CAIR – October 19, 2023
Terror Threats Force Va. Marriott Hotel to Cancel CAIR's Annual Banquet
CAIR to host event in alternate location after anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim extremists threatened to plant bombs and kill hotel staff due to CAIR's support for Palestinian human rights
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, today announced that the hotel scheduled to host CAIR’s 29th annual banquet in Arlington, Virginia, has canceled the event due to multiple terror threats targeting the hotel, its staff, CAIR and American Muslims.
CAIR’s banquet was scheduled to take place Saturday, Oct. 21, at the Marriott Crystal Gateway, in Arlington, Virginia. CAIR has hosted banquets there annually for over ten years. CAIR also planned to host a separate banquet at a Westin hotel in Maryland on Oct. 28th.
[NOTE: CAIR plans to proceed with hosting its Oct. 21st banquet at an alternate secure location with heightened security. The alternate location has been secured and will be announced shortly. Its Oct. 28th event in Maryland will also be cancelled as a precaution and merged into the Oct. 21st event.]
In recent days, according to the Marriott, anonymous callers have threatened to plant bombs in the hotel's parking garage, kill specific hotel staff in their homes, and storm the hotel in a repeat of the Jan. 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol if the events moved forward.
Earlier today, leadership of CAIR and Marriott met to discuss ongoing threats and concluded that the volume and specific nature of the threats, combined with the inability to secure additional security from local law enforcement agencies made it impossible to safely move forward with the events.
Law enforcement authorities and the FBI have been notified of the terror threats. The FBI has confirmed to CAIR that it is investigating the reported threats.
The terror threats came after CAIR updated its original banquet programming to focus on the work needed to support basic Palestinian human rights.
In a statement, CAIR National Executive Director Nihad Awad, who is Palestinian-American, said:
“We strongly condemn the extreme and disgusting threats against our organization, the Marriott hotel and its staff. We will not allow the threats of anti-Palestinian racists and anti-Muslim bigots who seek to dehumanize the Palestinian people and silence American Muslims to stop us from pursuing justice for all. We plan to move forward with our annual events merged at an alternate location with significant security and broadcast it to the entire nation."
“We ask all those who value free speech, human rights and justice to support CAIR's work today to show hateful extremists that they will not succeed in silencing us and will only make our voices stronger, God willing."
https://www.cair.com/press_releases/breaking-terror-threats-force-va-marriott-hotel-to-cancel-cairs-annual-banquet/?emci=1890278c-c66e-ee11-b004-00224832eb73&emdi=dd4bcb0b-d56e-ee11-b004-00224832eb73&ceid=78081
Arab Americans fear return to post-9/11 prejudices amid US backing of Israel
Inflammatory statements by US elected officials against Palestinians in Gaza and unconditional support for Israel worry Muslims of a possible rise in Islamophobia.
In the days following Hamas' attack on Israel, many Arab and Muslim Americans have worried over signs of a return to the atmosphere of suspicion that hung over their communities in the United States after 9/11.
Those fears were brutally underscored when a little boy of Palestinian origin was stabbed to death in Illinois.
Six-year-old Wadea Al Fayoume was stabbed 26 times on Saturday by his family's 71-year-old landlord, according to police, who charged the assailant with hate crimes.
The man shouted, "You Muslims must die" at the child's mother, who was seriously injured in the attack, according to text messages the mother sent to the murdered boy's father while in the hospital and cited by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
According to police, Wadea and his mother "were targeted by the suspect due to them being Muslim and the on-going Middle Eastern conflict involving Hamas and the Israelis."
President Joe Biden, who has given his unwavering support to Israel, said he was "shocked and sickened" by the assault, and stressed his rejection of Islamophobia.
The little boy "paid the price for the atmosphere of hate and otherisation and dehumanisation," said Ahmed Rehab, head of the CAIR office in Chicago.
"We've warned about not recreating the same mistake we had in the post-9/11 environment," he said. "But here we are."
Anxiety
Sarah Suzuki Harvard, 30, grew up in Plainfield, Illinois, where Wadea Al-Fayoume was killed.
"We're returning to the Islamophobic levels of 9/11 -- and it's only going to get worse," she said on X, formerly known as Twitter.
The former-journalist- turned-comedian, whose father is Moroccan and mother is Japanese, told AFP she remembers a difficult environment in the years following the September 11, 2001 Al Qaeda attacks in New York and Washington, and the "harassment" she witnessed as a child.
The situation was so bad, she said, that her family decided to change their last name to avoid discrimination.
When she learned of the little boy's murder, she said she felt "so much pain and heartache."
"Then I was scared, because my family lives there," she said.
"I texted my dad: 'Please be careful when you go to the masjid (mosque). I love you. Make sure you tell my aunt and uncle.'"
Zenjabela, a 23-year-old New Yorker of Palestinian descent who preferred not to give her full name, said she had felt "hostility" directed at her in recent days, adding she had seen people in her neighborhood being verbally abused for saying "as-salaam alaikum" -- a Muslim greeting that means "Peace be upon you" in Arabic.
"I've never felt so much anxiety about perception of Muslims and Palestinians and Arabs in general," she told AFP.
Inflammatory statements
Against this backdrop of rising tensions, some US elected officials have released statements that many have called inflammatory.
"The United States should have no part in providing aid to Gaza for the same reason the US didn't provide aid to Nazi Germany. Aiding Gaza will only prolong the rule of Hamas," Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas posted on social media.
Florida's governor Ron DeSantis, who is running in the Republican party's presidential primary election, declared the United States could not accept any refugees from Gaza because "not all of them are Hamas, but they are all anti-Semitic."
"How incredibly destructive and dangerous that rhetoric is," Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told CNN.
"We just had a six-year-old boy stabbed 26 times... because of rhetoric like that," she said. "It is unacceptable. It is reckless and no leader in the United States of America should be amplifying a message like that."
Aya Hijazi, a 36-year-old American social justice activist born to an Egyptian mother and a Lebanese father, said she feels "silenced and demonised."
"Basically, it's kind of like you have to prove that you're not a terrorist," she told AFP.
"I love to wear the keffiyeh," the black and white scarf that symbolises the Palestinian cause.
But, she said, "now I think twice and three times" before putting it on.
"I'm a mother now," said the Virginia resident. "Am I endangering my daughter?"
Religious News Service – October 18, 2023
Palestinian Americans decry demonization in media amid rising fear of hate crimes
By Kathryn Post, Roxanne Stone
(RNS) — Thousands of miles from the crisis in Gaza, Muslims and Palestinians in the U.S. are reporting a wave of Islamophobic incidents that, for many, feels terrifyingly familiar.
“This is reminding me a bit of how it felt post-9/11,” Palestinian activist and policy analyst Laila El-Haddad told Religion News Service on Tuesday afternoon (Oct. 17).
In the days since Hamas attacked southern Israel on Oct. 7 and Israel unleashed retaliatory airstrikes in Gaza, thousands of civilians have been killed. For some Palestinian Americans, the days have been consumed by checking on loved ones in Gaza while also taking precautions for their own safety. Meanwhile, they have watched as some who voice support for the Palestinian civilians trapped in Gaza have been slandered or received threats of their own.
In Pennsylvania, a man was arrested after yelling slurs and wielding a gun at a pro-Palestinian protest. In Los Angeles, UCLA students attending a webinar on the crisis in Gaza were reportedly threatened and called terrorists by a small group of unidentified men. In Boston, the Palestinian Cultural Center for Peace was spray-painted with the word “Nazis.” And with the horrific killing of 6-year-old Wadea Al-Fayoume, a Palestinian American boy stabbed inside his home in a Chicago suburb, all threats are being taken seriously. The landlord of the boy’s mother has been charged with his murder.
It’s not just Palestinian Americans who are being impacted, according to Selaedin Maksut, executive director of the New Jersey chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, who said threats have extended to all Muslims, or people who might be perceived as Muslim or Arab. For example, he said, a South Asian Muslim restaurant owner in South Jersey woke up Friday morning to the Quran being torn apart and scattered in front of her restaurant.
“Because we are so inundated, and the demand is so high, we’ve bypassed our usual intake process and are just trying to help people the best we can for the sake of time,” Maksut said about incidents in New Jersey, where Muslims make up about 3% of the population.
Corey Saylor, the director for research and advocacy at CAIR, confirmed that “without a doubt,” CAIR is seeing a surge of anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim incidents across the U.S. “I think that’s part of what’s particularly depressing about this moment,” he said. “Recognizing that it is so easy for the Islamophobia switch to go back on.”
El-Haddad blamed one-sided and sloppy media coverage for rendering such a broad and unspecified group of people the targets of anti-Palestinian sentiment in the U.S.
“Disinformation and inaccurate media coverage is deadly for Palestinians, and in the context of America, for Muslim Americans,” said El-Haddad. “So much of it is ingrained in orientalism. … Palestinian becomes Arab becomes Muslim becomes Other.”
From his vantage point in Bethlehem in the West Bank, the Rev. Mitri Raheb said he has watched the coverage of the conflict coming from Western media with increasing alarm.
“You saw yesterday in Chicago how a man stormed a house of a Palestinian Muslim and killed a small child. Because the rhetoric in the media was demonizing Palestinians, so everyone was thinking by doing this, by killing Palestinians, they are doing God’s service,” said Raheb, the founder and president of Dar al-Kalima University in Bethlehem.
“It’s kind of a racist approach. You will not find any journalist in the U.S. asking the Jewish Israeli at the beginning of the interview to start by condemning settler colonialism or genocide against the Palestinians. Or to denounce apartheid. They don’t do it. Only they ask these questions to the Palestinians about condemning Hamas,” said Raheb, a former pastor of the Christmas Lutheran Church in Bethlehem and former president of the Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land. Raheb said he will no longer answer these questions when asked by Western media.
“We are asking for balance. So if you ask Palestinians to condemn, ask Israelis to condemn. If you talk about Jewish civilians, talk about Palestinian civilians. If you give face to a Jewish victim, give a face to a Palestinian victim. I mean, that is the least that we can do,” he said.
Some Jewish American groups have vocally shown support for Palestinians, even as antisemitism is also on the rise. Jewish activist groups If Not Now and Jewish Voice for Peace have been “on the ground, shoulder to shoulder” with protesters clamoring for peace in Gaza, according to Maksut, and on Tuesday, over 100 Jewish groups signed a statement condemning “Islamophobia, anti-Arab hate, antisemitism, and all forms of bigotry.”
“It’s incumbent on us to recognize that at a moment when any community is being targeted, even when our own community is being targeted, we have an obligation to speak out just as we hope people speak out for us,” said Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, who spearheaded the statement.
El-Haddad said it’s been extremely painful to see responses from officials at all levels ignore the plight of Palestinians. Raheb agreed, condemning politicians for furthering harmful one-sided narratives. In recent days, Raheb and El-Haddad have both been inundated by requests to speak to media, colleges, churches and mosques on the conflict and the reality of life for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. In their talks, the long-standing siege on Gaza and occupation of Palestinian territories is front and center.
“We’re so shielded from the everyday realities of what Palestinians endure that even among our own Muslim community here in America, there’s a lot of ignorance,” said El-Haddad, who now lives in Maryland. “So I’m finding myself having to simultaneously justify to the media why we are human beings and why we don’t deserve to be killed, while at the same time educating my own community about the situation in between checking in to make sure my family is still alive.”
The author of “Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything In Between” and co-author of “The Gaza Kitchen: A Palestinian Culinary Journey,” El-Haddad was featured on the TV series “Parts Unknown” as a guide for Anthony Bourdain in the Gaza Strip and has long worked to humanize life in Gaza.
She has a large extended family living throughout the Gaza Strip and told RNS they are without power and have no working water pumps, so have resorted to bringing in well water and charging phones on small generators.
“They’re just trying to keep it together and cling to any semblance of routine and normality that they can,” she said about her family in Gaza. “They tried to celebrate their daughter’s ninth birthday. They’re trying to put on a brave face. They’re very resilient. Everyone is very strong of faith. We always ask, how do they cope? Faith is a big part of it.”
Battle against hate: Violence, bigotry toward
Palestinian Americans spiking across US
Minnah Arshad
Palestinian Americans are seeing two fronts in the Israel-Hamas war: One is the bloodshed in the Middle East. The other is emotional backlash from bigotry and hate in the U.S.
A U.S. Department of Justice hate crime investigation into the fatal stabbing of a 6-year-old Palestinian American Muslim boy in Illinois is one of several incidents of alleged hate being directed at Palestinian Americans, allies and people who look like them since the war began.
Among them:
In Dearborn, Michigan, police arrested a man last week for saying in a Facebook post that he wanted to gather people to "hunt Palestinians," according to a screenshot of the post Dearborn police shared with The Detroit News.
On Tuesday, the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Los Angeles called on the University of California, Los Angeles to open an investigation after a group of people intruded on a webinar, threatened to tear the heads off Palestinian supporters, calling them terrorists.
On Sunday morning, a person approached a Sikh teen wearing a turban on a New York City bus and said, “We don’t wear that in this country and take that mask off.” The suspect then punched the 19-year-old in the back of his head, face and back multiple times, police said. He also tried to forcibly remove the man's turban, before fleeing on foot.
In Oregon, the Islamic Society of Greater Portland said community members have faced threats in recent days, which have been reported to law enforcement.
American Muslims for Palestine executive director Osama Abu Irshaid told USA TODAY his team is facing a myriad of fears and forms of grief, as they mourn familial losses, the collective mourning of human loss, and mounting fears of violence fueled by anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim bigotry in the U.S. One staffer has lost 18 family members to recent attacks in Gaza, Irshaid said.
“There are attempts to criminalize our voices,” Irshaid said, noting that Palestinian supporters, including Christian, Black, Jewish and other voices are being stifled.
The community feels under siege, Irshaid said, but at the same time, wants to show support and express grief in the war crisis.
“They’re not out there to threaten anyone. They’re not there to delegitimize another narrative. They’re out there to assert a narrative that is being diminished,” Irshaid said.
Civil rights organizations report rise in hate
Joseph Milburn, a staff attorney at CAIR-Chicago, said the nonprofit civil rights organization has received an influx of calls since the start of the war from victims of hate crimes, including visibly Muslim women who have been taunted and targeted with slurs in public places. He also noted a lack of action from elected officials to protect Palestinian Americans and adjacent communities.
“In the best-case scenario, perhaps some politicians aren’t aware of the needs of marginalized communities. Or, in the worst-case scenario, they simply don’t care,” Milburn said.
In a recent alleged hate crime, 6-year-old Wadea Al-Fayoume was fatally stabbed 26 times in his Illinois home. His mother, Haanan Shahin, 32, was stabbed more than a dozen times and survived with severe injuries. The family’s landlord, 71-year-old Joseph Czuba, was charged with first-degree murder, attempted first-degree murder and two counts of hate crime.
CAIR-Chicago said the Muslim family had lived at the home owned by Czuba for two years with no reported problems. According to text messages between Shahin and the boy's father that were shared with the CAIR-Chicago, Czuba yelled "You Muslims must die" during the attack.
Czuba's wife, Mary, said her husband listened to a "conservative talk radio on a regular basis" and had been "heavily" interested in recent events in Israel, according to new court documents.
Advocates say one-sided narratives contribute to bigotry
Presidential candidate and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said at a campaign event the United States should not take in any refugees from the Gaza Strip.
“If you look at how they behave, not all of them are Hamas, but they are all antisemitic,” he said.
In a social media post on X, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul condemned a Palestinian rally in Times Square, calling it “abhorrent and morally repugnant.”
U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham said on Fox News: “We’re in a religious war here. I am with Israel. Do whatever the hell you have to do to defend yourself. Level the place.”
In statements released since the beginning of the war, President Joe Biden continued to offer unequivocal support for Israel and condemned violence against Israelis.
"The United States and the State of Israel are inseparable partners, and I affirmed to Prime Minister Netanyahu again when we spoke yesterday that the United States will continue to make sure Israel has what it needs to defend itself and its people," Biden said on Oct. 9.
Following the stabbings on Saturday, Biden released a statement on the "horrific act of hate."
"As Americans, we must come together and reject Islamophobia and all forms of bigotry and hatred. I have said repeatedly that I will not be silent in the face of hate. We must be unequivocal. There is no place in America for hate against anyone," Biden said.
To US Palestinian Community Network national chair Hatem Abudayyeh, Biden’s comments were “too little, too late.”
In a private call with State Department officials Monday, Arab American and Muslim leaders expressed outrage over the Biden administration’s rhetoric in recent days, POLITICO first reported. Leaders said the demonization of Palestinians, and of Arabs in general, had given way for rise in hatred against them in the US. They also noted calls for a cease-fire or restraint were absent from Biden's remarks.
CAIR said in an analysis of statements that hundreds of U.S. corporations, including CEOs of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Pfizer, and JPMorgan Chase, condemned the attack against Israelis but failed to do the same for attacks against Palestinian civilians.
Experts said statements that only acknowledge violence against one side imply the other side is either not facing violence or does not matter.
“No group should be demonized,” Milburn said. “Jewish people should be protected and respected, and so should Muslims and Arabs and South Asians and everyone else.”
Israel and Palestinian supporters gathered in cities around the world after Hamas surprise attacks on Oct. 7, 2023 killed over 700 people.
Law center reports increased FBI surveillance of Palestinian supporters, Muslim spaces
Suzanne Adely, president of the National Lawyers Guild, said there have been increasing reports over the last week of the Federal Bureau of Investigation visiting local mosques across the country and contacting individual Palestinian activists who had never had such an encounter before.
“It’s part of this larger onslaught of attack against Palestinians, Muslims and those that are supporting Palestine,” Adely said.
This is not the first instance Muslims have reported increased surveillance from the FBI. In June, CAIR released a report on FBI’s use of its terrorism watchlist, finding that 98% of the names on the watchlist were Muslim names, despite the fact that Muslims only make up about 1.1% of the U.S. population, according to the Pew Research Center.
"An individual’s watchlist status is used by government agencies to harass and humiliate people when they travel, to outright forbid people from flying, to deny individuals licenses and permits, to refuse to hire people or fire people already employed, to delay or deny visas and applications for U.S. citizenship or a US passport and subject the innocent people on the list to dangerous and invasive law enforcement actions,” CAIR said.
“All of what is happening sort of builds some kind of false narrative of who Palestinian supporters are in order to justify the US’ continued and shameful support for the genocide of the Palestinian people,” Adely said.
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/10/19/palestinians-us-assaults-rise-war/71211197007/
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The Journal of America Team:
Editor in chief:
Abdus Sattar Ghazali
Senior Editor:
Prof. Arthur Scott
Special Correspondent
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