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U.S. Muslim Leaders Arrested After Sharon Protests
by Ayesha Ahmad
WASHINGTON, June 26 (IslamOnline) - Six American Muslim leaders were arrested Tuesday as hundreds others demonstrated in front of the White House protesting Washington's welcome of Israel's hardline Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
The protest was the latest in a series of rallies organized by the local leadership of Washington-based national Muslim organizations to bring home to President George W. Bush's administration the importance of an unbiased U.S. position in the ongoing Middle East conflict.
Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) political advisor Mahdi Bray, a vocal supporter of the Palestinian cause and a veteran of the American civil rights movement, was one of those arrested.
"Hell, no! We [aren't going to stand for] a war criminal in the White House, that we paid for with our U.S. tax dollars," he said. "So therefore we're going across the street to make that statement loud and clear to this government, our government, that you can't do it… it's wrong, it's morally wrong."
Currently, the state of Israel receives over $4 billion every year in monetary and military aid in the name of self-defense. This aid includes F-16s and Apache helicopter gunships that has recently targeted civilians, in direct defiance of U.S. arms procurement laws.
As protesters continued to chant slogans and hoist signs against Sharon and against Zionism, Bray and other American Muslim leaders, five in all, locked arms and crossed Pennsylvania Ave. to sit in front of the wrought-iron fence guarding the White House, their steps dogged by cameramen. At this point, a number of ultra-orthodox rabbis from the anti-Zionist Neturei Karta International group joined the protest with signs of their own.
On the sidewalk, the leaders turned to face the demonstrators in the street, and police - preparing to take the leaders to jail - herded protesters back into the street.
One by one, leaders who sat down in front of the White House were arrested: Bray, along with Khalid Turaani, executive director of American Muslims for Jerusalem (AMJ), Abdul Rahman Alamoudi, one of the founders of the American Muslim Council (AMC) and president of the American Muslim Foundation (AMF), Yasser Bouchnak, Shaker Elsayed, Secretary General of the Muslim American Society (MAS) and Nihad Awad, director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
One of the organizers, Abdul Haleem Ashqar of the Virginia-based Islamic center Dar al-Hijrah, said the leaders would probably be released today or tomorrow, but that the message was clear.
"We are sending a message to the American administration and community," he said. "[Sharon] should be in The Hague [at the War Crimes court], not in the White House."
Other leaders and members of various organizations expressed their reasons for participating in the rally. CAIR's communications director, Ibrahim Hooper, said that the protest was meant to de-legitimize Sharon, as a counter to the legitimization he received by being welcomed by Bush at the White House.
"Here you have a man who is obviously indictable as a war criminal, for his past actions and his current actions, and the president of the United States granting him this high level of legitimacy with a meeting," Hooper said. "We don't think he deserves that… a leopard doesn't change his spots."
MPAC's executive director, Salam Al-Marayati, said simply that "America should not deal with terrorists or war criminals, and Ariel Sharon is both a terrorist and a war criminal."
Khalil Jahshan, the vice president of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) - one of the few secular pro-Palestinian organizations present - said, "We are part of this event today to make a statement… we feel it's shameful for our country to be receiving someone like Sharon today, someone who has a history of massacres and crimes against humanity."
Charles Lencher, an Israeli Jew who has been involved in pro-Palestinian activism for 17 years, spent time in Israeli jails for refusing - as a soldier in the Israeli army - to work in the occupied Muslim territories. He felt that sentiment against Sharon was proper, but that anti-Zionist sentiment was unfair.
"It gives the impression that what [the demonstrators] want is something different from peace for [Palestinians and Israelis…but] I think it's very good that there is a demonstration against Sharon," he said.
But Rabbi Yisroel Weiss of the Neturei Karta group felt that "Zionism is the core problem of what is going in Palestine." His organization represented what he called "the silent majority, the silent Jews throughout the world who are standing in sorrow and shame at the actions of the Zionists."
The Neturei Karta believe that Jews are forbidden to have a state of their own before the time appointed by God for them to return.
Mark Bruzonsky, publisher of Mid-East Realities, felt that the demonstration didn't serve any purpose beyond that of the organizations that promoted and organized it.
"This was a photo-op for the leadership," he said. "It will be projected as 'now there is a serious counter-lobby and movement in Washington,' but of course that's not true."
Bruzonsky felt that the organizations could not form a real lobbying power because "their primary agenda is to defend the [Middle Eastern] regimes, who are afraid of civil disobedience."
He said that if civil disobedience - a "tried and true American method" - is to be attempted, it should be done at a mass level nation-wide, including secular and other religious groups, rather than at the level of select Muslim leadership.
Organizer Ashqar, however, summed up the intense emotions that propelled today's rally with a forcefulness not as evident at previous American pro-Palestinian demonstrations. "We cannot allow the hijacking of our resources… to fund the killing of innocent people.
"Enough is enough."
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