But we get to see the blown-up children on Israeli buses and in Russian schoolrooms.
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Posted on 01/16/2005 9:47:27 AM PST by NormsRevenge
Edited on 01/16/2005 10:39:25 AM PST by Admin Moderator. [history]
Inside the Toronto SkyDome with more than 10,000 fellow Muslims, Shaykh Hamza Yusuf presided over new conversions, translated an ancient poem and gave a scholarly talk on the Prophet Isa, Islam's analog to Jesus.
Then the bespectacled imam turned for home and his institute in Hayward feeling uplifted.
But when Yusuf handed over his passport at the Toronto airport, two U.S. Customs agents led him to an interrogation room and detained him three hours for questioning. It wasn'tYusuf's demeanor or appearance.
As the son of two American academics and a convert to Islam almost 30 years ago, the most influential Islamic scholar in North America travels in a business suit, no headdress or flowing robe. His adopted Muslim name was flagged on a Department of Homeland Security computer, and the two agents questioning him wouldn't say why.
Yusuf soon stopped answering their questions. It was, he told them, a scene worthy of Kafka. What about his right to attend a spiritual conference, his right to free speech and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure?
"The rules are different now," one agent said.
That December day, at least 38 other U.S. citizens who attended the "Reviving the Islamic Spirit" conference were held up to six hours at bridges crossing the U.S.-Canada border, according to Homeland Security officials and civil rights activists.
The detainees, ranging from an infant to teenagers to men and women in their 50s, were kept from about 11:30 p.m. until 6:30 a.m. They were questioned, photographed and fingerprinted.
Agents asked a woman who said she was seven months pregnant to prove it by lifting her shirt. Some women cried as agents pressed their hands to digital fingerprint scanners.
After three hours, one woman with children became agitated and suggested she was going to leave. "We're going to send a car after you to get you," the officers said, according to officials at the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations.
Here at the border, the Muslims were told, "you have no rights."
A few hours later, U.S. Customs officers at the airport detained a University of Chicago academic and made jokes about Muslims.
But the men who detained Yusuf were "very polite and, I think, very bored. I think they literally were doing what the computer told them."
"You might as well answer our questions," one told him. "You're not going anywhere."
U.S. Customs and Border Protection authorities say the stops technically were not detentions or arrests.
Officers had been instructed to watch for Americans coming from Islamic conferences and confirm their identities beyond their passports, said Kristi Clemens, a Customs and Border Protection assistant commissioner.
"We had ongoing, credible intelligence that conferences such as this one in Toronto had been used, are being used and will be used by terrorists to transmit fraudulent documents, to fund-raise and also to mask the travel of terrorists," Clemens said. "Based on that information, we decided to have individuals verify they were who they said they were."
Yusuf's detention in Toronto — his third in two months — is a remarkable turn for a moderate Muslim who advised President Bush after the 9/11 attacks and whose steady condemnation of Islamic terrorism has earned him, in some Muslim circles, criticism as a U.S. propagandist and derision as "Bush's pet."
At the same time, Yusuf's experience reflects the frustratingly vague intelligence that feeds the nation's domestic security agencies and their dilemma: how to turn non-specific information into action without damaging the civil liberties of individuals.
Clemens said Customs struck the right balance at the border.
"It's unfortunate when people are delayed because we are going through additional security measures," she said. "But I think the American public expects us to carry out this mission and to do what's necessary. I think they want us to protect them."
Homeland security officials still were concerned enough last week that they scrambled to say it was not a new policy and, they stressed, "absolutely not racial profiling."
"There really isn't any policy," Daniel Sutherland, a veteran government civil-rights litigator who heads the agency's Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, said of the border stops. "We're really working through it and trying to see what we can learn from it."
The way America's domestic security agencies have handled Muslims in the last three years has been a roller coaster, yet in some ways little has changed since the anxious weeks after the 2001 attacks.
People with common Muslim or Arab names frequently are detained at airports and borders.
Three Iranian brothers whose names appeared on a list found in a terrorist's home have been detained since 2001 in Southern California, despite a court finding that they have no evident links to terrorism.
This summer and fall, FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Forces sought out thousands of American Muslims at home or work for interviews.
''I think's it's racism, and it's based on names," Yusuf said. "It's been three years now. They've had time to sort things out and they're not sorted out. Unfortunately I think they've lumped us all in together, and it's just guilt by association."
Some Muslim civil-rights advocates say Bay Area Muslims are fortunate. The San Francisco FBI office is trying to build trust with Muslims; unlike elsewhere, its agents haven't shown up at Muslims' workplaces demanding interviews and arousing employer suspicions.
Bureau officials say the interviewees aren't under suspicion. Rather, they say, agents want reassurance that nothing out of the ordinary is happening, that no terrorist cells are at work. Yet civil-rights lawyers and Muslim activists say the interviews delve intrusively into religious practices and political opinions.
How often do you go to mosque? Who do you see there? What are their names? How do you feel about the war in Iraq? What is your view of President Bush?
Yusuf can say he knows the president personally. Days after the Sept. 11 attacks, the president's aides called on him for a show of religious unity for a grieving nation. On Sept. 20, 2001, he joined 30 of the nation's top spiritual leaders at the White House. Afterward, Yusuf and four others were ushered into a talk with the president.
Yusuf pressed Bush to ensure Muslims weren't demonized; that a religion of a billion people worldwide not be painted as synonymous with terrorism. America's response to 9/11 must be judicious, Yusuf said, never vengeful.
Also, it would be a good idea, he suggested, to scrap the phrase Infinite Justice as the first U.S. code name for the global war on terror. For Muslims, only Allah can mete out infinite justice, Yusuf said, and in Arabic the code name would sound blasphemous, as though America was presuming divine powers.
Bush ordered the change immediately. Operation Infinite Justice became Operation Enduring Freedom.
Three years later, Hamza Yusuf is caught between the foreign policies of the West and the politics of the Muslim world, in the gulf between a president's words and government's actions.
Meanwhile, American Muslim activists are uncertain what the new detentions mean for the world's largest Islamic conference. This week, more than
10,000 American Muslims are expected back from Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca.
Customs officials declined to say whether Muslims will be detained, photographed and fingerprinted on their return.
Sutherland, the Department of Homeland Security's civil-rights chief, said, "There should be no concern about taking that pilgrimage."
But, he acknowledged, "I don't know that we've gone through step-by-step how to make the pilgrimage work effectively."
"It's like tightrope walking without a net," he said, "and I'm not a tightrope walker."
The Iraq invasion, the reports of torture and re-election of the president have made defending America harder in parts of the world saturated by images on al-Jazeera, Yusuf said.
"The blown-up children just aren't seen here, whereas that's what Arabs see all the time," Yusuf said. "When you're bombing Iraq, it's like bombing the whole Muslim world."
Now domestic security is making Yusuf "apprehensive" about travel abroad to speak.
"When I go back to my country, are they going to detain me? That's a horrible feeling when you're guilty of nothing except maybe having some dissident views, which I thought was a political right in this country," he said. "When you're at the brunt of it, you start feeling uncomfortable in your own country."
The pilgrimage is "the granddaddy of all Islamic conferences," said Arsalan Iftikahar, legal director for the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations.
"These are citizens. Imagine how we treat non-citizens. There has to some semblance of respect for their human and civil rights," he said. "Such blanket treatment of a group of lawful and contributing American citizens really should give pause to all Americans who cherish their civil liberties."
But we get to see the blown-up children on Israeli buses and in Russian schoolrooms.
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If it's so much better, then what the heck is he doing here? Be gone!
Here's a suggestion for you Yusuf: if you don't like being delayed and questioned, stay the hell out of the United States. Works for us...
Sounds like a code word meaning "Jihad" or "murder for the Jews".
Please put on boots while I cry a river. It's the Mormons and Mennonites we should really be eyeballing!
I am asking the AM to edit my original article post or make it an excerppt, worse case.
Looks like the newspaper double posted a lot of its original content,,
(I was wondering why that dang article was so long.-)
Thanks!
American Muslims....right up there with American Dhimmis
I do not believe one word coming from these people.
I don't believe them either. It is common knowledge that the terrorists from 9/11 would meet up and make plans at mosques.
Muslims in this country still have a separatist attitude where they don't condem uncle osama and when they do they generalize in muted tones there condemnation of terrorism.
That is why we laugh and don't believe them. They are full of it. They would see 1,000 Christians in this country die rather than tell the authorities where the terrorists are AND YOU KNOW DAMN WELL THEY KNOW!
Muslim leaders in this country know who the bad apples are. They also use the freedoms here to NOT tell anyone.
This is a holy war. This is Christianity against muslims. I don't care what people think of me when I say that. Muslims are the most violent, oppresive people on the face of the earth. No wonder they have been backward for decades.
This country is based on Judeo-Christian belief. You mix muslims in it and you get what we now have. Terrorism on our own soil AND mass chaos with no responsibility.
I say to the government, target more muslims and arabs. Go ahead. Bush's approval rating will go up when he does this more openly and without apologies.
This sentence epitomizes the overreaction here. And if they were really harassed by the government, then good! It's a sign they are doing their job.
i say tough shi'ite!
Maybe they had the proverbial "Bad Day at Black Rock". Maybe they should abstain from woshipping a Borg cube.
" translated an ancient poem and gave a scholarly talk on the Prophet Isa, Islam's analog to Jesus."
They have such fits of delusion. They have no concept as who Jesus was. I bet less then a few hundred Muslims authorities in recent times have truly did an in depth study of the bible.
They run on hearsay and bias generated over some 1400 years of deceit, lies, and mis-information. They have had to resort to lies claimed by various leaders and their troops that the OT/NT had been drastically malformed and simply could not be trusted as accurate. In short, Islam and it's proponents and followers live in a world of mis-information.
Their Koran is so convoluted with lie and deceit and often simply verses that many of the main commentators for centuries totally disagree on, and quite frankly makes no sense at all to no one. And they are content to continue to live the lie. For to do otherwise, means their lives are exposed to the worst crime given to human kind. In short. They would have to admit to being had.
This clown was born Greek Orthodox
______________________________________
Shaykh Hamza Yusuf was born in Walla Walla, Washington, and grew up in Northern California in a Greek Orthodox family. He is founder of the Zaytuna Institute. He embraced Islam in 1977 in Santa Barbara, California when he was only 17 and set off almost immediately to study Arabic, Islamic jurisprudence, philosophy, and spiritual psychology with masters in the Muslim world.
In 1979, he moved to the United Arab Emirates and studied in the Islamic Institute of Al-'Ain for four years, augmenting his studies with lessons by leading scholars of the Islamic world.
Some of the scholars he studied with include Shaikh Baya bin Salik, head of the Islamic court in Al-'Ain; Shaikh Muhammad Shaybani, Mufti of Abu Dhabi; Shaikh Hamad al-Wali; and Shaikh Muhammad al-Fatrati of Al-Azhar University. In 1984, Hamza Yusuf entered the Bilal ibn Rabah Madrasa of Tizi, Algeria and studied with Shaikh Sidi Bou Sai'd. After being expelled from Algeria by the government, he travelled to a unique madrassa in Mauritania and studied with the most noble scholar Shaykh Murabit al-Hajj bin Fahfu where he continues his studies periodically.
After ten-years of studies abroad, he returned to the United States and completed degrees in nursing at Imperial Valley College and religious studies at San Jose State University.
In the early 1990's he began to teach classes in the San Francisco Bay Area and in 1996 he established Zaytuna Institute. Two years later the institute acquired a property in Hayward, California, where it is now based. Zaytuna Institute is committed to inspiring a traditional understanding and study of the core Islamic sciences. In addition to weekly classes, week-long and month-long educational programs, and annual conferences that addresses contemporary issues affecting the American people, Zaytuna Institute has published four small books and several major audio-tape sets of Shaykh Hamza's classes.
His classes on the life of the Prophet Muhammad, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, produced as a 24-audio tape set, has sold well thousands of copies world-wide.
As the executive director of the Zaytuna Institute, Shaykh Hamza travels frequently to major North American and European cities to teach and lecture to both Muslims and non-Muslim audiences.
After years of passionate work Shaykh Hamza completed the first comprehensive English translation of the Burda of Imam Al-Busiri. In June 2002 Sandala Productions in the UK has released “The Poem of the Cloak: The Burda of Al-Busiri.” The poem, on two cds, is sung by the Fez Singers and and the book is calligraphed by Mohamed Zakariya, a world renowed calligrapher and the teacher of Ustadha Aishah Elinor Holland.
He presently resides in the Bay Area with his wife and four children.
(For more information on Shaykh Hamza Yusuf Hanson and the Zaytuna Institute please visit http://www.zaytuna.org)
Anyone who claims that we have open borders is either ignorant or a lier.
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