Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, October/November 1998, pages 111-113

Muslim-American Activism

ISNA Holds 35th Annual Convention Sept. 4-7 in St. Louis, MO

The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) held its 35th annual convention at the America’s Convention Center in St. Louis, MO over the Labor Day weekend. The convention attracted more than 17,000 Muslims from all over the United States, with ISNA activities filling almost all of the giant convention center’s facilities from Sept. 4 to 7. The bazaar area, where more than 175 vendors participated, was jam-packed for four days.

Following a trend of recent years, the convention, entitled “Muslims for Human Dignity,” included an increasing number of sessions on political matters along with the traditional religious and social topics.

In the welcome and inauguration session, ISNA president Dr. Muzammil Siddiqi thanked the convention organizers and St. Louis Muslim community for making possible what he described as the annual “convention of the Muslims of America.”

“ISNA is to bring all Muslims together and motivate them to work together for the cause of Allah,” Dr. Siddiqi asserted. He noted also that ISNA had invited President Clinton to this year’s convention, as it has in previous years, but to no avail.

President Ayman Rayes of the Islamic Medical Association described ISNA’s role in strengthening Muslim community ties in America. He suggested that it is time for ISNA to have its own newspaper, radio and TV. Steering committee chairman Rashid Qureshi discussed the role of American Muslims in dealing with the critical situation they face in the wake of the bombings of U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es-Salaam and retaliatory U.S. missile strikes in Sudan and Afghanistan.

St. Louis Mayor Clarence Harmon told attendees, in a friendly and warm speech, that the Muslim community in St. Louis has grown dramatically in the past three decades to about 10,000 persons. “Islam unites people across race, geographical locations, and ethnicities,” the mayor said. “It is truly an honor to us to have you in our city, and I am personally honored to address you today.”

Michigan Congressman David Bonior, the House Democratic Whip, also addressed Muslim political concerns. “Our challenge is to insist on justice,” he asserted. “People need to learn more about Islam.”

Bonior encouraged Muslims to take concrete steps to educate the American people and to dispel stereotypes. He undertook a personal initiative for Muslim rights recently when he introduced legislation calling for religious tolerance of Muslims in America. Although Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the United States, it is highly persecuted, he noted.

Bonior criticized airport harassment and the use of secret evidence against non-citizen resident Muslims. He cited as an example of such discrimination the case of Mazen Al-Najjar in Tampa, FL, who has been imprisoned and denied bail on the basis of “secret evidence” which even his lawyers are not permitted to see.

The congressman further asserted that “U.S. policy in Iraq needs to change or millions will continue to suffer…The U.S. government needs to consider the humanitarian effects of the Iraqi embargo.” Bonior also expressed his recognition of the need for a more balanced U.S. policy toward the Middle East. “I support a Palestinian state,” he said, “and security for all peoples of the Middle East.”

Turning to Muslim issues abroad, Representative Bonior said: “We [the U.S.] waited too long in Bosnia. Too many people were raped, killed and too many lives were lost. We can’t do this in Kosovo. We should not let history repeat itself there.”

He also called for U.S. attention to the problem of Kashmir: “We need to play a role in South Asia. We must work together. These issues are not only governmental challenges, but personal challenges as well,” Bonnier concluded.

In a panel titled “Media and Muslims,” speakers discussed negative media images of Islam. Maha El Ganaidi, director of the Islamic Network Group who conducted a survey of religious stereotypes in the American print media, said she found that 80 percent of Jews were portrayed as heroes, peacemakers, and victims, 80 percent of Christians were presented as backward and outdated, and 80 percent of Muslims were seen as terrorists, corrupt, and abusive toward women. El Ganaidi stressed the need for local activism to change media treatment. Muslims need to build positive, long-term relations with both policymakers and the media, she said.

Dr. Nazir Khaja, chairman of the Islamic Information Service (INS), expressed concern regarding public ignorance about Islam. INS broadcasts weekly one-hour programs to provide facts about Islam and Islamic values and to combat negative stereotypes. During the panel, Dr. Khaja showed a program segment where the camera crew asked random Americans, “What is Islam?” Most respondents displayed ignorance and suspicion. One American woman replied, “Well, as far as I know, Islam is the national religion of Israel.”

In a well-attended session entitled “Human Dignity and the Muslim World: The Case of Pakistan and Algeria,” former Prime Minister Abdelhamid Brahimi of Algeria discussed several aspects of the Algerian crisis, citing political, social, economic, and civilizational factors that have contributed to present problems there.

Regarding the systematic killing, rape, and torture of thousands of Algerians since 1992, Brahimi said “what‘s happening is unacceptable.” Brahimi himself was put on trial in Algeria when he expressed publicly his concerns about possible Algerian regime involvement in massacres there.

ISNA secretary-general Sayyid M. Syeed informed the audience that Qazi Hussain Ahmad, spiritual leader (Ameer) of the Islamic Group (Jamaat-e-Islami) in Pakistan, was unable to attend the convention due to the present circumstances in his region after the American bombing of Sudan and Afghanistan. “Pakistanis are frustrated by the American policy toward Muslim countries,” Ahmad said in the message he sent to the convention. “If the American government desires a common understanding with the Muslim world, it should respect the dignity and humanity of the Muslim world.”

Manifesting the Muslim presence in American political life was the focus of a panel entitled “Elections ’98: A Muslim Plan of Action.” Dr. Shabbir Safdar, the panel’s moderator, encouraged Muslims to participate more actively in the American political arena. He recommended strongly that every Muslim in the United States read the Washington Report on Middle EastAffairs, especially an article in the July/ August 1998 edition by executive editor Richard Curtiss in which the author advanced suggestions for effective united action by Muslims both in the Middle East and in the United States.

Hesham Reda, the Washington director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), discussed integration of Muslims into American society. “It is a necessity that every Muslim should participate in the issues of daily life in America, especially in the elections,” he asserted.

Mujahed Ramadan, president of the American Muslim Council (AMC), urged Muslims not to be concerned only about what happens in Muslim countries, but to participate more effectively in American politics. “If we want a change to happen in the foreign policies of the U.S., we have to be more powerful in participating in the elections,” he said. Ramadan noted that the Muslim community must have a vision and strategy for participation and representation in public policymaking. “We have to be continuously involved in internal issues in America,” he concluded.

Director Nihad Awad of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) focused on the importance of unity among Muslims living in the U.S. “To be united is the best way to be effective,” he said. Awad believes that the election process is a long, step-by-step procedure and that Muslim organizations should work more effectively to achieve unity of purpose and action.

In his presentation, Dr. Agha Saeed, president of the American Muslim Alliance (AMA), discussed plans for the upcoming elections and expressed concern over weak participation to date by Muslims in U.S. elections. “Muslims do not vote because they are not aware of the issues and the candidates,” he said. To solve this problem, the AMA is currently conducting a program of 30 meetings proposed to educate voters and enhance their awareness of the candidates and the issues.

The AMA has developed a community education guide based on a voter pamphlet. The guide includes several ballot propositions on which community members at each meeting are asked to show their position—either supporting, opposing or taking no stand on these ballot measures. “This way, we would be informing the community members about their candidates and the proposed issues as well as receiving their feedback,” Dr. Saeed said.

Dr. Saeed stated that there are 800,000 Muslims in California (2.2 percent of the largest state’s population), and that a high percentage of them are registered to vote. He provided the AMA head office phone number—(510) 742-1126—for people interested in organizing meetings in their areas.

Legal and media experts discussed the use of secret evidence against Muslims in a panel entitled “Guilty Until Proven Innocent: Prisoners of Conscience in the U.S.” Matt Piers, lawyer for Muhammad Salah, a Chicago-area Muslim arrested in Israel, asserted that discrimination against Muslims endangers all civil liberties. The United States has placed Salah on a list of “specially designated terrorists” and has denied him basic rights as a United States citizen without producing concrete evidence against him.

The U.S. government has rendered Salah a “nonperson,” stripping him of his right to financial dealings, to have a job, to go to school, and to receive medical treatment, Piers said. He noted that Muhammad Salah is the first and only U.S. citizen to be placed on a list of “specially designated terrorists.” Piers urged the Muslim community to show support for the Salah family, whose home has been seized by the U.S. government, in any way possible.

Four panelists at a major session on “Human Dignity and Foreign Policy” examined the problems of Palestine and Iraq. The session opened with a film supplied by Omar Ahmad of the Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) showing the bulldozing of Arab houses in East Jerusalem while Israel military forces forcibly restrained residents of the houses and beat and fired live ammunition at Palestinian bystanders seeking to halt the destruction and help the families evacuate their possessions.

Mr. Ahmad then recounted the horrifying statistics of the 1948 dispossession of the Palestinians which created 750,000 refugees who were not allowed by Israeli forces to return to their homes after the fighting ended, and the physical obliteration of some 418 Palestinian villages. Jewish residents of Palestine owned only 7 percent of the land and were only 33 percent of the population at the time Palestine was partitioned by the United Nations in 1947, Ahmad said. Yet by the time a cease-fire was negotiated in 1949, they had occupied 78 percent of the land, which now comprises Israel within its Green Line borders. The dispute centers on the remaining 22 percent of Palestine—East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza—where the Israelis are creating new waves of refugees with land seizures and bulldozing of Palestinian homes.

Richard Curtiss, executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle EastAffairs, discussed how American Muslims can use the mainstream U.S. media not only to acquaint their fellow citizens with Islam and the expanding American Muslim community, but also with the magnitude of the crimes committed against the Palestinians—a subject the U.S. media generally seek to avoid. He also suggested that American Muslim communities across the United States should invite candidates for elective office to get-acquainted sessions at which the candidates would learn about Muslim concerns, such as Jerusalem and the Palestine problem, and Muslim voters would hear what each candidate plans to do about them. The media also should be invited to all such sessions, Curtiss said, to make editors aware of the existence of the rapidly growing Muslim population in their midst and its concerns. “Let’s stop complaining about U.S. foreign policy,” Curtiss told his Muslim audience. “Let’s start changing it.”

Former U.S. Attorney General (in the Lyndon Johnson administration) Ramsey Clark discussed his personal observations during a trip to Iraq of the vast scale of the suffering of the Iraqi people under the U.S.-backed United Nations embargo. He also criticized U.S. military spending, saying it is $266 billion this fiscal year, while the military expenditures of China, the only conceivable military rival to the U.S., amounted to only $32 billion. Returning to the desperate situation in Iraq, Clark said:

“The new preferred weapons are genocidal weapons. How do you withstand the effects of sanctions on people? They kill infants first because they can’t get food supplements or pure water. They die very quickly.”

Clark said Iraq’s current infant mortality rate is seven times that of 1989. “This,” he charged, “is the direct result of U.S. foreign policy.” He said it will result in “a stunted generation, because malnutrition affects a great majority of the people. There is no action that any government can inflict or threaten that can justify what has been inflicted on Iraq. It is one of the greatest assaults of all time.”

Concluding, Ramsey Clark expressed the “hope that we can all join together to struggle to do all we can to end the sanctions.”

The second speaker on Iraq was Sara Flounders of the International Action Center in New York, who fasted for 21 days in front of U.N. headquarters in New York protesting that a report on the health problems of the Iraqi people was not being released. She reported from her own observations in Iraq that “schools which once were full are now closed. But the U.S. media act as if there were only one man who lives in Iraq and his name is Saddam Hussain.”

She said that every U.N. agency has reported the same grim statistics from Iraq, yet when U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was asked some time ago whether a policy that already had killed half a million children could be justified, she responded that the policy “is worth it.”

Citing vigils and activities such as the questioning at Ohio State University of Albright and White House National Security Adviser Samuel Berger Jr., who wanted to bomb Iraq last February, Flounders said such protests “changed the mood in the United States.”

“Sanctions will end when millions of people around the world say no to genocide,” Flounders said. “Let Iraq live.”

Concluding the foreign policy panel, moderator Manzoor Ghori described his own observations of people in Baghdad hospitals who had literally been starving to death, Ghori asked his audience: “Are we responsible as American citizens? What is our responsibility as believers? Muslims can make a difference. We have to unite. We have the responsibility to correct injustice, and to make it right.”

The session titled “Update on Kosova” focused on the current activities of panelists involved in mobilizing U.S. public opinion about the on-going Serb-perpetrated holocaust in Kosovo. Imam Zurkari, who visited Kosovo recently, described the suffering of the Kosovars and urged Muslims at the convention to stand up for the rights of their fellow humans, who are being killed and tortured in Kosovo. “It is our duty as Muslims to help every man and woman in Kosovo,” he said.

Naveed Mallick, from the Kosova Task Force, defined several steps to become effective and active in solving the Kosovan problem as proposed by Kosova Task Force. To support Kosovo, Mallick suggested that Muslims contact their congressmen to urge them to include the Kosovo problem in their agendas. [People interested in supporting Kosovo can call the Capital switchboard at (202) 224-3121 in order to get their representatives’ names and phone numbers.]

During the closing session of the convention, ISNA president Muzammil Siddiqui and ISNA secretary-general Sayyid M. Syeed encouraged the Muslim community to be more active. Syeed also stressed the importance of paying attention to the younger generations, for they represent the future. He urged Muslims to work together actively. “We are making good progress,” he concluded, “but we need to keep going.”

—Samia A. El-Mahdi & Raja’ M. Abu-Jabr