Rewriting the Ad Rules for Muslim-Americans

"Rewriting the Ad Rules for Muslim-Americans"
By LOUISE STORY
The New York Times
Published: April 28, 2007

For years, few advertisers in the United States have dared to reach out to Muslims.

Either they did not see much potential for sales or they feared a political backlash. And there were practical reasons: American Muslims come from so many ethnic backgrounds that their only common ground is their religion, a subject most marketers avoid.

That is beginning to change. Consumer companies and advertising executives are focusing on ways to use the cultural aspects of the Muslim religion to help sell their products.

Complete article here.

Poetry Professor Becomes Terror Suspect

Culture of Fear: Poetry Professor Becomes Terror Suspect

By Kazim Ali, New America Media. Posted April 24, 2007.

A poetry professor in a small college in the Northeast decides to recycle old manuscripts and becomes an object of suspicion.

On April 19, after a day of teaching classes at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania, I went out to my car and grabbed a box of old poetry manuscripts from the front seat of my little white Beetle, carried it across the street and put it next to the trashcan outside Wright Hall. The poems were from poetry contests I had been judging and the box was heavy. I had previously left my recycling boxes there and they were always picked up and taken away by the trash department.

A young man from ROTC was watching me as I got into my car and drove away. I thought he was looking at my car, which has black flower decals and sometimes inspires strange looks. I later discovered that I, in my dark skin, am sometimes not even a person to the people who look at me. Instead, in spite of my peacefulness, my committed opposition to all aggression and war, I am a threat by my very existence, a threat just living in the world as a Muslim body.

Upon my departure, he called the local police department and told them a man of Middle Eastern descent driving a heavily decaled white Beetle with out of state plates and no campus parking sticker had just placed a box next to the trash can. My car has NY plates, but he got the rest of it wrong. I have two stickers on my car. One is my highly visible faculty parking sticker and the other, which I just don't have the heart to take off these days, says, "Kerry/Edwards: For a Stronger America."

Because of my recycling, the bomb squad came, then the state police. Because of my recycling, buildings were evacuated, classes were canceled, the campus was closed. No. Not because of my recycling. Because of my dark body. No. Not even that. Because of his fear. Because of the way he saw me. Because of the culture of fear, mistrust, hatred and suspicion that is carefully cultivated in the media, by the government, by people who claim to want to keep us "safe."

These are the days of orange alerts, school lock-downs, and endless war. We are preparing for it, training for it, looking for it, and so, of course, in the most innocuous instances -- a professor wanting to hurry home, hefting his box of discarded poetry -- we find it.

That man in the parking lot didn't even see me. He saw my darkness. He saw my Middle Eastern descent. This is ironic because though my grandfathers came from Egypt, I am Indian, a South Asian, and could never be mistaken for a Middle Eastern man by anyone who had ever met one.

One of my colleagues was in the gathering crowd, trying to figure out what had happened. She heard my description -- a Middle Eastern man driving a white Beetle with out of state plates -- and knew immediately they were talking about me and realized that the box must have been manuscripts I was discarding. She approached them and told them I was a professor on the faculty there. Immediately the campus police officer said, "What country is he from?"

"What country is he from?!" she yelled, indignant.

"Ma'am, you are associated with the suspect. You need to step away and lower your voice," he told her.

At some length, several of my faculty colleagues were able to get through to the police and get me on a cell phone where I explained to the university president and then to the state police that the box contained old poetry manuscripts that needed to be recycled. The police officer told me that in the current climate I needed to be more careful about how I behaved. "When I recycle?" I asked.

The university president appreciated my distress about the situation but denied that the call had anything to do with my race or ethnic background. The spokesperson of the university called it an "honest mistake," not referring to the young man from ROTC giving in to his worst instincts and calling the police but referring to me who made the mistake of being dark-skinned and putting my recycling next to the trashcan.

The university's bizarrely minimal statement lets everyone know that the "suspicious package" beside the trashcan ended up being, indeed, trash. It goes on to say, "We appreciate your cooperation during the incident and remind everyone that safety is a joint effort by all members of the campus community."

What does that community mean to me, a person who has to walk by the ROTC offices every day on my way to my own office just down the hall -- who was watched, noted and reported, all in a day's work? Today, we gave in willingly and wholeheartedly to a culture of fear and blaming and profiling. It is deemed perfectly appropriate behavior to spy on one another and police one another and report on one another. Such behaviors exist most strongly in closed, undemocratic and fascist societies.

The university report does not mention the root cause of the alarm. That package became "suspicious" because of who was holding it, who put it down, who drove away. Me.

It was poetry, I kept insisting to the state policeman who was questioning me on the phone. It was poetry I was putting out to be recycled.

My body exists politically in a way I cannot prevent. For a moment today, without even knowing it, driving away from campus in my little Beetle, exhausted after a day of teaching, listening to Justin Timberlake on the radio, I ceased to be a person when a man I had never met looked straight through me and saw the violence in his own heart.

from AlterNet.

Muslims ask city to use leverage with hotel firm

"Muslims ask city to use leverage with hotel firm"

Text:

Muslims ask city to use leverage with hotel firm
Lawsuit in Kentucky prompts fears of discrimination
By Brendan O'Shaughnessy
April 13, 2007

"A developer planning to build a Convention Center hotel in Downtown Indianapolis has come under fire from local Islamic advocates concerned that the company will discriminate against Muslim women here.

"White Lodging Services Corp., one of the two developers of the proposed 1,000-room hotel, was recently sued in Kentucky for refusing to hire four Muslim women unless they worked without wearing a hijab, the traditional head covering for women mandated by Islamic religious teachings.

"The Muslim Alliance of Indiana, the Islamic Society of North America and a union group called Unite Here have asked Mayor Bart Peterson to make several demands before the city gives White Lodging and its partner, REI Real Estate Services of Carmel, more than $48.5 million in public subsidies.

"The advocates want White Lodging to meet with them, conduct diversity training for its employees, create protocols that prevent discrimination and allow its hotel employees to organize in unions.

"Peterson's administration last year chose the White Lodging-led partnership for the hotel that is part of the city's bid to host the 2011 Super Bowl, which requires a large number of nearby hotel rooms.

"The Merrillville-based company operates nearly a dozen hotels and restaurants in Indianapolis, including the Marriott Hotel Downtown and several Residence Inns.
White Lodging declined to comment.

"Shariq Siddiqui, executive director of the Muslim alliance, wrote a letter to the mayor in January and is spearheading the effort. He said Peterson should use the subsidies as leverage.

"'We're not against this deal or a subsidy,' Siddiqui said. 'But taxpayers have a say about how the city spends our money. We're saying if you want to get this incentive, you have to play by the rules of this country.'

"The city agreed to kick in about 20 percent of the $250 million construction costs in tax breaks and bonds financed with revenue from a new tax-increment financing district around the hotel. The final deal is in negotiations.

"Peterson said he was interested in sitting down with both sides to find a solution for a complicated issue. He said he has been concerned about a backlash against Muslims in the city since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

"'I want to hear both sides,' Peterson said. 'A private business has a right within the law to do business as it sees fit. On the flip side, when you're doing business with a public entity, the public has the right to ask questions about who we're partnering with.'

"The City-County Council must approve any financial incentives from the city. Patrice Abduallah, a City-County Council member, a Muslim and an advocate of Muslim rights, has worked to pressure White Lodging into changing its policy.

"Abduallah thinks he has support from a bipartisan majority of the council to oppose granting a subsidy if the developer condones discrimination. He said he hopes talks between the company and the Muslim groups can reach a settlement.

"'If Muslims want to wear our attire and women want to be modest and cover themselves in the workplace, then I'm shocked that a company would take a position against that,'" Abduallah said.

"Lonnell Conley, the council's Democratic majority leader, and Scott Keller, a Republican who spearheaded earlier anti-discrimination efforts, said they have not heard about the case in Kentucky or Abduallah's concern about White Lodging's policy.

"Jackie Nytes, a Democratic council member, said Democrats have talked to union leaders about pushing White Lodging to allow union organization.

"In the Louisville case, four Muslim women claimed they were denied jobs as housekeepers at a Marriott hotel because they wore a hijab.

"The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed a lawsuit last summer after it found no evidence that wearing the hijab would affect the women's work performance.

"The lawsuit accuses the company of illegal discrimination for refusing to accommodate the women's religious practices. The women, who were sent by an employment agency, claim they were told they couldn't work after they refused to remove their hijabs.

"The case is pending.

"An attorney for the EEOC told the Louisville Courier-Journal that the case was the first of its kind in Kentucky but that cases of religious discrimination are common around the country. It was unclear late Thursday whether similar cases have been filed in Indiana because complaints are not made public unless the EEOC takes action.

"The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations said it receives complaints at least once a week from women who have been told they could not wear the hijab.

"Siddiqui said the Islamic Society, a national organization, holds national conventions and would not hold one here if the Indiana Convention Center hotel allows discrimination. The society's convention could book up to 3,000 hotel rooms and bring $15 million in economic impact, Siddiqui said.

"Abduallah said Muslims across the world dress in a recognizable way as an expression of their faith. He often wears a fez, a rounded, flat hat that covers the hair, which he called a part of his personal style and community identity. It doesn't affect his work any more than his wife's hijab, he said.

"His wife, Helen Abduallah, said she couldn't imagine an employer not allowing her to wear the hijab. She and Patrice co-own a Near-Westside restaurant."

Producer: PBS dropped 'Islam vs. Islamists' on political grounds

Producer: PBS dropped 'Islam vs. Islamists' on political grounds

By Dennis Wagner
The Arizona Republic
Apr. 10, 2007
original text

The producer of a tax-financed documentary on Islamic extremism claims his film has been dropped for political reasons from a television series that airs next week on more than 300 PBS stations nationwide.

Key portions of the documentary focus on Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser of Phoenix and his American Islamic Forum for Democracy, a non-profit organization of Muslim Americans who advocate patriotism, constitutional democracy and a separation of church and state.

Martyn Burke says that the Public Broadcasting Service and project managers at station WETA in Washington, D.C., excluded his documentary, Islam vs. Islamists, from the series America at a Crossroads after he refused to fire two co-producers affiliated with a conservative think tank.
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"I was ordered to fire my two partners (who brought me into this project) on political grounds," Burke said in a complaint letter to PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which supplied funds for the films.

Burke wrote that his documentary depicts the plight of moderate Muslims who are silenced by Islamic extremists, adding, "Now it appears to be PBS and CPB who are silencing them."

A Jan. 30 news release by the corporation listed Islam vs. Islamists as one of eight films to be presented in the opening series.

Mary Stewart, vice president of external affairs at WETA, said Burke's documentary was not completed on time to be among 11 documentaries that will be aired beginning Sunday. Stewart said the picture may be broadcast by PBS at a later date.

"The film is a strong film," Stewart said. "I'm still hoping to see this in the Crossroads initiative."

Jeff Bieber, WETA's executive producer for Crossroads, gave a substantially different explanation. He said Burke's film had "serious structural problems (and) . . . was irresponsible because the writing was alarmist, and it wasn't fair."

"They're crying foul, and there was no foul ball," Bieber added. "The problem is in their film."

Federally funded films
The controversy involves a collection of documentaries financed with $20 million in federal grants from the corporation, which conceived Crossroads in 2004 to enhance public understanding of terrorism, homeland security and other crucial issues in the post-9/11 era. Independent filmmakers submitted 430 proposals. Full production grants were given to 21 of those, including Islam vs. Islamists, which received $700,000.

Subtitled Voices From the Muslim Center, Burke says his film "attempts to answer the question: 'Where are the moderate Muslims?' The answer is, 'Wherever they are, they are reviled and sometimes attacked' " by extremists.

Michael Levy, a spokesman for CPB, said the corporation set up the Crossroads project and provided funding, but turned over management and content control to PBS and WETA 13 months ago.

After that, Burke says in his Feb. 23 complaint letter, he "consistently encountered actions by the PBS series producers that violate the basic tenets of journalism in America."

PBS officials turned down interview requests.

Debate about bias
The dispute adds to a running debate about political bias in the nation's publicly funded television business. In 2004, filmmakers complained that CPB was pushing a right-wing agenda for the Crossroads series. A year later, CPB President Kenneth Tomlinson sought to eliminate what he saw as a liberal bias at PBS. He was forced to resign after an inspector general's report found that he violated federal rules and ethics standards in the process.

Burke's credits include Pirates of Silicon Valley, a movie about the founders of Microsoft, and The Hollywood Ten, a documentary about blacklisted leftists in the motion picture industry during the 1950s.

In the making of Islam vs. Islamists, Burke's co-producers were Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy, and Alex Alexiev, the non-profit organization's vice president. Both men are neo-conservatives who have written on the threat of "Islamofascism" to the free world.

Before filming began last year, Burke says, Bieber asked him, "Don't you check into the politics of the people you work with?"

Bieber said PBS was concerned that the Center for Security Policy is an advocacy group, so its leaders could not produce an objective picture. Because of that, he suggested that Gaffney be demoted to adviser.

Burke, who did not honor the recommendation, says that funding was delayed and WETA began to interfere with his film until it was "expelled" from Crossroads.

Among Burke's examples of tampering:


• A WETA manager pressed to eliminate a key perspective of the film: The claim that Muslim radicals are pushing to establish "parallel societies" in America and Europe governed by Shariah law rather than sectarian courts.


• After grants were issued, Crossroads managers commissioned a new film that overlapped with Islam vs. Islamists and competed for the same interview subjects.


• WETA appointed an advisory board that includes Aminah Beverly McCloud, director of World Islamic Studies at DePaul University. In an "unparalleled breach of ethics," Burke says, McCloud took rough-cut segments of the film and showed them to Nation of Islam officials, who are a subject of the documentary. They threatened to sue.

"This utterly undermines any journalistic independence," Burke wrote in an e-mail to WETA officials.

In an interview, McCloud said she showed a single video frame to a Muslim journalist who was not a Nation of Islam representative.

However, in a January e-mail, McCloud told Crossroads producers that she had spoken with Nation of Islam representatives and "invited them over to view this section." She also wrote that they were outraged "and will promptly pursue litigation."

Stewart, the WETA executive, said McCloud was admonished for "inappropriate" conduct.

Otherwise, however, Stewart said Crossroads producers have dealt with Islam vs. Islamists in a fair and professional manner.

Silencing Muslim moderates

Silencing Muslim moderates
Controversial program meets cutting-room floor

By Doug MacEachern
The Arizona Republic
Apr. 10, 2007
original text

If Dr. Zuhdi Jasser of Phoenix were a Christian - and he emphatically is not - we might deem him a saint.

But Jasser is a Muslim. He believes in his religion as fervently as any Catholic bishop believes in his. Or any Muslim imam, for that matter. He is faithful to the Quran, which Jasser believes conveys a message of peace.

Because of his faith, and because of what he has done to act on his faith, Jasser has evolved into an extraordinary symbol of what true heroism means in the post-Sept. 11 world. He is a Muslim and an American. And he is a man of peace - a rare, bold iconoclast who is willing to speak out against people who, he believes, have stolen his faith for evil ends.

So, is Zuhdi Jasser what you might call a "moderate" Muslim? If you do, then the Public Broadcasting Service has a problem with you.

On April 15, PBS, along with its Washington, D.C., affiliate, WETA, will begin airing an 11-part series of documentaries titled America at a Crossroads. It is described by PBS as "a major public television event . . . that explores the challenges confronting the post-9/11 world," and much of what it explores is the clash of Western values and those of fundamentalist Muslims.

Until earlier this year, a part of that exploration was to include a segment on Muslims living in the West - in places like Copenhagen, Paris, Toronto and Phoenix - and their clashes with Muslim fundamentalists who often explicitly align themselves with violence and, sometimes, with terrorists.

The segment was titled, Islam vs. Islamists: Voices from the Muslim Center. By and large, the clashes it depicted involved people like Jasser condemning violence perpetrated in the name of Islam, and fundamentalist imams condemning the Jassers of the world as false Muslims.

In some cases, the documentary showed fundamentalists talking candidly about shutting up the moderates in their midst. And, in one case involving a moderate Muslim politician in Denmark, it caught them talking about shutting him up permanently.

In many respects it is an inspiring story, the sort of story that public television often likes to tell. But it isn't going to tell the story depicted in Islam vs. Islamists. At least not as a part of the heavily promoted Crossroads series, and quite possibly not at all.

The problems that the PBS-WETA producers had with Islam vs. Islamists are complex. On The Arizona Republic's news pages today, reporter Dennis Wagner details many of those issues.

But much of their hostility seems to boil down to this: They could not bring themselves to declare people like Jasser "moderate" because that would mean criticizing the fundamentalists whom the Jassers of the world oppose.

As the PBS producers affirmed time and again in their letters and e-mails, who is an Islamic "extremist" and who is a "moderate" depends entirely on which side of the street you're standing. In large part, it is about "context."

"We felt the program was flawed by incomplete storytelling and problems with fairness," said Jeff Bieber, executive producer of the Crossroads series. "We felt the writing was alarmist and without adequate context.

"We just felt there was incomplete context, (that) could lead viewers to the wrong conclusions."

"These are the 'root-cause' people," responded Jasser, who said the PBS-WETA producers could not bring themselves to identify the issue facing the United States since Sept. 11, 2001: "It is a radical Islam problem."

On Feb. 12, Bieber wrote to the Islam vs. Islamists production team, informing them they were scrapping the project.

Bieber's bottom line: "The latest cut of Islam vs. Islamists falls significantly short of meeting the standards necessary for inclusion in America at a Crossroads and for PBS national distribution." Effectively, over 12 months of production work and an estimated $700,000-plus of public television's dollars went down the drain.

As The Republic's Wagner writes elsewhere in today's pages, the production of Islam vs. Islamists was stormy from the beginning. Series producers Bieber and Leo Eaton and the Islam vs. Islamists producers fought raging battles for months over matters of structure and presentation.

The paper trails of letters and e-mails among the series producers and those of the Islam vs. Islamists segment, as well as interviews with Islam vs. Islamists producer Martyn Burke of California, tell a story that goes well beyond typical editor-journalist haggling.

"I've worked for networks all over the world, and I've never seen anything like this," Burke said.

It is an odd trail. Early last year, conservative foreign-policy expert Frank Gaffney won approval from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the parent organization of PBS, to pursue his project as part of the Crossroads series.

But by mid-summer of 2006, the Crossroads producers were badgering Burke to fire Gaffney and his partner, Alex Alexiev, according to Burke, who argued it was because of Gaffney's conservative politics.

"Never before have I been asked, 'Don't you check into the politics of the people you're working with?' " wrote Burke in a long letter to Bieber and Eaton in January. "Years ago I did a two-hour documentary on the Hollywood Ten. I felt as if I was living in that same era of blacklisting."

Things got stranger still as production of Islam vs. Islamists continued.

Burke said the fight over "context" and the side issue of his co-producers' politics caused a seven-month delay in funding. Then, the PBS producers hired a five-member team of consultants to review all the segments of the Crossroads series - among them a university professor who teaches a course on Islam in the United States.

That academic, Dr. Aminah Beverly McCloud of DePaul University, screened a cut of Islam vs. Islamists for a group of Nation of Islam leaders - a rather serious breach of journalism protocol, considering that the Nation of Islam was a major part of Burke's Islam vs. Islamists investigation. According to an e-mail from McCloud to Burke, "These representatives (of the Nation of Islam) were outraged at the implications here and assert that if this airs, they will promptly pursue litigation."

The correspondence between Burke and the series producers suggests the two sides simply could not reach common ground on what constitutes a "moderate" Muslim in the West, and what constitutes an extremist.

It seems a bizarrely fine point to fight over.

The moderates, it seems, are the ones struggling to project a peaceful co-existence between the West and Islam. People like Jasser, for example.

And the extremists? Perhaps those who despise Jasser. Or those who threaten with death those who disagree with them.

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like viewers of the Crossroads series will have much chance to sort them out for themselves.



Reach the author at doug.maceachern@arizonarepublic.com or at 602-444-8883. To see a brief clip of America at a Crossroads go to videos.azcentral.com.

"Getting dressed each day is a fraught negotiation"

Fashion & Style
We, Myself and I
By RUTH LA FERLA
The New York Times
Published: April 5, 2007
"The demands of faith, family and Western culture test the fashion identities of Muslim women in the United States."

Read the whole article here.

Relatives of Interned Japanese-Americans Side With Muslims

Relatives of Interned Japanese-Americans Side With Muslims
By NINA BERNSTEIN
Published: April 3, 2007
The New York Times
An unusual legal brief draws parallels between the government’s treatment of Japanese and its treatment of Muslims since 9/11.
Complete text..