The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope (23 page)

There is a serious backlash against the bill in Arizona and around the country. Rep. Raul Grijalva, a Democrat from Tucson and co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, is front and center in opposing the controversial law. He told me: “It’s a license to racially profile. It creates a second-class status for primarily Latinos and people of color in the state of Arizona. . . . Arizona’s been the petri dish for these kinds of harsh, racist initiatives.”

Legal groups are mounting challenges to the law. Sunita Patel is a staff attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights. According to Patel, “It allows the local law-enforcement agencies to check not only the FBI databases, which they’ve traditionally always done, it also allows them to sync up with immigration databases, which are notoriously unreliable because of errors with the data entry because they just have incorrect information on citizenship status . . . so you have this very broad net being cast.”

Grijalva is calling on the federal government to refuse to cooperate with Arizona. “Immigration is a federal law, and if we’re asking the president for him not to cooperate in the implementation of this law through Homeland Security, through Border Patrol, through detention and a noncooperative stance by the United States government and the federal agencies, [it] would render much of this legislation moot and ineffective,” he said.

He also is calling for people to boycott his own state: “I support some very targeted economic sanctions on the state of Arizona. We will be asking national organizations, civic, religious, political organizations not to have conferences and conventions in the state of Arizona. That there has to be an economic consequence to this action and to this legislation. And good organizations across this country, decent organizations that agree with us that this bill is patently racist, that it is unconstitutional and it’s harsh, it’s unjust, that they should refrain from bringing their business to the state.”

Already, the American Immigration Lawyers Association has decided to move its fall 2010 annual conference from Arizona to another state. San Francisco Board of Supervisors member David Campos, saying that Arizona “with a stroke of a pen set the clock back on a generation of civil-rights gains,” is confident that his resolution calling for the city to boycott Arizona will pass. Similar city boycotts are being considered in Oakland, California, and El Paso, Texas. Sportswriter Dave Zirin is supporting a boycott of the Diamondbacks, Arizona’s Major League Baseball team.

Close to 30 percent of the Arizona population identifies itself as Hispanic. It was a boycott that eventually forced the state to recognize Martin Luther King Jr. Day. It is a shame that similar tactics are needed again.

May 26, 2010

Alleged Chicago Torturer’s Overdue Day in Court

Abu Ghraib has nothing over Chicago. Forty years ago, Jon Burge returned from Vietnam, joined the Chicago Police Department, and allegedly began torturing people. He rose in the ranks to become a commander in Chicago’s South Side, called Area 2. Electric shocks to the genitals, mock executions, suffocation with bags over the head, beatings, and painful stress positions are among the torture techniques that Burge and police officers under his command are accused of using to extract confessions in Chicago, mostly from African-American men. More than 110 men are known to have been victims of Burge and his associates. Victims often went to prison, some to death row. Facing mounting evidence and increasing community outcry, Burge was fired from the Chicago Police Department in 1993. He now lives in Florida, collecting his pension.

This week, in a federal criminal trial beginning in Chicago, Burge faces charges, not for torture, but for lying about torture under oath in an earlier civil suit brought by one of his victims (since the statute of limitations on torture, remarkably, has expired). He faces up to forty-five years in prison. Burge’s co-conspirators remain uncharged. Also untouched in the trial is the role played by the current mayor of Chicago, Richard M. Daley, who as state’s attorney for Cook County from 1980 to 1989, and as mayor since then, has consistently fought investigations or prosecutions of the alleged torturers.

Darrell Cannon is one of the men alleging torture against Burge and his associates. He says police tortured him in 1983 and forced him to confess to a murder he didn’t commit. He spent more than twenty years in prison, but after a hearing on his tortured confession, prosecutors dismissed his case in 2004. It took him three more years to gain release from prison.

At 6 a.m. on November 2, 1983, Chicago cops under Burge’s command arrested Cannon and drove him to an isolated industrial area on the Chicago waterfront. He related his ordeal to me:

They did a mock hanging, where I’m cuffed behind my back and one of the detectives would get on the bumper of the detective car, the other two detectives would lift me up to him, and he would grab my handcuffs from behind. They would let me go. That will cause my arms to go up backwards, almost wrenching the inside of my shoulders. . . . Then they switched to a second torture treatment, where they got their shotgun. . . . One of them said, “Go ahead, blow that ni—r’s head off.” And that’s when [Detective] Peter Dignan forced the shotgun in my mouth. . . . They did a mock execution three times.

Cannon refused to confess. He went on: “They then put me in the backseat of a detective car. . . . They pulled my pants and my shorts down . . . took an electric cattle prod, turned it on and proceeded to shock me on my testicles.”

Cannon finally made a false and coerced statement, implicating himself as an accomplice to murder, to make the torture stop.

His attorney, Flint Taylor, is with the People’s Law Office, which has been representing scores of Burge’s alleged torture victims. Taylor pointed out the controversial role of Mayor Daley. “Darrell Cannon here, my client, was tortured in 1983. If Daley had moved in 1982 with the evidence he had to remove Burge from the police force and prosecute him for torture, we would not have Darrell Cannon spending 20, 25 years behind bars and not having him tortured by electric shock. So, the real crime here started many years ago with the cover-up, a cover-up that was engineered by the mayor himself.”

In January 2003, before leaving office, Illinois Gov. George Ryan, a Republican, commuted the death sentences of all 156 people on Illinois’ death row, after the innocence of thirteen other death row inmates had been proved. Ryan pardoned four on death row who were known to be victims of Burge’s torture.

Where did it all begin? One thing is clear: In 1968–69, Burge was an MP at the U.S. Army’s Dong Tam camp in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, where captured suspected Viet Cong soldiers were allegedly interrogated with electric, hand-cranked field telephones supplying shocks. Torture techniques similar to this were rampant under Burge’s command in Chicago.

Given ongoing reports of torture in Iraq and Afghanistan, we have to wonder how many Jon Burges are being bred in President Barack Obama’s two wars.

August 18, 2010

Mosque-Issippi Burning

Salman Hamdani died on September 11, 2001. The twenty-three-year-old research assistant at Rockefeller University had a degree in biochemistry. He was also a trained emergency medical technician and a cadet with the New York Police Department. But he never made it to work that day. Hamdani, a Muslim-American, was among that day’s first responders. He raced to Ground Zero to save others. His selfless act cost him his life.

Hamdani was later praised by President George W. Bush as a hero and mentioned by name in the USA Patriot Act. But that was not how he was portrayed in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. In October, his parents went to Mecca to pray for their son. While they were away, the
New York Post
and other media outlets portrayed Hamdani as a possible terrorist on the run. “MISSING—OR HIDING? MYSTERY OF THE NYPD CADET FROM PAKISTAN” screamed the
Post
headline. The sensational article noted that someone fitting Hamdani’s description had been seen near the Midtown Tunnel a full month after 9/11. His family was interrogated. Hamdani’s Internet use and politics were investigated.

His parents, Talat and Saleem Hamdani, had been frantically searching the hospitals, the lists of the dead and the injured. “There were patients who had lost their memory,” his mother, Talat, said. “We hoped he would be one of them, we would be able to identify him.”

The ominous reports on Hamdani were typical of the increasing, overt bigotry against Arab-Americans, Muslim-Americans, and people of South Asian heritage. Talat, who worked as a teacher, told me how children in her extended family had to Anglicize their names to avoid discrimination: “They were in second grade . . . Armeen became Amy, and one became Mickey and the other one became Mikey and the fourth one became Adam. And we asked them, ‘Why did you change your names?’ And they said ‘because we don’t want to be called terrorists in the school.’”

On March 20, 2002, the Hamdanis received word that Salman’s DNA had been found at Ground Zero, and thus he was officially a victim of the attacks. At his funeral, held at the Islamic Community Center at East 96th Street in Manhattan, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, and Rep. Gary Ackerman all spoke.

Which brings us to the controversy around the proposed Islamic community center, slated to be built at 51 Park Place in lower Manhattan. The facility is not, for the record, a mosque. And it is not at Ground Zero (it’s two blocks away). The Cordoba Initiative, the nonprofit group spearheading the project, describes it as a “community center, much like the YMCA or the Jewish Community Center . . . where people from any faith are allowed to use the facilities. Beyond having a gym, the Cordoba House will house a pool, restaurant, 500-person auditorium, 9/11 memorial, multifaith chapel, office and conference space, and prayer space.”

Opposition to the center started among fringe, right-wing blogs, and has since been swept into the mainstream. While the hole at Ground Zero has yet to be filled, as billionaire developers bicker over the plans, the news hole that August brings has been readily filled with the “Ground Zero Mosque” controversy.

There is another hole that needs to be filled, namely, the absence of people in the U.S. in leadership positions in every walk of life, of every political stripe, speaking out for freedom of religion and against racism. As the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

Does anyone seriously say that there shouldn’t be a Christian church near the site of the Oklahoma City bombing, just because Timothy McVeigh was a Christian?

People who are against hate are not a fringe minority, not even a silent majority, but are a silenced majority. They are silenced by the chattering classes, who are driving this debate throughout the media.

Hate breeds violence. Marginalizing an entire population, an entire religion, is not good for our country. It endangers Muslims within America, and provokes animosity toward America around the world.

When I asked Daisy Khan, executive director of the American Society for Muslim Advancement, which is a partner in the proposed community center, if she feared for herself, for her children or for Muslims in New York, she replied, “I’m afraid for my country.”

March 17, 2010

NYC’s Jihad Against Debbie Almontaser

Debbie Almontaser has won a victory in her battle against discrimination. She was the founding principal of the first Arabic-language public school in the United States, until a campaign of hate forced her out. She is well known for her success in bridging cultural divides, bringing together Muslims, Christians, and Jews, yet as the new school neared its opening date in the summer of 2007, she became the target of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab attacks. Last week, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) ruled that the New York City Department of Education (DOE) discriminated against her “on account of her race, religion and national origin.”

The school is called the Khalil Gibran International Academy. Gibran was a Lebanese-born writer and philosopher. His best-known book,
The Prophet
, published in 1923, has sold more than 100 million copies in forty languages. A line from
The Prophet
, prominent on the academy’s website, reads, “The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind.”

But open-mindedness was hardly the response of a fringe group called Stop the Madrassa. The group used the Arabic word for
school
because of its negative connotations with religious schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The academy was developed as a secular, dual-language public school for sixth through twelfth grades and had no religious curriculum. As the small but vocal group of opponents continued to take issue with the planned school, the DOE compelled Almontaser to submit to an interview with Rupert Murdoch’s
New York Post
. The article’s headline read: “City Principal Is ‘Revolting.’”

In the interview, Almontaser was asked to explain the use of the word
intifada
, because the word appeared on a T-shirt of a women’s organization that sometimes used the offices of a community group where she was a board member. The T-shirt had nothing to do with the Khalil Gibran International Academy. Almontaser told me: “He asked me one or two questions about the school and then asked me for the root word of the word
intifada
. As an educator, I simply responded and said to him that it comes from the root word of the word
infad
in Arabic, which is ‘shake off’; however, this word has developed a negative connotation based on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, where thousands of people have died. Within the interview, I stated that I . . . condemn all violence, any shape, way or form.”