"Liberty and Justice for All"… Except Muslims

"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. And to the republic for which it stands. One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

Remember standing up in class every morning and reciting the pledge of allegiance before beginning your day? Remember everyone standing with their right hands over their hearts and looking towards the stars and stripes displayed in the front of the classroom?

Or how about when you finally got your citizenship and were sworn in during a proud ceremony that culminated with the pledge that seemed to hold so much promise for a bright future for you and your family?

Sadly, those words that color all of our memories now amount to nothing more than a meaningless bit of lip-service that may as well be thrown in the trash alongside the remnants of our Constitution.

The recent raids on Muslims' homes, places of business, and on their humanitarian, religious and educational institutions amount to nothing short of a fishing expedition in which the search for terrorists has become a McCarthyist witch-hunt for any and all Muslims that rivals the Spanish Inquisition and the puritanically driven hunts in Arthur Miller's The Crucible.

American Muslims have had to bear the brunt of the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, though not in the same way Afghans, Iraqis, Kashmiris and of course the Palestinians have been sacrificed at the altar of U.S. foreign policy. And it will probably get a lot worse before it gets better.

American Muslims, who are just as American as anyone else, have had their civil liberties categorically violated with no regard given to the fact that they, like all other persons living in the U.S. (citizens or otherwise), have constitutionally guaranteed rights -which include the right to be treated as equal members of society, free from religious and racial persecution.

What is also gravely overlooked is that American Muslims, too, lost friends and family in the attacks on New York and Washington. I personally sat in utter fear for 12 hours in Washington (a mile away from the Pentagon) as I wondered whether or not my father had to attend to business in the World Trade Center on that fateful day. But American Muslim losses are not even recognized, and are often, in fact, scoffed at.

American Muslims are now seen as "part of the problem" as opposed to what they really are… a community in a unique position to help ensure that nothing like September 11 ever happens again. If only the U.S. government would listen.

But, by far, the largest casualty of the attacks on September 11 has been the abandonment of the American Muslim/Arab community by the very government that is supposed to be sworn to protect them.

Before Election 2000, American Muslims were looking to the leaders of the community to guide them towards deciding whom to vote for in the presidential election, as well as in other local and state elections.

First, there was then Texas Governor George W. Bush - who seemed to be the first presidential candidate in the history of the U.S. to actually recognize the importance of the Muslim vote. And on the other side, then U.S. vice-president Al Gore was avoiding Muslims like the plague, despite the fact that the second Bill Clinton Administration was the most American Muslim friendly administration ever to sit in the White House, although we still had to deal with racial profiling, and "evil of all evils"…secret evidence.

The leaders of our community reached out to both the Bush and Gore camps. One continued to completely ignore them and the other seemed to be receptive to the idea that American Muslims could, in fact, secure him the presidency.

And so it went. Bush addressed, during televised presidential debates, the issue of racial profiling and specifically made reference to an anti-secret evidence resolution introduced by then Michigan Senator Spencer Abraham, an Arab American who under the Bush Administration became U.S. Secretary of Energy.

And the Muslim community, although definitely not all, said, "great, this is the candidate for us." Since Gore was nowhere to be found, Bush was legitimized by the Muslim leaders and for the first time in U.S. history, a major religious community publicly declared their endorsement for a presidential candidate.

What did this bring about? Our utter destruction. Sadly, our leaders, despite their best intentions, were taken for a ride… a very long and bumpy ride. As soon as the endorsement was made, the American Muslim community got thrown onto the sidelines. That is the nature of the political animal - once it secures what it wants, it moves on to another prey.

After the now infamous election of 2000, all talk on secret evidence on the part of the government came to a screeching halt and campaign promises made to the community were quickly forgotten.

Although it would have amounted to nothing more than a symbolic show of recognition and perhaps a “thank you” immediately following Bush's inauguration, the on again, off again Eid brunch at the White House proved to be the first in a long line of public humiliations for the Muslim community.

Former President Clinton had twice before hosted American Muslims for an Eid brunch at the White House. And Bush was on his way to doing the same as the White House called with invitations to Muslim family and friends to attend the event. This was a Friday, only two days before Eid.

Then, the day before Eid was set to begin, the White House called again and cancelled the event, giving no explanation as to why. It was only weeks later that it was made known that the White House was "concerned about the snow storm threatening the area." If you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I can sell you.

While that minor event is an extremely trivial example of the marginalization of Muslims, paling in comparison to the events that would succeed it over the next year, it does spotlight how quickly and easily the Muslim voice was dismissed.

Then came September 11, and Bush immediately stepped up to assert that Muslims in the U.S. are not to be targeted and that the attacks were not attacks by Muslims but by "people who have hijacked a peace loving faith."

Bush came to our mosques and made public service announcements. He even sent out his cronies to try to convince the Muslim community that they were safe and that the best thing they could do was cooperate. Muslims were more than happy to oblige.

Then, the Holy Land Foundation, a humanitarian charity organization, had its assets frozen, headquarters raided and become branded as a "supporter of Palestinian terrorism."

Mazen Al-Najjar, a soft-spoken professor who was finally released after being held in a Florida prison for four years on secret evidence gets rounded up and thrown back in jail, where he still remains.

Sami Al-Arian, a computer science professor and political activist dedicated to the issue of Palestine and perhaps more famously for his fight against secret evidence, gets fired from his job by the University of South Florida for a long list of decidedly bogus reasons.

And these are only the most well known of the hundreds of incidents of anti-Muslim backlash, not by layman America, as we had originally feared, but by our own government…the one we elected.

Now we have Muslims waking up in their homes to find guns pointed at their heads and their premises ripped apart while 150 Federal agents search for "Osama bin Laden in the basement," as one pea-brain of an agent had the audacity to tell a woman whose house was being searched. She was, by the way, an American born Caucasian female who converted to Islam and is married to a Muslim doctor.

And we have thousands of Arab and Muslim men being rounded up for "voluntary" interviews with the FBI.

One can go on and on about how in retrospect the endorsement was a mistake, although I think the leaders and the rest of the community already realize that, and at a time when we must all stand together against the U.S.'s new "war on American Muslims", the game of Monday morning quarterbacking should not be entertained.

The greater problem is the fact that the rule of law, along with basic civil and human rights, no longer applies to Muslims/Arabs in the U.S. Our administration has not only failed Muslims, it has also failed America and the world as a whole.

While many in the Arab/Muslim world are using the current actions by the U.S. to say "see, we told you the U.S. was a bad country", what they do not realize is that far worse than their criticism, which most Americans (Arabs and Muslims included) seem to ignore anyway, is the fact that the U.S. has betrayed itself and its long-standing reputation for allowing the rule of law to be the only entity governing its land.

While the U.S.'s reputation abroad is important, what is more crucial is its reputation among its own people. A country will never survive if its own people don't believe in it. And right now, Americans find themselves struggling to comprehend the new dictatorship and police state that has materialized on their shores.

American Muslims/Arabs are not the first, and will most certainly not be the last community, to be raped by the U.S. government. African Americans have been battling the same types of discrimination, suspicion, and destruction for over 200 years. But they have persevered, and so too will Muslims, and any other people currently at the mercy of the power of might. For in the end, the rule of law always wins.

And “justice” will no longer stand to mean "just us". 

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