Habeus Lost

It is 1933 again; as the Reichstag burned, Hitler blamed his own work on others in order to take total control. It is 1951 again, with the tactics of Joe McCarthy attacking liberals and Muslims and anyone standing in the way of the right wing machine and the maintenance of control. The powers that be have convinced themselves that this is how to win elections. The Republicans are playing hardball; Democrats are playing right back; the politics of fear and divisiveness prevail. It does matter who is in power.

We Muslims need to educate ourselves and get involved to lift this process to a better moral level. How do we think ourselves over the walls back to 1990 when the Berlin wall was pushed down by hammer swinging citizens? Is that what is needed in Washington? But Congress has already pulled down Democracy and Freedom, in the name of Democracy and Freedom.

The Capitol Building has been renovated— just yesterday I saw it standing white in the early morning. But the men and women of this institution have just voted for a law designed to strip many basic human rights protections for detainees, as well as others. The bill entrenches presidential power to a new extent, weakens court checks on that power, and allows the administration to declare even an American citizen an unlawful combatant subject to indefinite detention. It rolls back a number of the gains made when brave lawyers challenged the indefinite detention of Muslims after 9/11. It reduces Habeus protections in place since 1215 Magna Carta, the British model for our won political rights. Do you really feel more secure?

Manfred Nowak, the U.N. anti-torture investigator, commented, “I'm very disappointed. It doesn't send the signal that we would have expected after Abu Ghraib.''

Rabbi Wascow the Shalom Center commented, “This law is second in despicability only to the protection explicitly given slavery in the original Constitution of the United States. I am ashamed that to my grandchildren I am bequeathing an America so defiled.”

Salam Al-Marayati, MPAC Executive Director, observed last week, "The current legislation allows the world to think that America has given in to those that want to change us from a nation of laws and order to a nation that is scrambling to defend itself event at the cost of its identity."

Walls are rising everywhere around us. Why? Leaders build on fear, to defend absurd lines in the sand drawn by colonial powers; to defend “our way of life” and to create an illusion of security against immigrant invasion, criminal smuggling, and acts of war. Walls define us as who we are and who we are not.

Israel’s wall is well known, shutting Palestinians into a ghetto. There are other less well known security walls, such as in the deserts of Morocco, designed to impede the movement of Polisario rebels along hundreds of miles. In Iraq, new fortifications are planned to wall in much of Baghdad, along with curfews to contain the chaos there. However, order in Iraq has collapsed so completely that Saudi Arabia has ordered the construction of a 550-mile high-tech fence to seal off its northern neighbour. Like other modern walls, this will be equipped with ultraviolet night-vision cameras, buried sensor cables and thousands of miles of barbed wire.

In so-called Muslim countries from Sudan to Uzbekistan the culture of fear and division keeps the people penned like sheep. Laws exclude, in the name of tribal animosity; corruption erodes trust; state control is maintained with a heavy hand. And though once committed at least to a vision of freedom, Fortress America will soon build a 700-mile fence on our Southern borders, which Congress voted to fund last week, despite the opposition of Mexican authorities and the migration patterns of many creatures. As in dictatorships, our US leaders dig deep to build on fear. They dig deep psychologically, using the media. They also dig deep in our own pockets to pay their Halliburton and Bechtel friends to wall us in.

Many of the worst new walls are invisible; created by divisive politics; the influence of extreme tactics in politics; virulently negative and personal and misleading political attack ads, think tanks dedicated to massive takeover, such as the “K Street Project” a Republican initiative to integrate lobbyists into the political power structure, linked to the current scandal with lobbyist Jack Abramoff and former Congressional Leader Tom DeLay, as well as to the White House.

The current massive scale of corruption in Washington is a clear indication that right wing ideologies that romanticize privatization and the power of private business world can be all too easily and completely corrupted. And protecting access to power are miles and miles of invisible walls. You must pay to get in.

Some cannot get in at all, like Tariq Ramadan, for false reasons that slowly come to light as legal fictions. Others who are in suffer prosecutorial misconduct, such as Imam Warith Deen. "What has happened the last five years has brought discouragement and sometimes international disgrace to our great country," said former President Carter last week.

One thing you can do however, is join concerned Americans from all across the country in at the ACLU Membership Conference in Washington DC on October 15-17. Let there be Muslims there—we cannot stop the struggle for Ramadan. Let our faith and sacrifice define and energize us. At this defining moment in United States history, the record must show that the Muslim Americans were not afraid to gather and call on the government to account for its abuses of power. See www.aclu.org for more details; and for a limited number of subsidies for youth activists contact arosmarin@nyclu.org.