Are Muslims Under Siege in the Land of the Free?

N E W   Y O R K, Oct. 27, 2003 -- The jewelers round the corner from the halal meat store has closed its shutters, the grocery store is no more, and in the sari shop, salesgirls sit idly before a dazzling display of satins, silks and wispy veils, waiting for customers who rarely show up these days.

This stretch of Brooklyn's Coney Island Avenue, commonly called "Little Pakistan," was once a magnet for immigrants seeking essential wares from home and intrepid culinary hounds on the hunt for the consummate fiery, South Asian fare.

But the post-9/11 security crackdown with its baggage of suspicions, fears, increasing backlash attacks and dwindling civil rights, have taken its toll on the once-vibrant neighborhood.

Today, "Little Pakistan" is a neighborhood under siege as thousands of Pakistani immigrants in the United States have been seeking new lives in Canada, fleeing the land that prides itself as a destination for the world's weary, huddled masses, for an uncertain life in a new country.

In Muslim homes across the world over the weekend, the sighting of the sliver of moon on the eastern horizon marked the start of the holy month of Ramadan.

At sundown for the next few weeks, devout Muslims in America — like their brethren all over the world — will break their daylong fast with the iftar, or traditional evening meal, featuring a sumptuous array of dishes. (Click here for more on Ramadan.)

But more than two years after the 9/11 attacks, a disturbing sense of anxiety has cast a shadow over Ramadan, a quiet unease that threatens to disturb the comfort and security that rituals are meant to bestow.

"American Muslims as a whole feel under attack from this government — and not without reason," says Dalia Hashad, a spokeswoman for the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union). "They look at all the policies and laws of the U.S. government that targets Muslims in America and they get a clear sense that this government discriminates against them on the basis of religion and ethnicity."

On Foot, Taxis and Chartered Flights

The exodus from Pakistani neighborhoods and homes across the United States began gradually right after the 9/11 attacks, when hundreds of mostly Muslim immigrants were detained, many of them without criminal charges, in prisons across the country.

It turned into a flow earlier this year, when the Department of Homeland Security required male citizens from 25 countries to register with the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services or face arrest and deportation.

Since the 9/11 attacks, the Pakistani Embassy in Washington estimates that 13,000 Pakistanis have returned home from the United States in five specially chartered aircraft. Many of them were deported after prolonged detentions in U.S. jails. None of the detained men were charged with terrorist-related crimes although they did face immigration violations.

Another significant proportion of the Pakistani-American community opted to flee to Canada earlier this year to escape the special registration dragnet. According to the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board, more than 3,500 Pakistanis from the United States applied for asylum in the first half of 2003 alone.

Of the 25 countries on the U.S. special registration list, 24 of them — besides North Korea — are predominantly Muslim nations, leading advocacy and rights groups to accuse the Bush administration of racial and religious discrimination.

For its part, the Department of Homeland Security has maintained that the rules are simply "targeted at countries with terrorist organizations that target the United States."

‘This Government Does Not Want You Here’

But for most American Muslims, such explanations carry little weight and provide scant reassurances.

From her office at the ACLU, where lawyers have filed more than 30 civil liberties lawsuits since 9/11, Hashad goes through the list of grievances in quick succession.

"There have been secret detentions, deportations, FBI officials questioning innocent Muslims who have done nothing wrong, special registration measures targeting only Muslims, there have been programs like Operation Liberty Shield that make it harder for Muslims escaping persecution to escape to this country," says Hashad. "And with each policy based on racial profiling, the government is sending a clear message to Muslims in America that this government does not want you here."

In a controversial provision under Operation Liberty Shield, which the Department of Homeland Security launched in March, asylum-seekers from 33 predominantly Muslim countries, as well as the Palestinian territories, had to be detained until their applications were processed.

Following widespread criticism from human rights groups such as Amnesty International — which noted that al Qaeda sympathizers had operated out of Europe and the United States — the provision was terminated in May.

The new measures have also been accompanied by a sharp rise in race-related attacks over the past two years. According to the New York-based Human Rights Watch, most of the victims of hate crimes between September 2001 and September 2002 were Muslims.

To Canada With a Bag, Baby and Wife

More than two years after he arrived at New York's John F. Kennedy Airport from the Pakistani city of Lahore, Waseem Butt decided not to push the hospitality — or lack thereof — of U.S. authorities earlier this year.

On a freezing January morning, with the snow glowing in the predawn light, the 35-year-old Brooklyn shop-worker crossed the border into Canada from Plattsburg, N.Y., along with his heavily pregnant wife and 2-year-old daughter.

Carrying only one bag filled mostly with baby clothes, Butt and his family stepped out of a taxi on the U.S. side of the border and walked to a Canadian immigration center where the family applied for asylum.

"It was very cold, believe me, when we crossed at around 5.30 a.m.," says Butt during a phone interview from Toronto. "It wasn't a long walk — about 200 meters — but when it's winter, it seems very long. And my daughter, she was just cold and crying, crying."

Butt's troubles began shortly after the 9/11 attacks, when he realized he had been fooled by a man posing as a paralegal, who offered to find him a work sponsor — for a fee — who would change his U.S. tourist visa to an H-1, or work permit.

Like millions of illegal immigrants in the United States, he decided against returning to his impoverished homeland despite the stresses and hurdles he faced in his adopted country as an illegal immigrant.

But the last straw, according to Butt, came when he heard about the new special registration requirements. A member of Pakistan's increasingly persecuted Shiite Muslim minority, Butt claims that he opted to apply for asylum in Canada rather than appeal his case.

"We were scared of what the situation had become in New York after Sept. 11 — especially for Pakistanis," says Butt from his new home in Toronto where his son was born in May. "I understand that a lot of people died in the [9/11] attack, but the thing is, we are all innocent people just trying to give our children a better life."

Selective Targeting and Fighting Terror

With an estimated 7 million people living and working in the United States without documentation, immigrants from the Middle East and Pakistan constitute a small segment of America's illegal immigrants, prompting some activists and experts to condemn the government's new measures as racial and religious discrimination.

Justice Department spokesman Jorge Martinez, however, dismisses the charges as baseless. "The U.S. Justice Department does not condone or tolerate discrimination against any person here in the United States based on nationality, religion or ethnicity," he says. "Our argument is that there is a very real possibility that potential terrorists could have entered the United States prior to the Sept. 11 attacks [when tighter security measures were enforced at U.S. ports-of-entry]. These countries fit the criteria either as state sponsors of terrorism or countries where al Qaeda and other terrorist groups had operated."

Some legal experts such as David Cole of the Georgetown University Law Center also question the effectiveness of selectively targeting immigrants in the domestic war on terror.

"There has been much talk about the need to sacrifice liberty for security," says Cole in his latest book, Enemy Aliens. "In practice, however, the government has most often at least initially sacrificed noncitizens' liberties while retaining the basic protections for citizens."

The selective targeting has had widespread social and economic effects in immigrant communities. "Not only have whole families being ripped apart, it does not make sense because Pakistani immigrants are the best support group for the United States," says Imran Ali, a Pakistani Embassy spokesman. "They're turning out and alienating the most moderate people, the ones who couldn't be bothered about religious extremism."

But Steven Camarota of the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies says the selective targeting of immigrants does not unduly worry him."With limited resources, it does make sense to focus on that part of the world that poses the greatest security threat," he says. "I don't like it, but I can stomach it. And it's interesting that although the advocacy groups have been complaining, it doesn't get political mileage because the public does not care."

‘My God Was Bigger Than His’

By all accounts, the public perception of Muslims and of Islam has been deteriorating among Americans over the past two years.

An ABCNEWS poll published on the second anniversary of the 9/11 attacks found that while four months after the attacks, 14 percent believed mainstream Islam encouraged violence, two years after the attack, the figure was 34 percent. On the other hand, two-thirds of Americans felt they did not have a "good basic understanding" of the religion, essentially the same as it was in October 2001.

The figures do not surprise Hussein Ibish, a spokesman for the Washington-based American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. "It's a reflection of the way the Sept. 11 attacks have opened up the space for hostile and religiously bigoted opinion in popular American culture," says Ibish. "We have a situation where otherwise respectable people have been saying outrageous things and not being treated as pariahs because this has now become part of the national conversation."

In the latest salvo in the vitriolic war of words, Army Lt. Gen. William Boykin, deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence, likened the war on terrorism to a fight with Satan during church gathering and prayer breakfasts in his military uniform.

"I knew, that my God was bigger than his," Boykin told audiences about a Muslim militant. "I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol."

For Butt, comments like these are disturbing, but hardly surprising. "I know this is what they think of us," says Butt. "In New York, when my wife went out of the house after Sept. 11, people told her to 'go back' [to Pakistan] and in the store I worked in, sometimes people would look at me like they want to kill me."

From his new home in Toronto, Butt says he's relieved to be able to put all the unpleasant memories behind him. Like other asylum-seekers in Canada, Butt has been issued a work permit while his asylum application is being processed. And although his new job in a factory entails difficult hours and a long commute, he says he's happy in Canada.

"I am grateful to Canada because it has provided me and my family protection," he says. "We can keep Ramadan and celebrate eid [feast] here because we have no problems, we feel safe. I celebrated two eids in New York and now I'm looking forward to my first eid in Toronto. Insha'allah, [God willing] all will be well."