The bills were patterned on a template produced by a leading Islamophobe David Yerushalmi who founded an organization in 2006 with the acronym SANE (the Society of Americans for National Existence) with the aim of banishing Islam from the US. He proposed a law that would make adherence to Islam a felony punishable by 20 years in prison.
What is the fall out of the anti-Sharia campaigns. Such campaigns increase bias among the public by endorsing the idea that Muslims are second-class citizens. They encourage and accelerate both the acceptability of negative views of Muslims and the expression of those negative views by the public and government agencies like the police.
Anti-Muslim sentiment has not only manifested itself through mosque arsons, assaults, murders and invariably hostile rhetoric from society's extreme fringes. It has also become a permanent fixture of the very institutions that should provide safeguards against those things. The fallout of anti-Islam and anti-Muslim rhetoric , which is socially acceptable, appeared in different spheres. Hate crimes against Muslims or perceived to be Muslim is not an uncommon phenomenon while Mosques also became a target of hate.
NYPD declares mosques as terrorist organizations
Amid the concerted Islamophobic campaigns the America Muslim community was stunned to know that the New York Police Department (NYPD) has secretly designated mosques as "terrorist organizations." The Associated Press reported on August 28 that the designation allowed the police to use informants to record sermons and spy on imams, even without any evidence of criminal activity. According to the AP report , designating an entire mosque as a terrorism enterprise means that anyone who attends prayer services there is a potential subject of an investigation and fair game for surveillance.
The AP report further said: "Since the 9/11 attacks, the NYPD has opened at least a dozen "terrorism enterprise investigations" into mosques...... The TEI, as it is known, is a police tool intended to help investigate terrorist cells and the like. Many TEIs stretch for years, allowing surveillance to continue even though the NYPD has never criminally charged a mosque or Islamic organization with operating as a terrorism enterprise."
It may be pointed out that in August 2011, the AP exposed the NYPD spy program, which is allegedly being conducted with the assistance of individuals linked to the CIA. The AP reported that the NYPD is using covert surveillance techniques "that would run afoul of civil liberties rules if practiced by the federal government" and "does so with unprecedented help from the CIA in a partnership that has blurred the bright line between foreign and domestic spying."
Understandably, on June 18, 2013, civil rights groups filed a federal lawsuit charging that the NYPD's Muslim Surveillance Program has imposed an unjustified badge of suspicion and stigma on hundreds of thousands of innocent New Yorkers. It was filed on behalf of religious and community leaders, mosques, and a charitable organization that were all swept up in the NYPD's dragnet surveillance of Muslim New Yorkers.
New York city and the NYPD are being
sued in three separate lawsuits for that surveillance; the most recent suit,
Raza v. City of New York , was filed in June by the ACLU; the lead plaintiff,
Hamid Hassan Raza, is the imam at Masjid Al-Ansar, a Brooklyn mosque that the
ACLU says the NYPD has been spying on since at least 2008.
Muslims need not apply
"Muslims Need Not Apply" is the title of a report of the American Civil Liberty Union (ACLU) which revealed that a covert national security program allows the FBI and US immigration authorities the power to indefinitely delay immigration benefits to Muslims and those from Muslim countries. According to Jennie Pasquarella, the ACLU report writer, the Controlled Application Review and Resolution Program, or CARRP, secret program, relies on "deeply flawed" mechanisms such as "over-broad watch-list systems" and religious, national origin and associational profiling. "It not only catches far too many harmless applicants in its net, but it has overwhelmingly affected applicants who are Muslim or perceived to be Muslim."
The ACLU
report, released on August 21, has given examples of specific cases. Application of Tarek Hamdi,
an Egyptian, was rejected simply because he made his annual tithing (or a
religious donation, known as zakat in Islam) to an Islamic relief aid
organization, Benevolence International Foundation . The government later
shuttered the charity on allegations that it supported terrorism, and
prosecutors charged its leader with defrauding donors like Tarek. Nonetheless,
USCIS flagged Tarek, and what should have been a six-month citizenship process
took 11 years, ending only when a judge ruled in his favor (after numerous
attempts by USCIS to deny his application).
On the positive note:
The US Islamophobe Network, recently described by an infamous bigot Dave Gaubatz [1] as money making partnership, was fomenting fear and fright about Islam and Muslims, swaying many to react and retort negatively to their fellow Muslims . However many extending helping hand. Few examples:
Islamic school gets OK from Blaine City Council, Minnesota: In June, small Islamic school in Blaine, Minnesota, aimed at helping students memorize the Quran was allowed to continue to operate in a Blaine office building. With about 150 people in attendance, the Blaine City Council has voted 5-0 to approve a conditional-use permit for the Darul Arqam Center of Excellence. The approval means the Islamic school, which already is offering classes to a handful of students, will be allowed to stay in the building and to expand its program.
North Carolina University Muslim students get place to pray: In March, the N.C. Central University (NCCU) Women's Center offered dedicated space for Muslim students to pray. Until recently they prayed in stairwells, empty classrooms, bustling hallways, and sometimes, campus restrooms.
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