Amnesty says racial profiling is on increase against US Muslims

WASHINGTON, September 14 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – Racial profiling by US law enforcement agencies has grown over the past three years to cover one in nine Americans, mostly targeting Muslims, Amnesty International has said in a fresh report.

"State and federal agencies, under the guise of fighting terrorism, have expanded the use of this degrading, discriminatory and dangerous practice," said Curt Goering, deputy executive director for Amnesty International USA, in the report, released Monday, September 13, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP).

The study has found that some 32 million Americans have been subjected to profiling, defined as the targeting of people because of their ethnic or religious background.

Moreover, some 87 million Americans are at risk of racial profiling during their lifetime, as per the report.

The human rights group said the use of profiling has seen a major increase since the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.

The practice "violates human rights, undermines national security and simply does not work," said Goering.

Against Muslims

According to Amnesty, people of Middle Eastern or South Asian descent and those of the Muslim and Sikh faiths are most at risk, especially since the September 11 attacks.

It pointed to "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh, British shoe-bomber Richard Reid and Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh -- who escaped as police searched for Arab suspects -- as examples of people who did not fit the standard terrorist profiles.

"The targeting of certain groups -- specifically Arab and Muslim Americans and travelers who are citizens of Arab and Muslim nations -- has increased," Cathy Harris, a senior US Customs inspector, said in the report.

Timothy Lewis, a former district court judge and federal prosecutor, said that racial profiling is not only ineffective, it violates the US Constitution. "It is wrong, and nothing that happened on September 11, 2001 makes it right," he said.

Bush Grilled

President George W. Bush vowed to end racial profiling in US law enforcement in February 2001, but the ban is a policy -- not law -- and has no enforcement teeth, according to the report.

Bush "has failed to support any federal legislative effort" to eliminate racial profiling in the country, Amnesty said.

Harris complained in 1998 about racial profiling practices that included strip searches of black and Hispanic women. Following the complaints Harris said that Customs changed their practices and the group saw drug arrests increase by 300 percent.

But following the September 11 attacks and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, Customs merged with the Immigration and Naturalization Service and 20 other federal agencies -- and Customs "is slowly going back to its old ways," Harris said.

Amnesty wants the US Congress as well as state and local governments to enact comprehensive legislation banning the practice.

On the Rise

Amnesty's 50-page report documents cases of people pulled over by police and treated as suspects solely based on their looks, as well as people of Middle Eastern and south Asian descent who do not call police or the fire department because they fear they will be targeted based on their race.

Many of the seven-million-estimated Muslims in the United States have complained of racial profiling by the national authorities since 9/11.

In its ninth annual Muslim civil rights report, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) documented an unprecedented increase of 70 percent of anti-Muslim violence over the previous year.

Nearly 57 percent of American Muslims polled by CAIR in 2002 complained of having experienced bias or discrimination since the September 11 attacks and 87 percent know of a fellow Muslim who experienced discrimination.

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has launched a nationwide campaign to question Muslim and Arab Americans after intelligence warnings of possible terrorist attacks.

The series of interviews so far covered a broad spectrum, including students, high-tech professionals and even prominent Muslim figures.

A May 2004 report released by the US Senate Office Of Research concluded that the Muslim community in the United States has taken the brunt of the Patriot Act and other federal powers applied in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

On July 1, agents raided an Islamic institute in Northern Virginia, with no reasons cited, a move seen by an American Muslim civil rights group as a "new fishing expedition".