Posted on 03/29/2002 5:57:58 AM PST by NativeNewYorker
For American Muslims,time once counted in minutes and hours is now measured as before and after. Before and after September 11.
Before the terrorist strikes, they felt safe in their homes and offices and, although many felt apart from the mainstream, most believed they had an equal stake in the American Dream. After the attacks, the nightmare of detention camps, such as those employed against Japanese Americans in the second world war, has seemed to many like a real threat.
These sentiments were expressed repeatedly at two town meetings held this week in the northern Virginia suburbs after 150 federal agents raided 14 homes and offices of some of the region's most respected Muslim leaders.
The raids were launched as part of Operation Green Quest, a task force created to track and disrupt the sources of terrorist finances. The Customs Service leads the group but it includes investigators from across a broad spectrum of agencies, such as the Internal Revenue Service, the FBI and Secret Service.
In northern Virginia they targeted, among others, the International Institute of Islamic Thought, the Graduate School of Islamic Social Sciences, the Muslim World League and the Fiqh Council of North America. These bodies were described by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair) as "respected Islamic institutions" whose targeting "sends a hostile and chilling message to the American Muslim community and contradicts President Bush's repeated assertions that the war against terrorism is not a conflict with Islam".
According to Customs, Operation Green Quest is carrying out more than 300 probes into terrorist finances. In its four months of operation, it has seized about Dollars 10.3m (Pounds 7.2m) in smuggled US currency and Dollars 4.3m in other assets. Its work has resulted in 21 searches, 12 arrests and four indictments.
It says evidence seized during the raids has generated "substantial leads". It has several investigations into charities and "so-called" relief operations. "Suspect charities frequently garner funds through community solicitation and fundraising appeals, then divert a portion of these funds to terrorist organisations," it says.
Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for Cair, said the task force had acted on "its usual unsupported allegations using secret evidence" classified on grounds of national security. "They raided a poultry business in Georgia," he said. "They are afraid of terrorist chickens." There were no charges and no arrests.
The Justice Department also used secret evidence last week to freeze the assets of Global Relief Foundation, a Muslim charity from the Chicago area. The secrecy is permitted under the Patriot Act, rushed through Congress and signed after September 11. It allows the freezing of assets of groups before proving they have funded terrorism.
Detentions of an estimated 1,200 non-citizens in the wake of September 11 produced harsh condemnation from Amnesty International earlier this month.
Many have been deported and an estimated 300 are believed to remain in the custody of the Immigration and Naturalization Services.
The Justice Department this week ended another attempt to conduct voluntary interviews of 5,000, predominantly Muslim, foreign nationals. Of these, 2,261 interviews were completed and, according to the Justice Department, fewer than 20 were people detained, mostly on visa violations.
Congressman John Conyers Jr, senior Democrat on the House judiciary committee, is one of the few in Congress who has spoken publicly against Green Quest: "The suggestion that Arab and Muslim Americans appreciate being singled out and interrogated is a prime example of the attorney-general's wartime propaganda machine in full swing."
In northern Virginia, Muslim Americans are still in shock over the raids. According to some of the 300-400 at the town meetings, agents broke doors and locks, brandished guns, and used handcuffs while they ransacked homes and offices.
Once grateful to President George W. Bush, who spoke out against using them as scapegoats for September 11, many now regret backing him in the 2000 election. They spoke of marching on the Capitol, lobbying con- gressmen to hold hearings, impeaching Mr Ashcroft.
"As a community we feel hurt. Our kids are afraid to sleep at night," said Mohamed Majad of the All Dulles Area Muslim Society. Nihad Awad, executive director of Cair, said he had been overseas when he heard about the raids and had had to defend the US government to other Muslims. He said he explained that the government had slipped into the control of "the extremists".
Wherever there are Muslims and non-Muslims together, there is violence. Muslims out!
I doubt that. They saw America as a place to make more money than they could in their own societies. They didn't and don't want to become part of America.
Dreams of turning this country into the cesspool they came from? Good.
Maybe because those famous muslim schools in northern VA preach hate and their textbooks talk about plans for a judenfrei middle east? Maybe because million of dollars were being funneled to terrorists? Maybe because two muslims from this area were arrested last week because they documented their plans to become suicide bombers?
The problem is not us, it is them, them, them.
That having been said, I'm sick and tired of the vast majority of these Muslims complaints! Most of these folks subscribe to the "You(U.S.A) brought this $#!* on yourselves by supporting Isreal, by bombing aspirin factories, by propping up the arab dictators, by........ Most of these Muslims have a hard time condenming the 9/11 attacks, and the folks who planned it, for the cowardly terrorist attacks that they were. These folks send their kids to the Saudi financed "Hate and destroy all infadel" Muslim schools(not unlike the Pakistani schools that graduate future terrorists) that operate in the U.S.A!!!
Yes, I know, I'm guilty of horrific generalizations. The truth hurts. I'm sick and tired of multicultural B.S.
America, love it or leave it.
19 of their own lived among us, smiled in our faces, told us how much they loved this country, told us islam was peace, called us ignorant for doubting them, called is bigoted for daring to question them.
Then they turned around and in the blink of a sunny summer morning slaughtered thousands and thousands and thousands of freedom loving people from 80 nations around the world.
I will neither forgive nor forget in my lifetime.
This ignorant and racist moron, has rarely gotten ANYTHING right.....he's still wrong. Jeeze, will we never be spared the stupidty of liberal/marxist/racist thinking?
Semper Fi
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