Scarf ban, arrest prompt training

 

ATLANTA – City court workers in an Atlanta suburb will undergo sensitivity training and post courtroom dress code signs after police arrested a Muslim woman for refusing to remove her religious headscarf before attending a hearing.

A judge ordered Lisa Valentine, 40, to serve 10 days in jail for contempt of court after the Dec. 16 incident. She was released in less than a day.

Muslim rights activists have asked the Department of Justice to investigate the incident that triggered a protest in Douglasville, a city of 20,000 people on Atlanta’s west suburban outskirts.

Council on American-Islamic Relations spokesman Ibrahim Hooper said Wednesday the training doesn’t address the problem.

“We can deal with whether people knew about policies or whether they handled things correctly, but the bottom line is, can a Muslim woman walk into this courtroom wearing religious attire?” he asked.

In a news release this week, the city police department acknowledged that while courtroom rules restrict headgear, Municipal Court Judge Keith Rollins has made accommodations for religious reasons.

Lisa Valentine was arrested for wearing a Muslim headscarf to a court hearing.

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ArabAmericanNews

How about some respect for a moderate Muslim?

some respect for a moderate Muslim

 If Santa Claus were ever to pay me a visit and grant me a wish, I would reply with one word: respect.

I would wish that society at large would show some respect towards me and my faith. I am judged negatively whenever someone of my faith is accused of committing a crime. I am viewed as an enemy within, a home-grown fanatic whom everyone should guard against.

I am harassed at the boarding gate when I leave the country, as if I was going to an Al Qaeda convention. I am also bullied by the customs and immigration officers when I come back home, as if I don’t belong here.

I am pulled aside for extra inspections, as if I was carrying instructions on making weapons of mass destruction. I am told repeatedly to tell the real truth about what I am bringing with me that I have not declared.

When a crime occurs where a Muslim is the primary suspect, I am asked to issue a statement in the strongest possible terms against terrorism and to dissociate myself from the crime. Whatever language I use in my denunciation, I am told is not enough and I must do more.

On the day after the crime, the headline reads: “Moderate Muslims Fail To Speak Up”, even though I have spoken and have condemned the crime.

When I try to access my own money, the bank teller reminds me of the seriousness of money laundering. A bank supervisor recently alleged that my signature did not match the signature they had in my file. I emptied my wallet and showed all my identifications, to no avail.

Although I have lived in Canada for more than a decade and have been working hard to pay taxes and make ends meet, I am still viewed as a foreigner who belongs somewhere else.

A colleague at the airport where I work asked me recently, “Why did you choose Canada, a Christian country, and did not go to your own people instead?”

Another co-worker said the other day that she cannot tolerate seeing Muslim women covering up. “I feel the urge to remove the piece of rag by force,” she said. “Why in the world would she hide her beauty?”

Another airline employee suggested that we should stop Muslim women from entering the country if they choose to wear the hijab (head cover).

I cried like a child when a friend said that the only way the world can solve the problem of terrorism is to nuke the Muslim world. Only then will the planet live in real peace, he said.

It is deeply troubling to see how Muslims are treated in society. While I was having dinner at work, my colleagues next to me were discussing the shooting death right after the 11 September tragedy of a Sikh man in the US who was thought to be a Muslim.

One of the people involved in the conversation blamed the murderer for not doing his homework in making sure that the person he was targeting was a real Muslim. The people in the cafeteria did not find the statement troubling and they all laughed approvingly.

We are reminded—again and again—that freedom of expression has limits. But when the same freedom involves the dehumanization of Muslims, it has no limit.

I don’t think I am asking too much if I expect some respect from my fellow countrymen.

I might have some lunatics in my midst but who doesn’t? If Christians are not held responsible for the death and destruction their co-religionist George W. Bush caused in Iraq, why should I be held responsible for the acts of a few mad men who might create mayhem in the name of my faith? 

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Terror stalks Surrey twins

Terror stalks Surrey twins

Terror stalks Surrey twin Sajid Hameed, originally from Karachi, Pakistan, moved to the United States to build a new life for his family. He worked as a lab technician in San Jose, California.
But the racial hostilities towards Muslims in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 destroyed that dream.
“I was laid off after 9/11. I believe this was done deliberately because of my religious background,” said Sajid.
Disillusioned, he switched over to the taxi business.
Sajid says he was soon after assaulted by a passenger, an incident he describes as a hate attack.

“He was upset with the Muslims and swore at me before hitting me with a soda can,” he said. “The police failed to find him.”
“Driving cab in the U.S. was not easy either. Following several incidents of hostilities I decided to quit and move to Canada.”
Sajid moved to Surrey, British Columbia – a thriving, multicultural metropolis and the second largest city in the province – to rebuild his dream of a happy and prosperous life for his family. And they were content – until his twin daughters were accosted on their way home from school, subjected to obscenities, called terrorists, and blamed for the recent attacks on Mumbai.
Sajid has filed a report with police, and his daughters remain traumatized.
Tarik Kiani, a member of the Pakistan Canada Association and a community activist, disclosed that his organization has also received complaints of post-Mumbai harassment toward local Pakistanis.
“We have formed a committee to confirm these incidents and will act accordingly after establishing the truth,” he told the South Asian Post.
Muslim sisters Ayesha and Nida say they were walking home from their school in Surrey last week when several Indo-Canadian youngsters in a silver car began to follow them, hurling racial slurs through the vehicle’s open windows.
Between other obscenities, the youths called the 14-year-old girls terrorists and blamed them for the recent terror attacks on Mumbai that left at least 172 people dead, including two Canadians, in India’s financial capital.
The India government has blamed the attack on Pakistan-based Islamic extremists. With the war of words escalating between the two neighbouring countries, the aftershocks of the Mumbai attack are now being felt in Metro Vancouver, where Canadians of both Indian and Pakistani origin have long lived in relative harmony.
Since the two sisters wear the hijab, a scarf that some Muslim women wear to cover their heads, they were an easy target for what their Pakistani father, Sajid Hameed, believes was a hateful, ignorant reaction to the madness in Mumbai.
Inside the car were four to five youngsters, including some girls, according to Ayesha.

They called us terrorists and shouted you are the ones who attacked Mumbai. They also made some scary noises,” she told the South Asian Post.
Ayesha believes all of the youngsters were Indo Canadians.
“We couldn’t see their full faces, as they had opened their car windows half way,” she recalled.
While Ayesha provided details of the incident, frightened Nida sat quietly in the presence of her parents.
“As soon as our mother reached us to pick us up in her car, those people fled from the scene,” says Ayesha, of the alarming incident last Wednesday.
The Tamanawis Secondary School Grade 9 students, who live with their father and their stepmother Uzma, are known as Taylor (Ayesha) and Tera (Nida) amongst their high school friends.

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Arab-American youth

Inside the world of Arab-American youth

The number of hate crimes committed against Arab-Americans has decreased since their peak immediately following the September 11, 2001 attacks, according to a new study by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.

At a young age, one of the book’s characters, Yasmin, was invoking notions of Martin Luther King Jr’s struggle for equality while she was being discriminated against at her high school for wearing hijab.

While the findings are seen as a step in the right direction, author Moustafa Bayoumi says other forms of discrimination continue to affect the lives of Arabs living in the US.

In his new book, “How Does It Feel To Be A Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America,” Bayoumi reveals how “state oppression” has impacted the lives of second generation Arab-American youth. The book chronicles the lives of seven 20-something Arab-Americans living in Brooklyn, New York who have encountered diverse problems in a post-9/11 America, ranging from employment discrimination to government detention.

“I felt like there were stories to be told, but nobody was telling those stories,” Bayoumi told Daily News Egypt at an interview in a Brooklyn coffee shop.

“I really wanted to write a book about ordinary people, not about people who were already community leaders. What was ordinary life like, for one thing? There is so much ideology in the air that ordinary Arab-American life is mystified,” he said.

Bayoumi is of Egyptian heritage, but was born in Switzerland and raised in Canada. He has been living in New York City for over 15 years and works as an English professor at Brooklyn College. Bayoumi has written about Arab issues in North America for numerous years in outlets such as The Nation and The London Review of Books.

The author claims that he is more optimistic now than when he started working on the book about three years ago. Through relationships developed with his interviewees, Bayoumi has come to see strength in the human spirit despite adversity. His characters understand that their stories do not stand alone in American history and that other minority groups have suffered similar discrimination in the past.

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EU Court Back French Hijab Ban

STRASBOURG — Europe’s top human rights court on Thursday, December 4, held a French school ban on wearing hijab,saying the ban was not a violation of the European Rights of Human Rights. “The court observed that the purpose of the restriction on the applicants’ right to manifest their religious convictions was toadhere to the requirements of secularism in state schools,” the European Court of Human Rights said, reported Reuters. Two French Muslim girls, aged 11 and 12, had been expelled from school in 1999 after refusing to take off their hijab uring sport classes. The school claimed that hijab was incompatible with physical education classes The two students took their case to a French court, which backed the school’s decision. The pair took their complaint to the European court that their school had violated their freedom of religion and their right toan education. France banned hijab in state schools in 2004, sparking a heated debate over freedom and equality within the Europeancountry. Islam sees hijab as an obligatory code of dress, not a religious symbol displaying one’s affiliations. France is home to nearly seven million Muslims, the biggest Muslim minority in Europe. Secular Requirements The Strasbourg-based court said that the expulsion of the two Muslim girls was not “discriminatory”. It said the decision was based on secularism requirements and not on any objections to the girls’ religious beliefs. The European court said that the school has sought to balance the interests of the girls with respect for France’s secularmodel. “It was clear that the applicants’ religious convictions were fully taken into account in relation to the requirements ofprotecting the rights and freedoms of others and public order.” Hijab has taken central stage in the West since the French hijab ban in 2004. Last year, a Canadian girl was thrown out from a national Judo tournament for wearing hijab. In March 2007, an 11-year-old girl in Quebec was expelled from a soccer game for the same reason.

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Islamic extremism among students

Study challenges claims of Islamic extremism among students

British universities are not hotbeds of Islamic radicalism, despite fears about the rise of “campus extremism”, a new study arguess.The University of Cambridge research, based partly on in-depth interviews with 26 students at UK universities, found that most young British Muslims are opposed to political Islam and are more likely to join Amnesty International than al-Qaida.

This contradicts research published by the Centre for Social Cohesion earlier this year, which suggested Muslim students on British campuses believed killing in the name of religion could be justified.

And ministers have issued guidelines for university staff on how to combat the threat of violent extremists targeting campuses as potential breeding grounds for new recruits.

But the research has been criticised for being too “flimsy” to draw such strong conclusions.

Anthony Glees, professor of politics and director of Buckingham University’s centre for security and intelligence studies, accused Cambridge of trying to prove that British universities are not “hotbeds of Islamic radicalism” on the basis of “flimsy and uncompelling” research.

“That the Economic and Social Research Council should fund it is even more amazing,” he said.

Muslim students from Cambridge, the London School of Economics and the University of Bradford were interviewed for the study.

It found that while Muslim students in the west are often regarded as prime targets for extremists seeking young, impressionable and educated recruits, many have a stronger sense of civic responsibility and British identity than their elders.

The study acknowledged that extreme political views can be found among a minority of young western Muslims but found little evidence of any threat, suggesting such fears have been exaggerated.

It describes young Muslims as better integrated into British society than their parents, with a stronger sense of national identity.

“Contact with social democracy, multiculturalism and new generational experiences and opportunities have created a momentum for accommodation rather than a clash,” he report said.

The interviewees disliked the British government’s alignment with regimes such as Turkey, Egypt or, until recently, Pakistan, which oppose political Islam but are nevertheless regarded as oppressive.

The research found young Muslims view restrictions on the expression of their religious identity, such as wearing the hijab, as an abuse of human rights rather than as obstructing a wider, political Islamic cause.

“Attempts to ban the hijab were perceived as incompatible with western and in particular British commitment to freedom of speech and multicultural practices, and a European commitment to values of freedom, choice and individuality,” the report argues.

Dr June Edmunds, who carried out the research, said: “The findings show that the young Muslims best equipped to lead radical opposition to western society are also among the least inclined to do so.

“Although a minority have extreme political views, most are concerned about human rights and social democracy.

“The UK in particular now hosts a new generation of Muslims who are more confident of their national identity and more politically engaged than their parents.”

Glees said: “To be fair to Dr Edmunds she does concede that ‘a minority have extreme political views’.

“The current Whitehall view (which she should have sought) is that some universities fostered radicalisation and were a source of radical young Muslims, particularly from early 1990 to the early 2000s.

“Today, Whitehall says, there is still a problem in some universities and colleges but not most,” he added.

“Even if it could be shown that students are not overrepresented among Islamists, it still tells us something about our higher education that they should study and yet hate this country and its values,” he said.

More than half of the participants described themselves as British, and 91% either as British or “British-hyphenated” such as British-Pakistani.

Most were members of student Islamic organisations but these tended to be moderate groups without international links.

Their favourite websites were guardian.co.uk, BBC news and the Independent, rather than religious sites.

Whereas the lives of many first- and second-generation Muslims centre on the family and the local mosque, younger Muslims revealed themselves to be better disposed to contribute directly to British society and culture.

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