UNITED STATES: Muslims fear focus of new terrorist rules

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Feb 3 1995 (IPS) - U.S. Muslims are worried that a new counter-terrorism bill may lead to harassment of Muslims supporting any groups or views that contradict U.S. foreign policy.

The bill, a draft of which is being prepared by various federal agencies, is called the Omnibus Counter-Terrorism Act of 1995. President Bill Clinton may present it as early as next week.

And, although the specifics are not yet clear, the message to Muslims is that Washington is on the look-out for any organisation that may be advocating ‘jihad,’ or struggle, against the United States and its allies.

“It is not a crackdown, but a harassment intended to throw a chill on the free speech of American Muslims,” said Dr. Mohammed T. Mehdi of the New York-based National Council on Islamic Affairs. “This aggravates and increases their fears that the U.S. government is after them.”

A U.S. State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Counter-Terrorism Act will be “more broadly based” than an executive order signed by Clinton last week to freeze any U.S. funding of a dozen alleged terrorist groups.

That order instructed some 500 U.S. banks to freeze accounts held by 10 Islamist and two radical Jewish organisations, including Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, Sheikh Omar Abdel- Rahman’s Gamaat al-Islamiya and the Jewish groups Kach and Kahane Chai.

“Those were the groups most directly threatening to the peace process in the Middle East,” the State Department official said. But the new legislation would focus on a wide range of activities and support for groups not directly linked, as last week’s ruling was, to the 1993 Israeli-Palestinian peace accords, he added.

A.M. Rosenthal of The New York Times, who obtained a copy of the draft, said it would allow the government “to trace funds to and from the terrorist-supporting groups, tighten the definition of terrorism … and make it illegal to plan or train for terrorism abroad as well as in the United States.”

Defenders of the policy claim it can prevent U.S. groups from funding the bombings and suicide attacks performed most recently by Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Israel, or from acts like the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing.

But Muslims counter that, so far, the only clear result of Clinton’s initiatives have been to make Muslims wary of sending funds to charities for fear of any possible link to ‘terrorists.’

“What they are trying to do is criminalise political opposition to Israel,” claimed Ibrahim Hooper, executive director of Washington’s Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). “They’re saying, ‘If you’re not on board the Israeli-Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) accord, you’re supporting terrorism’.”

Hooper argued that, as the current executive order stands, the ruling has no bearing on U.S. Muslims. The ruling — and the provisions of the upcoming terrorism bill — focus on direct funds going to groups that are not even active fund-raisers within the United States, he noted.

“I doubt the executive order will have any impact,” Mehdi agreed. He noted, “There is no money here going to Hamas. It gets its money from Muslim people in the (Middle Eastern) Gulf states, not from American Muslims.

“If the president wants to do anything (to stop the funding), he should interfere with the sovereignty of the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Bahrain,” he added dryly.

Another Muslim activist, speaking on condition of anonymity, said there was no point believing that leftist PLO faction leaders like George Habash and Nayef Hawatmeh — both on Clinton’s list — have bank accounts in the United States.

What the new and planned legislation does achieve, Hooper said, is to create “a pretext to go after legitimate groups.”

He argued that the rulings create a climate where funding to a wide variety of Muslim causes — supporting Bosnia’s government, Chechen or Kashmiri rebels, or Muslim minorities in Burma — can be viewed with suspicion. Even funds to food programmes or mosque construction could be viewed as re-directable, he said.

The U.S. Constitution protects charities from government intrusion or inspection. But sources say Clinton may ask for stronger federal power to monitor charities in the Counter- Terrorism Act, which could in turn test the courts’ policies.

The prospect of such a lessening of Constitutional protections is what worries the Muslim groups most. Mehdi said it was “a frightening aspect of the reactive order” that this activity is happening when the groups Washington has cited are inactive here.

But for Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, who is being tried for sedition with 11 other Islamists in New York, the groups and people now under suspicion have generally had a higher presence in Europe than in the United States.

The Feb. 1993 World Trade Centre bombing, in which six people died, and the arrest of the Islamists on charges of plotting to blow up several New York sites that summer, stoked suspicion in this country against the spectre of Muslim terrorists.

But no acts since then have given any weight to the charges of organised Islamist terrorist cells that have been repeated by the government and by some media reports.

“These guys are playing fast and loose with the talk” of terrorist activity in the United States, Hooper said. “Ask them to give you one shred of evidence…One! They can’t do it.”