American
And Muslim: six Million People In Search Of An Identity
By Robert Fisk
03 September 2006
The
Independent
A
guy with brown eyes and dark skin and a thick American accent walks
up to talk to me. I guess he's an Iranian, possibly a Pakistani. Where're
you from, I ask? "Austin, Texas," he replies. Fisk foiled
again. But where do you originally come from I ask him? "I was
born in Newark, New Jersey." Fisk clears his throat. Where does
his family originally come from? I'm beginning to feel like the man
from Homeland Security, racially profiling my new friend. "Lahore,"
he replies laconically and I try to make amends. The only beautiful
city in Pakistan, I say, and he smiles witheringly at me.
And I go on making the same
mistake at the conference hall where the biggest annual convention of
American Muslims - perhaps 32,000 of them - is meeting for a weekend
of speeches and discussions that run all the way from drug addiction
to Condi Rice's "new" and bloody Middle East, from banking
without interest to the Bush administration's use of torture and yes,
of course, the after-effects on Muslims of the international crimes
against humanity of September 11, 2001.
You from Jordan I ask? "Denver,
Colorado," the young woman replies. Born in San Diego. Family,
yes, from Jordan. From Lebanon, I ask another? "Buffalo, New York."
Actually, the family was from Syria.
It takes a while to realise
that I'm playing the game of so many American non-Muslims in the aftermath
of the plane hijackings. I'm sniffing for the world's enemies only hours
after President George W Bush went into paranoid mode while addressing
the American Legion in Salt Lake City. He had just claimed that America
is fighting "the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century"
and then jumped on the crumbling old arguments of pre-Second World War
appeasement to bang the Hitler drum as well.
Oddly, it's the Muslim converts
rather than the Muslim-born Americans who are toughest on Bush. "He
wants eternal war," a young man with a brown beard but very bright
blue eyes - yes, he was from Vermont - hissed at me. "He talks
shit and we have to listen to this and promise to be non-violent or
someone will point the finger at us." All agree that the most pernicious
element to the latest Bush rant is his gift to Israel of placing Ehud
Olmert in the ranks of his "war on terror", quite specifically
linking Israel's slaughter of Lebanese civilians in July and August
to his own manic project by stating that combatants from Iraq and Lebanon
"form the outlines of a single movement, a worldwide network of
radicals that use terror to kill those who stand in the way of their
totalitarian ideology".
I search for the anger amid
these thousands of Muslims, businessmen from Seattle and students from
Harvard and housewives from Miami. It's there, I know, but as an Armenian
friend of mine remarks in the afternoon, they seem happy. And it's true.
There are more smiles than expressions of contempt, more babies in backpacks
and prams than posters of pain. In fact there aren't any posters at
all. But I suspect I know the truth. On their own, as thin minorities
in the towns and cities of the United States, America's Muslims - perhaps
six million of them - can feel under siege, distrusted and even hated.
At the convention centre,
however, they are in a self-confident majority, Sunnis for the most
part - America's Shias, who may be in the majority over all, don't have
the same organising abilities at present - who blithely ignore the officers
of the Illinois state police and the Chicago cops' bomb squad. I watch
them, guns swinging at their hips, go from stand to stand, occasionally
inspecting the boxes of books piled against the walls. Just who, I wonder,
do they think is going to bomb Muslims in Chicago?
Salam al-Marati - he is one
of the few Muslims I meet who actually was born in the Arab world, in
the Baghdad suburb of Qadamiyeh - is director of the Muslim Public Affairs
Council (MPAC), a Los Angeles advocacy group which repeatedly urges
American Muslims to work with the authorities against violence but who
sees other dangers and other targets for Muslim political anger: the
pro-Israeli lobbyists who ostentatiously insist that the vast majority
of American Muslims are peaceful and law-abiding but that a "network
of Islamic terror" exists across the nation.
Daniel Pipes is a bête
noire, as is Steven Emerson, a freelance journalist who grinds out article
after article about the "American jihad" for such august papers
as The Wall Street Journal, which, by the way, more and more reads like
The Jerusalem Post. Emerson and his work are taken apart by al-Marati
and his colleagues in a widely circulated booklet entitled Counterproductive
Terrorism: How Anti-Islamic Rhetoric is Impeding America's Homeland
Security.
"Those representing
pro-Israeli groups continue to intimidate and marginalise those who
are critical of Israeli policies by claiming this is pro-terrorism,"
al-Marati says with a mixture of anger and weariness. "This is
to the detriment of America, to the detriment of countering terrorism."
Maher Hathout, originally
from the Cairo suburb of Qasr el-Aini and an MPAC advisor, is, if anything,
even more angry. "We are that group of Americans who are not intimidated,"
he says. "You go to the campuses, and the Muslim students are the
most outspoken. They are asking - we are asking - how we can get the
average American who knows the truth about the Middle East to have the
guts to speak it. Our job is to say: 'Shame on you. You criticise your
President. But when you speak of Israel,you whisper.' What has happened
to the home of the brave?"
MPAC - which is operating
in Chicago under the auspices of the distinctly pro-Saudi Islamic Society
of North America - has produced a handbook called the Grassroots Campaign
to Fight Terrorism, which quotes from the Koran ("Whoever killed
a human being... it shall be as if he had killed all mankind")
and advises its supporters that "it is our duty as American Muslims
to protect our country and to contribute to its betterment".
"But what is the American-Muslim
identity?" al-Marati asks. "Our religious values and our American
values are not incompatible. There is no dissonance between the founding
principles of America and Muslim values. Unless we have this identity,
we will be trapped. We will end up creating Muslim ghettoes in America."
Sometimes, though, these
men and women remind me of nothing so much as the more ardent members
of the Israeli - or Armenian - lobby: fluent, just a little bit over-eloquent,
passionate - and I wonder if one day they may get a little loose with
the facts.
© 2006 Independent News
and Media Limited