American and
Muslim: Six Million People in Search of an Identity
By Robert Fisk
A guy with brown eyes and
dark skin and a thick American accent walks up
to talk to me. I guess he's an Iranian, possibly
a Pakistani. Where're you from, I ask? "Austin,
Texas," he replies. Fisk foiled again. But
where do you originally come from I ask him? "I
was born in Newark, New Jersey." Fisk clears
his throat. Where does his family originally come
from? I'm beginning to feel like the man from
Homeland Security, racially profiling my new friend.
"Lahore," he replies laconically and
I try to make amends. The only beautiful city
in Pakistan, I say, and he smiles witheringly
at me.
And I go on making the same mistake at the conference
hall where the biggest annual convention of American
Muslims - perhaps 32,000 of them - is meeting
for a weekend of speeches and discussions that
run all the way from drug addiction to Condi Rice's
"new" and bloody Middle East, from banking
without interest to the Bush administration's
use of torture and yes, of course, the after-effects
on Muslims of the international crimes against
humanity of September 11, 2001.
Salam al-Marayati - he is one of the few Muslims
I meet who actually was born in the Arab world,
in the Baghdad suburb of Qadamiyeh - is director
of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), a
Los Angeles advocacy group which repeatedly urges
American Muslims to work with the authorities
against violence but who sees other dangers and
other targets for Muslim political anger: the
pro-Israeli lobbyists who ostentatiously insist
that the vast majority of American Muslims are
peaceful and law-abiding but that a "network
of Islamic terror" exists across the nation.
Daniel Pipes is a bête noire, as is Steven
Emerson, a freelance journalist who grinds out
article after article about the "American
jihad" for such august papers as The Wall
Street Journal, which, by the way, more and more
reads like The Jerusalem Post. Emerson and his
work are taken apart by al-Marayati and his colleagues
in a widely circulated booklet entitled "Counterproductive
Terrorism: How Anti-Islamic Rhetoric is Impeding
America's Homeland Security."
"Those representing pro-Israeli groups continue
to intimidate and marginalise those who are critical
of Israeli policies by claiming this is pro-terrorism,"
al-Marayati says with a mixture of anger and weariness.
"This is to the detriment of America, to
the detriment of countering terrorism."
Maher Hathout, originally from the Cairo suburb
of Qasr el-Aini and an MPAC advisor, is, if anything,
even more angry. "We are that group of Americans
who are not intimidated," he says. "You
go to the campuses, and the Muslim students are
the most outspoken. They are asking - we are asking
- how we can get the average American who knows
the truth about the Middle East to have the guts
to speak it. Our job is to say: 'Shame on you.
You criticise your President. But when you speak
of Israel, you whisper.' What has happened to
the home of the brave?"
MPAC has produced a handbook called the Grassroots
Campaign to Fight Terrorism, which quotes from
the Koran ("Whoever killed a human being...
it shall be as if he had killed all mankind")
and advises its supporters that "it is our
duty as American Muslims to protect our country
and to contribute to its betterment".
"But what is the American-Muslim identity?"
al-Marayati asks. "Our religious values and
our American values are not incompatible. There
is no dissonance between the founding principles
of America and Muslim values. Unless we have this
identity, we will be trapped. We will end up creating
Muslim ghettoes in America."
Sometimes, though, these men and women remind
me of nothing so much as the more ardent members
of the Israeli - or Armenian - lobby: fluent,
just a little bit over-eloquent, passionate -
and I wonder if one day they may get a little
loose with the facts.
(Courtesy The Independent, 9/3/06)
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