Posted on 09/13/2003 4:18:51 PM PDT by Pikamax
U.S. detains, kicks out two Canadian Muslims
By COLIN FREEZE From Saturday's Globe and Mail
UPDATED AT 2:39 AM EDT Saturday, Sep. 13, 2003
Two moderate Islamic scholars were kicked out of the United States and sent back to Canada last night, after U.S. authorities detained them as suspected terrorists when they landed in Florida on the anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks.
Ahmad Kutty, 59, and Abdool Hamid, 37, are Canadian citizens affiliated with the Islamic Centre of Canada in Mississauga, Ont. They were flying to Orlando to lead an Islamic prayer service, but were intercepted by immigration agents during a stopover Thursday stopover in Fort Lauderdale.
In Florida, suspicion of terrorism runs especially high, partly because al-Qaeda ringleaders who carried out the hijackings that killed 3,000 people two years ago took flight training there. According to a man who met one of the detained Canadians in prison, a U.S. border agent said, "You've chosen to fly on the wrong day," Sept. 11.
Altaf Ali, head of the Florida chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said the account was relayed to him by Mr. Hamid when he met him in prison early yesterday. "He was very embarrassed to be in orange [prison] clothes," Mr. Ali said.
Calling the story "one of the most bizarre cases I ever heard," Mr. Ali called upon the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to apologize for detaining the two men. "It's totally uncalled-for," he added.
The case appears to be the latest example of the perils facing Islamic Canadians passing through the United States.
Some outraged Canadian Muslims suggest this case bears similarities to that of Berna Cruz, an Indian-Canadian who was sent back to India after Chicago agents accused her of carrying a fake passport, and Maher Arar, a Syrian-Canadian who remains locked up on suspicion of terrorism in Syria, where he was sent a year ago after passing through New York.
The two religious scholars arrived at Pearson Airport last night, two days after they left for Florida.
"I feel sorry for America," Mr. Kuddy said after he got off the plane and was hugged by dozens of family members and well-wishers. "I had a lot of admiration for that country; it was standing for great ideas for freedom and liberty.
"Now I think the terrorists have succeeded in making that country a police state."
Mr. Hamid said he was detained because a name similar to his was on a terrorist watch list.
"I didn't think [the name] was that common, but it's pretty common at least in that database," he said. Mr. Hamid was left with the impression, after being interviewed by about 10 security agents, that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
"He said to me at the end when he interviewed me, we basically chose the wrong day to fly on."
The imams said they were detained in the Fort Lauderdale airport at 9:30 a.m. on Thursday and questioned by about 10 different U.S. agents for 16 hours, before briefly being sent to jail.
The two men were then given the option of returning to Canada or being detained for two to three months in the United States while immigration authorities checked them out. They chose to return.
Mr. Ali said that border agents became suspicious after seeing Mr. Hamid's name and also Mr. Kutty's business card, which bears the name of a Muslim organization that authorities deemed suspicious.
But no links to terrorism were found. Mr. Kutty, an Indian-born imam with a PhD in religious studies from McGill University in Montreal, has been quoted expressing moderate views in recent Canadian newspaper articles.
"Every community has moderates, conservatives, reform-minded and extremists in their midst; the Muslim community is not an exception," he told the Toronto Star in an interview last year. "The real issue is that some in the media appear to thrive in highlighting the extreme elements in the Muslim community more than others."
Reynald Doiron, a Foreign Affairs spokesman, said customs enforcement agents in Miami said they were not "at liberty" to explain to Canadian consular officials why the two men were detained.
"Any country has the sovereign right to admit or refuse admission without giving an explanation," he said.
Barbara Gonzalez, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Bureau of Customs and Border Protection, said the two men were found inadmissible under a section of immigration law dealing with security grounds. She said they would not be barred from re-entering the United States because they voluntarily withdrew their application to enter. She said she could not go into further details for privacy reasons.
Mr. Kutty is the father of Faisal Kutty, a lawyer affilitated with Muslim civil-liberties groups. In the past, the younger Mr. Kutty has represented individuals and charities whom the Canadian government has tried to link to terrorist groups, most notably Ahmed Said Khadr, an Egyptian charity worker whose sons remain detained in Cuba after being arrested in Afghanistan while fighting for the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
But the younger Mr. Kutty doesn't think his legal work would have caused his father to come under suspicion. In fact, he assured the two men it would be all right to fly on Sept. 11.
"They were asking, should we go?," Faisal Kutty said in an interview. "We said, 'There's nothing for you to hide. Given the security, it's the safest day for you to travel.' "
My B.S. filters automatically switched to maximum bandwith while reading this article, but either the Canadian gov't linked them to terror or they did not.
Mr. Kutty is the father of Faisal Kutty, a lawyer affilitated with Muslim civil-liberties groups. In the past, the younger Mr. Kutty has represented individuals and charities whom the Canadian government has tried to link to terrorist groups, most notably Ahmed Said Khadr, an Egyptian charity worker whose sons remain detained in Cuba after being arrested in Afghanistan while fighting for the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
This Faisal Kutty guy is quite a character. Dollars to donuts he's a Hamas, or perhaps Hezbollah operative. (No doubt the kind who claim to be part of the 'political wing' of a terrorist group rather than the militant wing, as if there is any meaningful difference.
I notice that the article says he is involved with "civil liberties" groups but manages not to name exactly what groups he belongs to...
Get a load of this article :
Canada: Angry Muslims switching party allegiances
Andrew Chung for Toronto Star
7 January 2003
Bitterness taints the voice of Faisal Kutty, a 34-year-old Toronto lawyer, Muslim and card-carrying federal Liberal, when he talks of the governing party to which he belongs.
"I was shocked by them caving in to the Hezbollah issue," Kutty said.
The Anti-Terrorism Act 'Bill C-36' "really upset me. I'm watching closely the position on Iraq. Will they totally give in to the United States? I am so disillusioned with where the Liberals are going."
Angry over what they see as a failure of the governing Liberals to protect them in a security-conscious world, members of the Arab and Muslim communities warn that the party cannot count on their vote in the next election.
Community leaders say the traditional support for the pro-immigration Liberals is eroding, and allegiances ˜ like those of Kutty ˜ are shifting to the New Democratic Party.
"For the first time the NDP has been able to attract a fairly significant number of members of these ethnic communities into its ranks," said Zafar Bangash, 52, publisher of Crescent International, a bi-monthly news tabloid for the Ontario Muslim community.
"It has to do with the kinds of policies it has adopted and issues it has spoken about since Sept. 11 and the war hysteria that has been created."
The NDP has spoken out against the government's sweeping anti-terror legislation passed one year ago, which expanded police powers and secret intelligence hearings, and tackled terrorist financing.
The Anti-Terrorism Act was criticized as too broadly impinging on civil liberties.
The NDP has also repeatedly highlighted the problem of racial profiling at the U.S. border, where members of Arab and Muslim communities are being photographed and fingerprinted.
It has spoken out firmly against military action in Iraq and members have criticized the government's recent extension of its ban of the military wing of Lebanese organization Hezbollah to cover the whole group.
The NDP's Alexa McDonough was the only party leader at a candlelight vigil for Maher Arar, an Ottawa man deported by the U.S. to Syria for alleged terrorist ties.
"Muslims are feeling under siege," said Toronto community activist Uzma Shakir. "Their faith is being demonized and associated with terrorism. We can't travel, even with a Canadian passport; we don't know if our country will stop us from being deported. We don't know who will be picked up by whom and when. Our citizenship can be taken away."
So, Shakir said, a movement away from Liberals, under whose governance this perception has flourished, is not surprising.
Toronto Liberal MP Derek Lee (Scarborough-Rouge River), whose constituency has a large Muslim population, said he has had to "put up with criticisms of my party and my positions," including from Ontario NDP Leader Howard Hampton and McDonough at events in mosques.
But there has been no erosion of civil liberties, he said, and the NDP is "fear-mongering" in the Muslim community.
"If there has been a shifting of support," he added, "in my view it has been marginal."
He may be underestimating the undercurrent.
Ayub Qureshi, 65, a Scarborough grocer and producer of a radio show called "Voice of Pakistan," said he has warned Lee, whom he considers a friend, about the shift in allegiances.
Qureshi himself has voted Liberal since he came to Canada from Kashmir in 1969. He even met the late prime minister Pierre Trudeau.
But he recently took out an NDP membership.
As the NDP leadership vote nears, on Jan. 25, rookie Windsor MP Joe Comartin appears to have benefited the most from this community disaffection.
He went to Iraq on a trip funded by Palestine House, a Palestinian cultural centre based in Mississauga, and reported on the devastation he saw.
Comartin has criticized Israeli "atrocities" in the occupied territories, but also denounced Palestinian suicide bombings.
Of the 4,000 members Comartin convinced to become paid party members, two-thirds are Arab or Muslim or both.
"I made a conscious effort to reach out to them," Comartin said. "They are alienated from the Liberal party and are looking for a new home."
There are nearly 300,000 Arabs and West Asians in Canada, according to the 1996 census ˜ 85,000 in Greater Toronto.
Estimates place the number of Muslims in Canada at 650,000.
There's a pretty good chance Kutty is also affiliated with the Palestine House
Who's next, clergymen of the Religion of Peace?
GO DEAN!
- "Uproar over Canadian Muslim clerics’ expulsion," By Khalid Hasan, Daily Times, Pakistan, Sept 13, 2003, http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_14-9-2003_pg7_42
WASHINGTON: The Muslim community in Canada and the United States is in an uproar about the arrest and deportation to Canada of two respected Muslims clerics by Florida immigration authorities.
The two clerics – Ahmad Kutty, 59, and Abdool Hamid, 37 – who landed at Fort Lauderdale from Toronto on September 11 were told by one of the immigration officers, “You guys have picked the wrong time to fly.”
“They could not be admitted because of security reasons,” Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman Nina Pruneda said, refusing to elaborate.
“We cleared them. We didn’t think there was any reason to detain them any longer,” Federal Bureau of Investigation Miami spokeswoman Judy Orihuela said. “Whatever Customs decided to do, it wasn’t anything we told them to do.” This would mean that there was no legitimate security concern, American Civil Liberties Union in Florida Executive Director Howard Simon said.
Ahmad Kutty has been described as “one of Canada’s most moderate and respected Muslim clerics” who has preached tolerance and peace throughout North America for more than two decades. He is an imam and a scholar at the Islamic Institute of Toronto and at the city’s Jami Mosque. In the wake of 9/11, Kutty is said to have became “a beacon of reason and calm within the city’s Muslim community.”
In an October 2001 column, the Star’s Jim Coyle quoted one of the imam’s sermons at the Jami Mosque in which he cautioned his congregation against Islamic extremism: “Let us make no mistake about it: Today, Muslims have no enemy greater than fanatics in their midst. Let us know that fanaticism is ignorance; it is nothing but sickness and bigotry; let us know that fanaticism is opposed to both scripture and reason.”
Abdool Hamid is also a respected figure among the several million Canadian Muslims.
He is associated with the Islamic Centre of Canada in Mississauga, Ontario. Both were ordered off the Orlando-bound flight from Toronto and interrogated in an airport holding cell and a local jail for 16 hours as the US marked the second anniversary of the September 11 attacks. Kutty was seen as “a risk to national security”. The pair had travelled to Florida to attend seminars and give a series of lectures and sermons on, among other things, the dangers of fanaticism in the Islamic world.
Kutty told a Canadian newspaper, “We have gone through a traumatic experience. Really it dehumanised us.” He said he was pulled off the plane at 9:30 am on Thursday and grilled by at least 10 officials until about 1:30 am on Friday. “They handcuffed us and took us to jail,” he said.
Kutty said immigration officials told him his Islamic Institute of Toronto organisation sounded familiar in name to the Islamic Institution of America, which he assumed was some sort of suspect group. Kutty said the authorities were especially interested in a business card that he carried in his wallet bearing the Islamic Society of North America’s name. He said immigration officials made him sign a waiver giving up his application to enter the United States. Kutty also said he would not return to the United States and would caution other Canadian Muslims from doing so.
Council on American-Islamic Relations Florida Executive Director Altaf Ali who visited Hamid in a Fort Lauderdale jail later said, “This is by far the most bizarre incident I have ever heard of or witnessed.”
Ali said he was denied permission to see Hamid’s affidavit by the Homeland Security department.
“How can Muslims throughout the world be told that they cannot travel on September 11? Does that mean we are being held responsible for the actions of 19 individuals?” he asked.
“I’m totally flabbergasted. I’ve heard some crazy things in the past about people being detained, but this beats them all,” he said.
Khurrum Wahid, a New York lawyer who spoke to Kutty, called the decision ‘outrageous’ and said he would be willing to file a lawsuit against the US government if Kutty wanted to take the case further. Muslim leaders in Canada denounced the detentions as racially motivated and were calling on Ottawa to condemn the incident and insist on fairer treatment for Islamic Canadians and Arabs travelling to the United States.
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