophobia in America on July 4th, 2018
https://www.cnn.com/2017/11/29/politics/donald-trump-retweet-jayda-fransen/index.html
Posted by Brave_Heart in Decline of Empires, NGOs-Trojan Horse For Spies, THE MAD DUDE, Trump, TRUMP - INDIA BUSINESS, US INFILTRATION OF PAKISTAN AGENCIES & COMMISSIONS, US Interference in Balochistan, US Media, US SPYING ON PAKISTAN, US SPYING ON PAKISTAN FOR INDIA & ISRAEL, US-Iran-India Axis on February 22nd, 2018
The Diplomat
For a 16-year-long war in Afghanistan, whose failure lies in an endless list of complex causes – including flawed strategy, incoherent war aims, return of the warlords, rise of fiefdoms and ungoverned spaces, corruption, power struggles and a competitive and conflict-prone regional environment – U.S. President Donald Trump has one simple solution: get rid of the Haqqani Network and Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan. And if Pakistan does not oblige, cut off aid.
Like the Afghanistan war, the equally complicated U.S.-Pakistan relationship is also being narrowly defined, thereby obscuring the many different ways it can serve or hurt the very American interests that the Trump administration is trying to serve.
The War in Afghanistan: What Went Wrong
It was a war that may not have been unnecessary but was nonetheless possibly avoidable. It has been an unwinnable war in the way it has been conducted, especially given the realities of a strife-torn country wracked by multiple conflicts since the overthrow of the monarchy in 1973. The 1980s war against the Soviets and the subsequent civil war had raised the profile of the mullah and jihad and changed not only Afghanistan but also the adjoining tribal territories in Pakistan. Home to millions of Afghan refugees and base to mujaheddin, these territories almost became like one country along with the areas across the Afghan border.
Pakistan’s heartland too was affected by the religious infrastructure spawned by the 1980s war and by Islamabad’s own follies, to which Washington made no small contribution, first through the ISI- and CIA-sponsored jihad in Afghanistan, and then by sanctioning Pakistan in 1990 and leaving it to its own devices. The Taliban were an extension of this slow unravelling of Afghanistan, and strategic overreach of the Pakistan army and societal changes in the country.
Former President George W. Bush made grievous mistakes upon America’s return to Afghanistan. He showed no understanding of what had been going on in and around Afghanistan since Washington’s last exit. It was a strategic mistake to try to defeat al-Qaeda by defeating Taliban who were not going to fight but instead run away to Pakistan. The focus should have been on al-Qaeda. The context of dealing with the Taliban was fixing fractured Afghanistan through reconstruction and stabilization of the country with a new ethnic-regional balance acceptable to all the Afghans. That is what you call nation-building. But Washington, of course, would have none of that.
Instead, Bush outsourced much of the war to warlords and rushed to institute democracy, guided by the need to get domestic support for the war and by a flawed view that democracy is nation-building. Actually, democracy and nation-building are two separate challenges, with one sometimes reinforcing the other but not always.
In Afghanistan, democracy did not help. It made Karzai dependent on the political support of warlords and regional power brokers, the very people who had brought Afghanistan to grief in the 1990s. This led to payoffs, corruption, a drug mafia, power struggles, and bad governance, facilitating the return of the Taliban which led a resistance that was a part insurgency, part jihad, and part civil-war. And by creating a dual authority – their own and that of the Afghan government – Americans set up a perfect scenario for clash of personalities, policies and interests, making for a poor war strategy.
While Bush went on to fight another war, for his successor, it was a story of dealing with his deeply conflicted approach to the war where policy and legacy collided. Indeed the policymaking itself was not without its own conflicts, strife-torn as it was by turf wars, interagency rivalries and bureaucratic tensions.
The Trump Strategy
Now Trump is seeking a military solution to the conflict. There is a talk of a political solution, but that seems to be just a Plan B in case the military option fails. The suspension of aid to Pakistan is aimed at pressuring Islamabad to help Washington defeat the Taliban. But Pakistan is finding it hard to oblige without relinquishing its national interests in favour of U.S. aid, and that too in the face of public humiliation by Trump. It certainly will not do so in this election year, and not in an atmosphere where Pakistan sees the Indian threat having doubled with India’s increased presence in Afghanistan from where it is allegedly helping orchestrate terrorist attacks on Pakistan. If anything, this should enhance Pakistan’s relationship with the Taliban, which may be demonstrating their value as an ally with the recent horrific terrorist attacks in Kabul.
The Taliban are the biggest card Pakistan has to secure its interests in Afghanistan, and it would not give it up easily unless it knows what comes next. Pakistan also feels the U.S. strategy would not succeed and may in fact backfire. A disinherited Taliban on a retreat from Afghanistan would be a much greater threat to Pakistan and to the United States, especially if the Taliban joins forces with other jihadist and Islamist groups.
The Washington-Islamabad standoff thus continues. Pakistan feels it can take the heat, and that if Washington dials up the pressure, it would fall back on China. Washington thus has to consider the geostrategic implications carefully in this respect.
The China Factor
A Pakistan closely aligned with China could conceivably take a harder line against India. If the United States continues to see China as a threat and India as a balancer, what would serve American interests better: an India whose resources are divided by a two-front deployment, or one that has friendly relations with Pakistan? For that, Washington should not burn its bridges with Islamabad.
A relationship with Pakistan would also give the United States leverage against India. Furthermore, it will be useful to have Pakistan on its side in a region that is increasingly coming under the strategic shadow of Russia and the creeping influence of Iran. Most importantly, Pakistan’s role remains critical in stabilizing Afghanistan, and in helping Washington’s counterterrorism efforts.
A Political Solution?
After considering all other options, the discussion always reverts to the talk of a political solution. But the irony is such a solution remains as elusive as the military one. How do you have power-sharing or coexistence when the Kabul government and the Taliban subscribe to two different political systems? And if instead of sharing it, you divide power by relinquishing the governance of some areas to the Taliban rule, are you not consigning the populations to the Middle Ages?
Pakistan has a limited influence to bring Taliban to the negotiating table and has little incentive to do so when there is lack of clarity about American policy and Pakistan’s own relations with Washington are strained. The upshot is that Taliban themselves are divided. Some are irreconcilable, but those who want peace worry that if they do lay down the arms and accept a deal while the American forces are still there, they might be shortchanged.
The Taliban trust China and its guarantees that they would not be betrayed. But the Chinese need support from Washington and Kabul. The Quadrilateral Consultative Group process offered the prospect of such a support. But the Trump administration prefers military option and going it alone, and that also suits Kabul: this way, at least the Americans will likely stay for the long haul.
What is needed is a new relationship between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Only Kabul and Islamabad together can deal with the Taliban, politically if possible, and militarily if necessary. Counterinsurgencies are essentially a governance issue. Afghanistan needs to conciliate the areas under the Taliban control, and Pakistan should help by making its lands inhospitable to them. And both must work on joint border management and resolution of the refugee problem. This is a long-term plan, but it is doable. U.S. engagement with them would be essential to their success, as would be China’s involvement.
But the Trump administration is not thinking in these terms. Instead, Trump has defined the Afghanistan war very narrowly and in immediate terms as a terrorism problem. American soldiers under attack from sanctuaries in Pakistan, rather than the war itself, preoccupies the Trump base. As for the military, it is only thinking of the military solution, and that also highlights the sanctuaries issue. So, right now, U.S. Pakistan relations are stuck, which makes the prospects of any political solution in Afghanistan quite dim.
Touqir Hussain, a former ambassador of Pakistan and diplomatic adviser to the Prime Minister, is adjunct faculty at Georgetown University and Syracuse University.
Posted by Fiona in Trump War on Muslims on February 8th, 2017
February 01, 2017
President Donald Trump is getting ready to plunge into the burning Mideast with all the zeal and arrogance of a medieval crusader. The new administration’s knowledge of the region is a thousand miles wide and two inches deep.
Reviving a truly terrible idea originated by know-nothing Congressional Republicans, Trump proposes US-run safe zones in Syria for refugees from that nation’s conflict. The president went out of his way to insist that such safe zones would spare the United States from having to shelter Syrian refugees.
He should better worry about Chicago where 762 citizens were murdered last year.
At the same time, Trump, declaiming from his new Mount Olympus of New York’s Trump Tower, vowed to impose a 30-day halt on immigrants from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen to ‘protect the American people from terrorist attacks by foreign nationals.’
One wonders if any of Trump’s Praetorian Guard noticed that all these listed ‘terrorist’ nations have been attacked by the United States or seen their governments overthrown by Uncle Sam. I’m surprised Afghanistan and Pakistan were left off the list. Their time will likely come soon. Is it any wonder that all of these Muslim nations bear a serious grudge against the United States? The angriest group is ISIS, who are seeking revenge for the destruction of Iraq.
Former President Barack Obama shied away from direct military intervention in Syria, preferring stealthy warfare, drones and hit squads. He had the sense to know that US military intervention in the heart of the Mideast would be fraught with danger, not the least clashes between US and Russian forces. History shows it’s easy to invade into unstable areas but hard to get out.
But not so for bull in the Mideast china shop Trump as he charges into the Levant, advised by generals who made a mess in Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Trump’s ardently pro-Israel cabinet must be rubbing their hands in glee as they see Syria in his cross hairs. The destruction of Syria’s regime and fragmenting that nation is an Israeli strategic priority.
One wishes Trump would stop for a moment and reflect. There are 11 million Syrian refugees in Syria and neighboring states. They are the result of a civil war engineered by Washington, Turkey, the Emirates and Saudi Arabia, with France and Britain playing a supporting role. Western money, arms, and supplies have fuelled the six-year-old conflict whose aim was to overthrow Syria’s Assad government because he is an ally of Iran.
The US and France did exactly the same thing in Libya, overthrowing its leader, Muammar Khadaffi, and murdering him – thank you, Hillary Clinton. The US invaded and destroyed Iraq, tore apart Somalia and neighboring Sudan, and is now providing warplanes, bombs and mercenary advisors that Saudi Arabia – the patron of the jihadi forces in Syria – is using to crush little Yemen.
The largest number of Mideast refugees are now in Syria, thank you Uncle Sam, and its neighbors, Jordan and Lebanon. The second biggest group are the 5.2 million Palestinian refugees scattered across the Levant. Iraq is awash with internal refugees, thank you George W. Bush. Add now a couple of million refugees from strife-torn South Sudan, a new failed nation created by blundering US Mideast policy as a way of punishing disobedient Sudan, thank Bush and Obama.
At the same time, Washington must avoid any and all risk of military clashes in Syria with Russia. We can’t keep huffing and puffing that Moscow has no business in Syria when it’s as close to southern Russia as northern Mexico is to Texas. The US has troops and bases across the globe, most lately in Africa. Who are we to tell Russia to get out of Syria?
Just when it seemed that the Syrian conflict was beginning to simmer down, Trump’s intervention will be certain to heat up the conflict and undermine potential peace agreements. In case there are still Muslims who believed the US is their friend, as was the case fifty years ago, they will now understand that America is their enemy thanks to Trump’s ham-handed, ‘no Muslims’ policies.
Muslims account for 23% of the world’s population and will surpass Christians in about four decades. Besides riling up the Chinese, is it really wise to antagonize and insult members of Islam, the world’s fast-growing religion? And single out Muslims as most likely to face torture? Bad idea.
Eric S. Margolis is an award-winning, internationally syndicated columnist. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune the Los Angeles Times, Times of London, the Gulf Times, the Khaleej Times, Nation – Pakistan, Hurriyet, – Turkey, Sun-Times Malaysia and other news sites in Asia. EricMargolis.com
Posted by Brave_Heart in Donald Trump Islamophobe on January 31st, 2017
The Huffington Post tracked Islamophobia in the U.S. throughout 2016.
After the 2015 terror attack in Paris, when Donald Trump and other GOP presidential candidates were ratcheting up their anti-Muslim political speech, we started a running list of Islamophobic acts. Sadly, in less than two months, the list became so long the webpage often wouldn’t load.
This made us recognize the very real surge in anti-Muslim incidents sweeping the nation — a surge many wanted to deny was happening at all. (Think Fox News host Eric Bolling saying he “hadn’t heard of any” anti-Muslim hate crimes.)
So we developed The Islamophobia Project, and committed to tracking anti-Muslim violence, vandalism, discrimination, public policy and political speechjam throughout 2016.
CAIR-St Louis
America, 2016. A man with a gun screams at a Muslim family near St. Louis. “You Muslim?” he allegedly said. “All of you should die.”
The timing of the incidents we collected helped reveal patterns. We discovered that Trump supporters attacked, harassed, or plotted to kill Muslims at least 13 times during the election cycle, proving a potential link between Trump’s rhetoric and the actions of supporters. We documented apparent surges in anti-Muslim incidents during Muslim holidays.
It’s now been a year, and our project is a sad and seemingly endless scroll through nearly 400 stories of Muslims in America being attacked, threatened, scapegoated, and profiled, seeing their places of worship vandalized and their faith denigrated.
An email address we set up as a source for tips — islamophobia@huffingtonpost. com — generated hundreds of responses. Many people expressed gratitude for the project. One email led to a story about a Muslim Army veteran who found the word “terrorist” written on his locker. Mostly, we received anti-Muslim hate mail.
Our reporters and editors were attacked on anti-Muslim hate group sites and trolled relentlessly on Twitter ― signs that the project was making waves.
And, if you scroll through the tracker to March 10, 2016, you’ll read about the then-frontrunner in the Republican presidential primary saying: “I think Islam hates us.”
So much cynicism and misinformation was packed into those five words. That Trump could say them and go on to get elected president of the United States underscores just how successfully Muslims have been designated the “other” in this country.
When a group is an “other,” it’s easier to attack them, or to strip them of their civil rights. Our tracker documented this time and again.
But in another sense, Islamophobia isn’t something that can ever be tracked comprehensively. There’s too much of it, and not every instance becomes a headline.
It’s ubiquitous in the daily lives of Muslim Americans. It’s when a Muslim mom tells her daughter to maybe not wear the hijab today. It’s a Muslim father having to explain to his children that no, they’re citizens, they can’t be deported. It’s how almost every Muslim in a movie is depicted as a terrorist, and it’s why cable news channels only ask Muslims if they condemn terrorism.
With the rise of Trump, the silver lining is that now, more people seem to be paying attention to anti-Muslim hate. Media organizations are covering the subject more robustly. The nonprofit investigative news organization ProPublica has launched its own project, called “Documenting Hate,” and The New York Times has started a weekly column on the subject called, “This Week in Hate.”
This year, we won’t be updating the Islamophobia Tracker. The story is so much bigger than a dataset now. But we will continue telling stories of hate and extremism. And we will pay close attention to the new presidential administration that seems hell-bent on vilifying Muslims and persecuting them.
Having tracked hate for a year, we’re able to see that people who disparaged Muslim Americans are mostly reading from the same old script. It’s possible even to look at our project as a kind of how-to guide for anti-Muslim bigotry ― a list of six “rules” of Islamophobia in America.
And if we’re going to help protect our Muslim neighbors, coworkers, friends and family, these are six “rules” that desperately need to be dismantled and destroyed.
Rule 1: Muslims are not American.
Mark Wilson via Getty Images
“Go back to your country,” a man screamed at worshipers leaving a Connecticut mosque. “C**t, you don’t belong in this country. Go back to your f****** country,” another man shouted at a Muslim woman and her family in Ohio.
“Get the hell out of the country you bitch-ass Muslims,” a woman screamed at a Muslim mother and daughter in Maryland. “You’re not even from here, motherf*****! F*** you and your family, you terrorist!” a man yelled at a Moroccan Uber driver in Queens, New York.
“Get out of America, bitches,” a woman in Brooklyn, New York, screamed at two Muslim women pushing their babies in strollers. “This is America — you shouldn’t be different from us.”
And when pundits and politicians decried San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick for kneeling during the national anthem, they were quick to baselessly blame this alleged act of unAmerican-ness on the influence of Kaepernick’s Muslim girlfriend.
Muslims just can’t be from here, the thinking goes ― even though Muslims fight in our military and die in our wars, and even though a United States without Muslims has never existed.
Rule 2: All Muslims are terrorists.
A hate-filled voicemail left at the San Francisco chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
“You’re a terrorist,” a woman yelled at a Muslim woman inside a New Mexico grocery store.
“We don’t want niggers and terrorists here. #Trump,” read a note taped to the door of a Muslim family’s home in Iowa.
Mohamed Abbas, a 32-year-old Iraq War veteran and American citizen with PTSD who happens to be Muslim, found “terrorist” written on his locker inside a California Marine Corps base.
“When you say the word ‘Islam’ to Mike Goodman, it means ‘terrorist,’” Goodman, a member of a Massachusetts town commission, said of himself. “When you say ‘Muslim,’ it means a person. Islam is nothing but full of terrorists.”
That’s just not true, Mike.
A Texas anti-Muslim militia group dips bullets in pig’s blood. Why? To send Muslims “straight to hell.”
In Florida, a man allegedly trashed a mosque with a machete before leaving bacon on the front doorstep. At mosques in Nebraska and Las Vegas, men wrapped bacon around mosque door handles. In Raeford, North Carolina, a man carrying a handgun left packages of bacon at the mosque and threatened to kill worshippers.
In Philadelphia, someone left a severed pig’s head outside a mosque. And outside a mosque in Lawton, Oklahoma, someone dumped a whole pig carcass.
And then there’s Trump, who in 2016 was fond of telling an apocryphal story of how a U.S. general killed Muslim insurgents with bullets dipped in pig’s blood.
Like Judaism, Islam generally prohibits its followers from eating pork. While these pork-based acts of hate are undoubtedly meant as insults, the perpetrators also seem to ascribe mythical or inhuman qualities to Muslims, as if pork could magically fend them off, or send them straight to hell. As one anti-Muslim activist told comedian Samantha Bee on her show this year: “A pig head to Muslims is like a crucifix to a vampire.”
Muslims, of course, don’t believe this. Most don’t eat pork ― and that’s about the extent of it. As one Muslim HuffPost employee put it recently after reading about the pig carcass in Oklahoma: “I swear I need to spread a rumor that Muslims don’t eat cupcakes.”
Rule 4: All brown people are potentially Muslim, and are therefore potentially terrorists.
Courtesy of the Jabara family
Khalid Jabara, an Arab-American Christian, was fatally shot by a neighbor who often called the Jabaras “dirty Arabs,” “Aye-rabs” and “Mooslems.”
Simran Jeet Singh was running in the New York City Marathon when he said someone called him a “dirty Muslim.” Harmann Singh said a man called him a “f****** Muslim” inside a Cambridge, Massachusetts, store. “You’re trying to blow up this country, I should (expletive) kill you right now, you know,” Balmeet Singh said a man told him outside a California burger restaurant.
All three Singhs, who are not related, wear turbans and are Sikh, not Muslim. Sikhs are commonly perceived as Muslims in the U.S., and are targeted in anti-Muslim hate crimes, even though Sikhism and Islam are completely different religions ― not that it should matter.
In Oklahoma in August, a 61-year-old ex-convict named Stanley Majors allegedly shot and killed a 37-year-old man named Khalid Jabara outside his home. Majors reportedly had harassed the Jabara family for years. He called the Jabaras “dirty Arabs,” “Aye-rabs” and “Mooslems.” The Jabaras are Christian immigrants from Lebanon.
This phenomenon is sometimes called the “racialization of Islam,” and it helps explain why nearly 30 percent of Americans, including possibly Trump, still think the country’s first black president is secretly a Muslim.
Retired Lt. General Michael Flynn, President Donald Trump’s national security adviser and an anti-Muslim conspiracy theorist, saying that Islam isn’t a religion.
Islam “is an ideology posing as a religion. Islam is intolerant and deceitful, and its adherents are ordered to overthrow our way of life and to replace it with ‘Sharia’ law,” Republican New Hampshire state Rep. Ken Weyler wrote in testimony submitted to the state House.
In Pennsylvania, a school board member said that Islam is “not a religion” and is “not only godless, but pagan.” In Virginia, a member of the Republican State Central Committee tweeted that Islam is a “death cult organized by Satan” and “is not a religion of peace but an ideolgy (sic).”
And in Utah, the state’s third-largest political party called for outlawing Islam altogether, arguing that because it’s not a religion, it’s not protected under the First Amendment.
Merriam-Webster defines Islam as “the religious faith of Muslims including belief in Allah as the sole deity and in Muhammad as his prophet.” It is practiced by 1.6 billion people and is the world’s second-largest religion, after Christianity. It is no more inherently violent or peaceful than any other religion.
Rule 6: There’s a secret Muslim plot to take over and/or destroy the United States and/or Western civilization from within.
Richard Ellis/Getty Images
Frank Gaffney, an advisor to Sen. Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign, has long pushed the “civilization jihad” conspiracy theory. In a press release for a bill that could destroy American Muslim groups, Cruz cited “civilization jihad.”
Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson warned of a “civilizational jihad” against the U.S., wherein “jihadists” who “disguise themselves as moderate Muslims” would “infiltrate, multiply and take positions of power” in order to “replace our Judeo-Christian values with Islam.”
Former Rep. Michele Bachmann described the influx of Muslim migrants and refugees into Europe and the U.S. as a “planned invasion” meant to destroy “western Christendom.” It’s part of a “civilization jihad,” the tea party Minnesota congresswoman explained, aimed at “Islamizing” the West.
The news site The Hill published an article by Frank Gaffney, an adviser to presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), in which Gaffney wrote that Muslims in the U.S. have a “civilization jihad” aimed at “destroying Western civilization.” This Muslim conspiracy, he explained, uses “stealthy, subversive means like influence operations to penetrate and subvert our government and civil society institutions.”
The idea of a “civilization jihad” is a thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory. But it’s also a popular one that has contributed to this country’s dim view of Muslims. A recent survey revealed that Americans think there are 54 million Muslims in America. There are only about 3 million.
“If you’re promoting anti-Muslim bigotry and your theory is that a small percentage of the population is going to take over, it doesn’t work very well,” Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told HuffPost recently. “You have to create the impression that there’s a flood of Muslims taking over America.”
Reference
Preview YouTube video Armed and Vigilant: In Fear of a Muslim Uprising in Texas
Armed and Vigilant: In Fear of a Muslim Uprising in Texas
© 2024, All Rights Reserved by Pakistan Think Tank.
A recent news report documented the removal of two Muslim women working for the federal government from an American Airline flight. On its surface, the airline staff appeared to be upholding safety regulations, but in reality, they were engaging in discriminatory practices. I know this to be true because I was one of the two women. We were removed from the plane for doing nothing more than requesting water and asking why we were still aboard an idling plane for more than five hours.
Although the incident was humiliating it was also eye-opening. Until it happened to me, neither my friend nor I had realised how common this trend had become. Passengers are removed from an aircraft for benign reasons such as asking for a beverage, a child harness, speaking a foreign language, changing or upgrading seats, taking pictures, making videos, or questioning a long delay. It isn’t just about what happened to me – increasingly Muslims are a part of a cycle of discrimination that targets them due to their appearance.
American Airlines states that they prohibit “discrimination of any kind” and ensure that their “policies require that we treat all our customers in a fair and courteous manner and discrimination due to race, ethnicity, religion, or skin colour is not tolerated”. However, this was not reflected in the treatment that I and other passengers received.
Shan Anand, a young, turbaned, Sikh man along with three of his Muslim friends were removed from an American Airlines flight travelling from Toronto to New York earlier this year. When I asked Shan why he thought he and his friends were removed from the flight he said: “We know why it happened, right? There were four of us, three are Muslim and I am Sikh.” When Shan and his friends asked American Airlines why they were removed, they were told: “There were inconsistencies of their behaviour travelling as a group.” But the explanation made no sense to Shan – he was travelling in a group of six with two Latinos, three South Asians and one Arab, yet only the South Asians and Arab were removed. Shan and his travel companions were told that “the crew felt unsafe”.
“Unsafe”: a trigger word commonly used as an excuse by airlines under the pretext of ensuring safety and security post-9/11. Nearly all Muslims have at some point been subject to secondary security screening selection, but being thrown off a plane was an entirely new level of humiliation for me.
Measuring discrimination
Khurram Ali, the former civil rights director for the Council on American-Islamic Relation’s (CAIR’s) New Jersey chapter, explains that the pilot of an aircraft is given a list of those passengers that are marked with the infamous SSSS on their boarding pass. The SSSS or *S* indicates someone needs to be scrutinised a bit further by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). And although it is unknown if airline attendants have access to the names labelled SSSS by TSA on domestic flights, they do have access to their respective airline computer reservation system, which details passenger name and detailed information.
Although there is no published criteria used to select passengers for “random selection” or “suspicion”, Ali says: “It is happening to more and more people who are considered visibly Muslim.” Ali documented 27 airline discrimination complaint cases with three of those being “pulled off” or airline removal cases for CAIR’s New Jersey chapter during his short tenure. But as he pointed out, those numbers come nowhere near the amount being documented by CAIR on a national level.
CAIR has been fairly thorough in its documentation of discrimination against American Muslims, however, it is still in the process of aggregating data regarding Muslim airline passengers being “pulled off” planes. Corey Saylor, CAIR’s director of the department to monitor and combat Islamophobia, acknowledged that they “are seeing more airline cases”. But in regards to statistics, Saylor stated: “We do not have stats as of yet. We are working on it.”
The only cases the public is aware of are those documented in the media. I counted nine airline passenger removal cases involving American Muslims published in the media over the past 13 months. But if that isn’t indicative enough, just look at trending hashtags on social media like #FlyingWhileMuslim to understand and confirm the reality of rising discrimination.
The official reasons for removal of these passengers are all in relation to safety and security concerns. But there is no mistaking this trend toward discrimination of Muslims.. Here are a few examples:
Many instances have gone undocumented due to fear of victims being further targeted, labelled troublemakers and being put on a “no-fly” list. The silent acceptance of these incidents has enabled airlines to dismiss the arbitrary treatment of select passengers as compliance with airline security regulations post-9/11. This policy is not effective and ultimately makes Americans feel marginalised in our own country.
Khairuldeen Makhzoomi, or Mark for those that have trouble pronouncing his name, recalls his experience with Southwest Airlines as “tearful and humiliating”. Makhzoomi came to America after his father was executed in Iraq by Saddam Hussain: “I experienced dictatorship in Iraq and now I am experiencing it in the freest country in the world.”
The discrimination Khairuldeen faced in Oakland, California, was anything but subtle. Khairuldeen detailed how he was removed from the aircraft, questioned by airline representatives and security, cornered against a wall, searched, sniffed by dogs in public and later interrogated privately by the FBI. Southwest Airlines representative and the authorities that removed him from the plane berated him for having spoken Arabic aboard the aircraft. Khairuldeen recalled the Southwest Airlines representative, stating: “Why would you speak that language knowing the environment in an airport?”
Khairuldeen said: “I was excited because we were talking about my upcoming graduation from UC Berkley, saying ‘inshallah’. You know, we use this word 30 to 40 times in any given conversation.” The rest of Khairuldeen’s conversation revolved around what they served for dinner at an event he attended which hosted the UN secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon. “I was telling my uncle that they served us chicken, mash potatoes and spinach for dinner at the event,” said Makhzoomi. Yet the authorities that escorted him and claimed to understand Arabic, accused him of “discussing martyrdom” in his telephone conversation.
An atmosphere of fear
Cenk Uygur, political commentator and co-founder of the Young Turks, believes that this issue goes beyond discrimination towards Muslims in particular. Uygur was also kicked off of an American Airlines flight but he doesn’t believe it was because of religion. “Was it religious? In my case, I don’t think it was racially motivated.” Uygur believes that the root of the matter boils down to power and compared airline attendant behaviour toward Muslims since 9/11 to police officers abusing their authority and using excessive force on African Americans. “After 9/11 airlines/flight attendants have taken up the ‘I can do whatever I want attitude’ in the name of security,” Uygur says. “In my opinion, the core of the problem is flight attendants are given unlimited power and they tend to abuse it. They tend to use their power on those they perceive to be powerless. And unfortunately, in America, the darker the skin colour the more powerless you are. And many Muslims tend to fit in that category.”
He adds: “By the way, it’s much harder on women because they are more visibly Muslim and they often bear the brunt of the burden of Islamophobia or discrimination.
“Donald Trump has given people permission to be Islamophobic and told them that it’s okay to discriminate against Muslims. Trump basically says, ‘If I become president I will systematically discriminate against them [Muslims],’” Uygur says.
Likewise, Khairuldeen Makhzoomi attributed the recent rise in discrimination towards Muslims to Donald Trump, saying, “Trump is using ‘Islamophobia’ to rise to political power.”
Trump’s statements have fostered and further instigated an atmosphere of fear and prejudice towards the estimated 6-7 million Muslims in America.
I’m an American and being labelled a safety threat is unacceptable in a country founded on tolerance and freedom.
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