Did You Give at the Office?

He told me, "With our return to a 'preventive paradigm' of preemptively weeding out threats to national security, guilt by association has been resurrected from the McCarthy era. While it was illegal in the 1950s to be a member of the Communist Party, it is now a crime to support an individual or organization on a terror watch list, although the government can designate and freeze assets without a showing of actual ties to terrorism or illegal acts."

"While the House Un-American Activities Committee once relied on the private sector to mete out punishment through the destruction of reputations and careers, today measures such as the Anti-Terrorist Financing Guidelines have turned funders into the new enforcers. In this light, he said the nonprofit sector has an obligation to resist such a partnership with government," he says.

Other observers believe that the campaign against charities that conduct programs in Muslim areas is part of a larger suspicion of Arabs and other Muslims. Samer Shehata, professor of Arab Politics at Georgetown University, told me Islamophobia "produces an environment that is fundamentally at odds with what the U.S. is supposed to be about; our values for treating everyone fairly and not discriminating on the basis of skin color, race, religion, gender, etc."

He adds, "This is damaging certainly for all Americans and it is also damaging for the reputation of the U.S. overseas. One of the questions I hear the most whenever I am in Egypt and other parts of the Middle East is: how is it like now in the U.S. for Arabs? Have you been the victim of discrimination, bigotry, abuse?"

One of the many "walls" that Barack Obama said in Berlin needs tearing down is the one the Bush Administration has built to paint American Muslims as wild-eyed fanatical bomb-throwing terrorists. It has created this deeply flawed and hateful caricature by creating the environment of fear in which all of us find ourselves - and our politics -- in this election season.

The Bush Administration no doubt believes that its efforts to cut off terrorist funding by U.S. charities are critical to the national interest. And when the national interest, as defined by the president and his aides, is at stake we turn a blind eye to the rule of law. Like much of the so-called "war on terror," this campaign against the not-for-profit sector is a blunt instrument. It produces collateral that robs our country of a wide range of skills and resources that could help build bridges to the very people we need to win this war of ideas.

That no jury has yet to return a guilty verdict against any of the charities the Justice Department has brought to trial is a tribute to the good sense of American citizens.

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