And already people are afraid of getting medical care because they ebelieve
they will be killed for their beliefs:
http://whdh.com/news/muslim-woman-afraid-to-reach-out-for-medical-health-because-of-faith/
Frank
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Miriam Vieni
Sent: Friday, November 25, 2016 6:04 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] We Must Prevent Trump's "Muslim Registry" Before It
Starts
We Must Prevent Trump's "Muslim Registry" Before It Starts Friday, 25 November
2016 08:58 By Tanzila Ahmed, Truthout | Op-Ed
(Image: Lauren Walker / Truthout)
Maybe I shouldn't have been so glib about talking about internment camps when I
gave my speech. Well, at the time it had felt a little glib -- but in
hindsight, it feels prescient. I was at an award ceremony for a local Asian
American organization where my co-podcaster and I were accepting a Rising Star
Award for our #GoodMuslimBadMuslim podcast. It was two weeks before Election
Day, and as I accepted the award, I ended my speech with, "Finally, when you
vote on November 8, please think of faces like ours -- when you vote, you
aren't just voting for yourselves -- you're doing it to not send us to an
internment camp." We both gave campy sad faces. People in the crowd laughed
uncomfortably. The internment of Japanese Americans is no joke. But given the
absurdity of the world, I thought a bit of absurd humor might make for a
compelling get-out-the-vote argument.
After we got off stage, an elderly petite Japanese American woman with stylish
short white hair came up to us. She reached out a frail hand and grabbed our
arms to say congratulations and tell us that Nisei people like herself were in
solidarity with us. When she was a child, she had been in the internment camps,
she said. She was little, but she remembered.
Her eyes welled up with tears as she poured out her story. She started to cry
as she told us how important it was for us to speak out against racist and
Islamophobic abuses, reflecting on how quickly situations can become dire. She
talked about how, after she got out, she married a white man, to try to
assimilate more. He didn't treat her well, because he didn't need to, she said
-- their interracial marriage was still considered illegal back then, after
all. She left him, eventually.
Always the organizer, I immediately tried to draw her into current resistance
movements, telling her about all the Muslim-Japanese solidarity work that's
been done over the years. She just looked at me with sadness in her eyes and I
trailed off, not sure what to say. She hadn't been looking to get organized --
she was expressing empathy. Because internment had happened to her. I didn't
know how to hold the immediacy of her fear that the same thing could happen to
me.
Attacks on Muslims in the Wake of the Election Two weeks after Election Day,
her fear now feels like a harbinger of events soon to come. Since November 9,
there has been a rampant increase in attacks on Muslims, immigrants and LGBTQ
people, all being invoked in the name of Donald Trump. The Southern Poverty Law
Center, which is collecting hate crime incidences at #ReportHate, listed more
than 701 incidents of hateful intimidation and harassment between November 9
and November 16 alone. Hijabs have been pulled off of the heads of women, and
in a frightening incident in Houston, a Muslim man had a firebomb thrown inside
his car, resulting in third-degree burns on his arms. In total so far,
according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations' Islamophobia Monitor,
there have been 111 anti-Muslim bias incidents between the election and
November 14.
For the Muslim American community, this does not come as a surprise -- due to
the increased anti-Muslim campaign rhetoric of the past year, it makes sense
that anti-Muslim hate crimes in the United States rose 67 percent, from 154
incidents in 2014, to 257 in 2015. In the podcast I co-host, we lift up the
narratives of anti-Muslim crimes that mainstream media don't cover. Every month
leading up to Election Day has seen an escalation of hate directed to the
Muslim community. It's not a surprise -- the use of fear-mongering to drive
voters to the polls has been a tried and true tactic
-- and given that between 2008 and 2011, $119 million has been poured into
organizations that are working to make more people hate Muslims, it is likely
these funds continued to rake in donations in the years leading up to Election
Day.
What did this lead to? In Kansas, a plot to bomb a Somali immigrant apartment
complex by a three-person anti-Muslim group was foiled in August.
The members had intentions of sparking a crusade with their action. A
60-year-old Bangladeshi woman was stabbed while walking the streets of Queens
at 9 pm. A man in Tulsa was shot by his neighbor at his home by a man who
called him a "dirty Arab." There has been a dramatic increase in anti-mosque
attacks and bullying of Muslim children in grade school, all leading up to
Election Day.
In a "60 Minutes" interview on the Sunday after Election Day, a reporter asked
the president-elect about the increase in hate crimes carried out in his name.
Trump dismissed the acts of violence as media manipulation, and said he hadn't
heard of anything actually happening. When pushed further, he looked at the
camera and said, "Stop it." Clearly, his statement hasn't stopped the violence.
Japanese American Internment as a "Precedent" for a Muslim Registry The
president-elect's administration appointments have been some of the most
Islamophobic ones to date. For attorney general, we have Alabama Sen. Jeff
Sessions, who had argued for a religious test to ban Muslims in 2015. For the
head of the CIA, we have Kansas Rep. Mike Pompeo, who, in 2013, falsely alleged
that American Muslim leaders were potentially complicit in terrorist acts.
Finally, last week Trump political operative Carl Higbie went on Fox News to
discuss the Muslim registry proposed by Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of
state whom Trump has named as part of his transition team. In the conversation,
Higbie suggested that the mass internment of Japanese Americans during World
War II was a "precedent" for the plan to create a registry. When pushed, he
said it would "hold constitutional muster." The internment of the Japanese
Americans forced the relocation of close to
120,000 people on the West Coast to internment camps in California, Arizona,
Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, Utah and Arkansas.
Technically, Higbie is not wrong. The landmark 1944 case of Korematsu v.
Supreme Court, though challenged over the years, held up the principle that the
government's need to protect against espionage outweighed an individual's
rights, and the rights of Americans of Japanese descent. In 2011, the solicitor
general of the United States issued a "confession of error" for the internment
of the Japanese but technically, the ruling wasn't overturned. Despite the
Trump team's latest lie about his past statements on this issue, the fear is
very real that 70 years later, just replace "Japanese" with "Muslim" and this
can happen again.
We Must Fight Now to Put Safeguards in Place As we move forward in trying to
retain a sense of normalcy during the reeling aftermath of this election, we
must ultimately remember that this is not normal. We cannot let this be our
normal. But we also must remember, that for the most part, we've been here
before. The tactics that will be used against people of color have been used in
the past. And the tactics needed to strategically push back against this
oppressive power are actions that we've employed in the past, too -- except
now, we are better organized.
The news of this week has made me woefully nostalgic for the days that led me
to the path of becoming an activist. One of my first actions in organizing the
South Asian community was to drive around to South Asian grocery stores in the
suburbs of Washington, DC, and hand out Know Your Rights flyers. It was 2002
and everyone was reeling from September 11 and its backlash. Homeland Security
had been hastily created and the USA Patriot Act had been quickly enacted.
Mosques were infiltrated by FBI informants, and Muslims were put on no-fly
lists and "randomly" searched at airports.
One of the largest security measures enacted was the National Security
Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS), which required men who emigrated from
certain Muslim nations to register. Before it was disbanded in 2011, the NSEERS
program registered 93,000 people, and 13,740 immigrants were deported in
conjunction with it. Zero people were prosecuted on terrorism charges.
As talk of a Muslim registry is re-inserted in political conversations, I think
back to this moment. NSEERS was implemented with little pushback from the
mainstream community and was kept enforceable well into the Obama
administration. And while activists have mentioned they would add their names
to a registry in solidarity with Muslims, not many people remember that NSEERS
was a Muslim registry that had actually been in place only five years ago.
There are still two months left before Trump takes office, and we need to focus
on doing everything we can to make sure he can't create a registry.
First, we must pressure President Obama to dismantle the infrastructure around
NSEERS; he can still do so during his remaining months in office.
Next, we must push to put as many safeguards as possible in place. Some efforts
are already underway. Democratic Congress member Suzan DelBene has proposed a
bill that would ban religious registries ahead of any attempts at establishing
one. An enormous public mobilization could create pressure in Congress for the
passage of this bill.
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has promised that New York will sue Trump if he
establishes the registry or requests from New York City ID records.
People in other cities throughout the country could pressure their own mayors
to issue similar threats and preemptively commit to this kind of pushback.
And incoming American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Legal Director David Cole
"says any proposal from President-elect Donald Trump to create a registry for
Muslims is unconstitutional," according to The Hill. It appears that the ACLU
will immediately challenge Trump's efforts as unconstitutional. We can all
pressure other legal organizations to also commit to this kind of immediate
pushback, should Trump make actual moves toward establishing a registry.
We need to act now to prevent a repeat of history.
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
TANZILA AHMED
Tanzila "Taz" Ahmed is an activist, storyteller and politico based in Los
Angeles. An electoral organizer by trade, she's mobilized thousands of Asian
American and Pacific Islanders to the polls in more than 17 different languages
in the past 15 years. Essayist, poet and now podcaster, her writing developed
around creating a counternarrative for the communities that she belonged to,
whether youth, Muslim, South Asian or counterculture.
She can be heard monthly on The #GoodMuslimBadMuslim podcast and can be read
monthly in her Radical Love column at loveinshallah.com. She was a long-time
writer for Sepia Mutiny and is published in the anthology Love, Inshallah:
The Secret Love Lives of American Muslim Women. Her writing has been featured
on The Aerogram, The Nation, Left Turn Magazine, Angry Asian Man, MTV Iggy,
Taqwacore Webzine, Mideast Tunes, The SAALT Spot, Wiretap Magazine, AlterNet,
IMOW, PopandPolitics, Kahani, Falling Star Magazine and more.
RELATED STORIES
Meet the Anti-Muslim Leaders Advising Donald Trump and Ted Cruz By Stephen
Piggott, Southern Poverty Law Center | News Analysis Will New York Get an
Anti-Muslim Blacklist?
By Sofia Arias, Socialist Worker | News Analysis World War II-Era Internment
Camps for Japanese-Americans Cited as Legal Precedent for Muslim Registry By
Nell Abram, Free Speech Radio News | Audio Segment
________________________________________
Show Comments
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We Must Prevent Trump's "Muslim Registry" Before It Starts Friday, 25 November
2016 08:58 By Tanzila Ahmed, Truthout | Op-Ed
. font size Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink
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reference not valid.
. (Image: Lauren Walker / Truthout)
. Maybe I shouldn't have been so glib about talking about internment
camps when I gave my speech. Well, at the time it had felt a little glib -- but
in hindsight, it feels prescient. I was at an award ceremony for a local Asian
American organization where my co-podcaster and I were accepting a Rising Star
Award for our #GoodMuslimBadMuslim podcast. It was two weeks before Election
Day, and as I accepted the award, I ended my speech with, "Finally, when you
vote on November 8, please think of faces like ours -- when you vote, you
aren't just voting for yourselves -- you're doing it to not send us to an
internment camp." We both gave campy sad faces. People in the crowd laughed
uncomfortably. The internment of Japanese Americans is no joke. But given the
absurdity of the world, I thought a bit of absurd humor might make for a
compelling get-out-the-vote argument.
After we got off stage, an elderly petite Japanese American woman with stylish
short white hair came up to us. She reached out a frail hand and grabbed our
arms to say congratulations and tell us that Nisei people like herself were in
solidarity with us. When she was a child, she had been in the internment camps,
she said. She was little, but she remembered.
Her eyes welled up with tears as she poured out her story. She started to cry
as she told us how important it was for us to speak out against racist and
Islamophobic abuses, reflecting on how quickly situations can become dire. She
talked about how, after she got out, she married a white man, to try to
assimilate more. He didn't treat her well, because he didn't need to, she said
-- their interracial marriage was still considered illegal back then, after
all. She left him, eventually.
Always the organizer, I immediately tried to draw her into current resistance
movements, telling her about all the Muslim-Japanese solidarity work that's
been done over the years. She just looked at me with sadness in her eyes and I
trailed off, not sure what to say. She hadn't been looking to get organized --
she was expressing empathy. Because internment had happened to her. I didn't
know how to hold the immediacy of her fear that the same thing could happen to
me.
Attacks on Muslims in the Wake of the Election Two weeks after Election Day,
her fear now feels like a harbinger of events soon to come. Since November 9,
there has been a rampant increase in attacks on Muslims, immigrants and LGBTQ
people, all being invoked in the name of Donald Trump. The Southern Poverty Law
Center, which is collecting hate crime incidences at #ReportHate, listed more
than 701 incidents of hateful intimidation and harassment between November 9
and November 16 alone. Hijabs have been pulled off of the heads of women, and
in a frightening incident in Houston, a Muslim man had a firebomb thrown inside
his car, resulting in third-degree burns on his arms. In total so far,
according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations' Islamophobia Monitor,
there have been 111 anti-Muslim bias incidents between the election and
November 14.
For the Muslim American community, this does not come as a surprise -- due to
the increased anti-Muslim campaign rhetoric of the past year, it makes sense
that anti-Muslim hate crimes in the United States rose 67 percent, from 154
incidents in 2014, to 257 in 2015. In the podcast I co-host, we lift up the
narratives of anti-Muslim crimes that mainstream media don't cover. Every month
leading up to Election Day has seen an escalation of hate directed to the
Muslim community. It's not a surprise -- the use of fear-mongering to drive
voters to the polls has been a tried and true tactic
-- and given that between 2008 and 2011, $119 million has been poured into
organizations that are working to make more people hate Muslims, it is likely
these funds continued to rake in donations in the years leading up to Election
Day.
What did this lead to? In Kansas, a plot to bomb a Somali immigrant apartment
complex by a three-person anti-Muslim group was foiled in August.
The members had intentions of sparking a crusade with their action. A
60-year-old Bangladeshi woman was stabbed while walking the streets of Queens
at 9 pm. A man in Tulsa was shot by his neighbor at his home by a man who
called him a "dirty Arab." There has been a dramatic increase in anti-mosque
attacks and bullying of Muslim children in grade school, all leading up to
Election Day.
In a "60 Minutes" interview on the Sunday after Election Day, a reporter asked
the president-elect about the increase in hate crimes carried out in his name.
Trump dismissed the acts of violence as media manipulation, and said he hadn't
heard of anything actually happening. When pushed further, he looked at the
camera and said, "Stop it." Clearly, his statement hasn't stopped the violence.
Japanese American Internment as a "Precedent" for a Muslim Registry The
president-elect's administration appointments have been some of the most
Islamophobic ones to date. For attorney general, we have Alabama Sen. Jeff
Sessions, who had argued for a religious test to ban Muslims in 2015. For the
head of the CIA, we have Kansas Rep. Mike Pompeo, who, in 2013, falsely alleged
that American Muslim leaders were potentially complicit in terrorist acts.
Finally, last week Trump political operative Carl Higbie went on Fox News to
discuss the Muslim registry proposed by Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of
state whom Trump has named as part of his transition team. In the conversation,
Higbie suggested that the mass internment of Japanese Americans during World
War II was a "precedent" for the plan to create a registry. When pushed, he
said it would "hold constitutional muster." The internment of the Japanese
Americans forced the relocation of close to
120,000 people on the West Coast to internment camps in California, Arizona,
Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, Utah and Arkansas.
Technically, Higbie is not wrong. The landmark 1944 case of Korematsu v.
Supreme Court, though challenged over the years, held up the principle that the
government's need to protect against espionage outweighed an individual's
rights, and the rights of Americans of Japanese descent. In 2011, the solicitor
general of the United States issued a "confession of error" for the internment
of the Japanese but technically, the ruling wasn't overturned. Despite the
Trump team's latest lie about his past statements on this issue, the fear is
very real that 70 years later, just replace "Japanese" with "Muslim" and this
can happen again.
We Must Fight Now to Put Safeguards in Place As we move forward in trying to
retain a sense of normalcy during the reeling aftermath of this election, we
must ultimately remember that this is not normal. We cannot let this be our
normal. But we also must remember, that for the most part, we've been here
before. The tactics that will be used against people of color have been used in
the past. And the tactics needed to strategically push back against this
oppressive power are actions that we've employed in the past, too -- except
now, we are better organized.
The news of this week has made me woefully nostalgic for the days that led me
to the path of becoming an activist. One of my first actions in organizing the
South Asian community was to drive around to South Asian grocery stores in the
suburbs of Washington, DC, and hand out Know Your Rights flyers. It was 2002
and everyone was reeling from September 11 and its backlash. Homeland Security
had been hastily created and the USA Patriot Act had been quickly enacted.
Mosques were infiltrated by FBI informants, and Muslims were put on no-fly
lists and "randomly" searched at airports.
One of the largest security measures enacted was the National Security
Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS), which required men who emigrated from
certain Muslim nations to register. Before it was disbanded in 2011, the NSEERS
program registered 93,000 people, and 13,740 immigrants were deported in
conjunction with it. Zero people were prosecuted on terrorism charges.
As talk of a Muslim registry is re-inserted in political conversations, I think
back to this moment. NSEERS was implemented with little pushback from the
mainstream community and was kept enforceable well into the Obama
administration. And while activists have mentioned they would add their names
to a registry in solidarity with Muslims, not many people remember that NSEERS
was a Muslim registry that had actually been in place only five years ago.
There are still two months left before Trump takes office, and we need to focus
on doing everything we can to make sure he can't create a registry.
First, we must pressure President Obama to dismantle the infrastructure around
NSEERS; he can still do so during his remaining months in office.
Next, we must push to put as many safeguards as possible in place. Some efforts
are already underway. Democratic Congress member Suzan DelBene has proposed a
bill that would ban religious registries ahead of any attempts at establishing
one. An enormous public mobilization could create pressure in Congress for the
passage of this bill.
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has promised that New York will sue Trump if he
establishes the registry or requests from New York City ID records.
People in other cities throughout the country could pressure their own mayors
to issue similar threats and preemptively commit to this kind of pushback.
And incoming American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Legal Director David Cole
"says any proposal from President-elect Donald Trump to create a registry for
Muslims is unconstitutional," according to The Hill. It appears that the ACLU
will immediately challenge Trump's efforts as unconstitutional. We can all
pressure other legal organizations to also commit to this kind of immediate
pushback, should Trump make actual moves toward establishing a registry.
We need to act now to prevent a repeat of history.
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
Tanzila Ahmed
Tanzila "Taz" Ahmed is an activist, storyteller and politico based in Los
Angeles. An electoral organizer by trade, she's mobilized thousands of Asian
American and Pacific Islanders to the polls in more than 17 different languages
in the past 15 years. Essayist, poet and now podcaster, her writing developed
around creating a counternarrative for the communities that she belonged to,
whether youth, Muslim, South Asian or counterculture.
She can be heard monthly on The #GoodMuslimBadMuslim podcast and can be read
monthly in her Radical Love column at loveinshallah.com. She was a long-time
writer for Sepia Mutiny and is published in the anthology Love, Inshallah:
The Secret Love Lives of American Muslim Women. Her writing has been featured
on The Aerogram, The Nation, Left Turn Magazine, Angry Asian Man, MTV Iggy,
Taqwacore Webzine, Mideast Tunes, The SAALT Spot, Wiretap Magazine, AlterNet,
IMOW, PopandPolitics, Kahani, Falling Star Magazine and more.
Related Stories
Meet the Anti-Muslim Leaders Advising Donald Trump and Ted Cruz By Stephen
Piggott, Southern Poverty Law Center | News AnalysisWill New York Get an
Anti-Muslim Blacklist?
By Sofia Arias, Socialist Worker | News AnalysisWorld War II-Era Internment
Camps for Japanese-Americans Cited as Legal Precedent for Muslim Registry By
Nell Abram, Free Speech Radio News | Audio Segment
Show Comments
