NYC Case a Wake-Up Call for Muslims

May 6, 2010

by Aisha Gawad

I was raised in the Southern United States, reciting the pledge of allegiance every morning, memorizing the Bill of Rights, and listening to country singers croon about good ole American values. Like many young Muslim-Americans, I felt just like my blonde, blue-eyed classmates until the events of September 11 made me suddenly and irrevocably different.

At first, it didn’t change much about me. The pledge of allegiance resonated in the same way and the Bill of Rights remained an untouchable beacon of justice. But over the past eight years, I feel like I’ve lost my footing. Patriotism has become synonymous with Security, and Security has become synonymous with two unjustified wars and a host of laws and administrative measures that seem to fly in the face of the American values I was taught to hold so dear.

I feel like many of us have been trying to weather the storm, to lay low until “Muslim” is no longer a dirty word in this country. But something has to wake us up to the fact that this isn’t about 9/11 and it isn’t about Iraq. It’s about us asserting our rights as Americans and as human beings.

Over the past two years, I feel like I’ve had a wave of wake up calls that keep me from falling into a routine of passivity. Last week, the news of Fahad Hashmi’s plea deal came more like a slap in the face.

Unfortunately for Fahad, he’s become a symbol of the extent to which Islamophobia and racism plagues this country.

Fahad was arrested in June 2006 after he allowed an acquaintance, Junaid Babar, to stay in his London apartment for two weeks. Babar apparently had with him bags containing ponchos and socks which allegedly were delivered to Al Qaeda members. Once Babar was arrested by U.S. authorities, he took a plea deal and was more than willing to tell police what they wanted to hear in order to save his own skin, including implicating Fahad.

Since Fahad’s arrest, he has been kept in solitary confinement in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan. The isolation in which he has been kept (permitted under the atrocious Special Administrative Measures passed in October 2006) amounts to psychological torture.

His trial was set to begin on April 28th, but its fairness was questioned before it even began. As his brother Faisal Hashmi writes in a public statement on behalf of his family, Fahad “faced the prospect of going before an anonymous jury based in part on the prosecution’s ugly assertion that his friends and family were as dangerous as they alleged Fahad was. Furthermore, the case against Fahad relied on secret evidence based in large part on the testimony of a government informant with a history of lying. The material support statute under which he was charged is notoriously flawed and the subject of outrage from civil libertarians. It enables the government to take a grain of truth and bury it in an ocean of innuendo and outright lies.”

So on the eve of his trial, Fahad changed his innocenet plea to a guilty one and accepted a deal from the prosecution in which he now faces just a single charge of material support to terrorism. He will serve 15 years in prison with credit for time served.

A “Free Fahad” (www.freefahad.com) campaign has been waged for years by activists outraged by the treatment he has faced and what it stands for. For them, this is surely a hard prospect to swallow – that Fahad was forced to accept the government’s assertion of his guilt in order to escape extended solitary confinement and decades in prison. But we cannot expect him to make a martyr of himself; the plea deal was realistically the best option he could hope for.

The sad truth for him is that for many brothers like Fahad, this is the best they can hope for. If this reality doesn’t wake us up as a community, then I don’t know what will.

I don’t want to quietly weather the storm. I want to put an end to injustice now. It is our responsibility as Muslims, as Americans, and as human beings to come out of hiding and assert our rights. I’m not asking for much. I just want to feel truth in the words I was taught to memorize in elementary school.

Contact the author:

Email: aisha.gawad@gmail.com

Twitter: http://twitter.com/ArabRaptor

Published in the Elan Magazine:

http://www.elanthemag.com/index.php/site/blog_detail/nyc_case_a_wake_up_call_for_muslims-nid646486841/