IN THE DAYS after September 11, mainstream Arab- and Muslim-American community groups condemned the terrorist attacks in the most emphatic terms. Salam Al Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), recalls, “As citizens we all felt the obligation to seek the culprits behind it. In the sense that the suspects were people of Arab background, it put a special onus on the community.” Now, five months later, that resolve seems to have dissipated. After a flurry of cooperative meetings between the FBI and organizations like MPAC and James Zogby’s Arab American Institute, protesting the status of Muslim detainees is the order of the day. Any hope of a dispassionate assessment from within the Muslim community of its possible role in creating a climate hospitable to extremism has been dispelled by a hardening refusal among Muslim-American leaders to acknowledge radical elements within their ranks, and a growing eagerness to place the blame for terrorism on “American foreign policy.” To be sure, MPAC’s Al Marayati still encourages his peers to work with law enforcement–pointing out it was the FBI that recently thwarted a Jewish Defense League bomb plot–and it is important, he says, for his community to “root out any criminal elements.” But he denies any significant presence of Islamic extremists in the United States. He argues the 9/11 hijackers were “transients,” and says some American mosques “present a more conservative approach, but that’s their right so long as they don’t promote social harm.” This see-no-evil posture fails to acknowledge what goes on in America’s mosques. Days after September 11, for example, the imam of New York’s Islamic Cultural Center, the city’s most prominent mosque, fled to Egypt, where he told a newspaper Jews had hijacked the planes, aided by Zionist air-traffic controllers. Two months later, his successor, Omar Saleem Abous-Namous, still refused to acknowledge Islamic extremists were behind the atrocities, telling one television interviewer, “It is not my job, as a matter of fact, to identify who did it.” Of course, it is not just a question of who did it, but who provided the context that made it appear justifiable to some. Imam Muzammil Siddiqi, director of California’s Islamic Society of Orange County, is considered a moderate. In fact, he was invited to speak at the National Cathedral prayer service on September 14. But in October 2000, addressing a rally in support of the terrorist group Hezbollah, he declared, “America has to learn–if you remain on the side of injustice, the wrath of God will come!” Khaled Abou El Fadl is an Egyptian-born law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, a scholar of Islamic law, and a vocal critic of the Muslim-American establishment (though he defends it in certain instances; he calls Daniel Pipes, Steven Emerson, and Yossef Bodansky “Islamophobics”). He says groups like MPAC and the American Muslim Council are “locked in a paradigm of apologetics and siege mentality.” On the question of extremist mosques in America, Abou El Fadl says, “[Muslim-American groups] are either living in an environmental bubble or they know and they don’t want to admit it.” Abou El Fadl says that after September 11, the Muslim-American community faced an important challenge: “To engage in introspective processes–to ask, in which ways do certain normative doctrines empower this ugliness?” He explains, “Even if one says this ugliness and extremism are not representative, I do not think that is an adequate response. The fact that white supremacists are not representative does not mean that wider American culture must not ask how the ways we talk, think, behave, help allow these groups to exist.” Asked to rate the Muslim-American community on the progress of their self-examination, Abou El Fadl says, “It’s been fairly, overall a complete failure.” One task that MPAC and others have been far more willing to take on is a reassessment of “American foreign policy.” As early as October, MPAC began running ads on a Los Angeles radio station saying the United States’s role in the Middle East had stirred anti-American sentiment. (Those ads were pulled after the radio station was deluged with angry calls.) Of the 13 News Alerts posted on MPAC’s website, over half condemn Israel or the Jewish Defense League. (The remainder concern civil liberties and hate crimes.) Al Marayati says the United States has defined terrorism too narrowly, failing to account for groups like the Tamil Tigers and for Jewish terrorism in the Israeli occupied territories. And he insists it’s important to explore what motivates those who follow Osama bin Laden. Al Marayati complains, “We’re not able to understand the grievances of the masses that terrorists exploit. If we don’t understand that, we’ll isolate ourselves–not the terrorists–from the Muslim world.” That many Muslim organizations sympathize with those grievances is no surprise. Further, violent tactics are often characterized as legitimate means of national resistance. In October 2001, the New York executive director of the Council on American Islamic Relations, Al-Haaj Ghazi Khankan, told the newspaper Jewish Week, “From a religious point of view, [Palestinians] have the right to defend themselves. …Who is a soldier in Israel and who is not? Anyone over 18 is automatically inducted into the service, and they are all reserves. Therefore, Hamas, in my opinion, looks at them as part of the military. Those who are below 18 should not be attacked.” More subtle, and more common, are efforts to “contextualize” terrorist violence. Abou El Fadl explains this habit of mainstream Muslim-American groups: “They’ve condemned terrorist acts. But the problem is that they invariably attempt to attach these other causes.” After 25 Israelis died in one weekend of suicide bombings, the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee issued the following release: “ADC President Ziad Asali stated that ‘This weekend’s attacks in Jerusalem and Haifa are morally unjustifiable and politically counter-productive, however, these attacks did not occur in [a] vacuum.’ Asali added that ‘prolonged Israeli occupation of Palestine and provocative measures taken by the Sharon government to suppress the intifada have directly contributed to this vicious cycle of violence.'” One consequence of such tactics is a fair amount of moral confusion. Another is reflected in a poll of Muslim Americans recently conducted by John Zogby (James’s brother). Presented with a range of military and policy options, respondents were asked, “If you had to choose one of the following ways to wage the war against terrorism, which would you choose?” Sixty-seven percent picked “Changing America’s Middle East policy.” Only 7 percent picked the next most popular option, “Using U.S. military covert/Special Forces.” If two-thirds of Muslim Americans believe the best way to end extremism is for America to end its support for Israel, then they have little reason to explore other founts from which terrorist ideology might spring–notably certain puritanical and fanatical strains of Islamic thought. Nor can they muster much enthusiasm for a fight they believe is being fought the wrong way. As America continues to prosecute its campaign against terrorism, Muslim Americans could make a unique contribution, especially in the arena of national security. Abou El Fadl has proposed forming a community task force to assist law enforcement, but reports the idea has been widely rejected by Muslim organizations. It is hard to ignore his conclusion: that, as America confronts this great crisis, “the Muslim-American community’s reaction has been defensive, apologetic and largely rhetorical. . . . It has not developed any concrete ways of engaging society, but has united to close ranks and not air any dirty laundry.” Noah D. Oppenheim wrote about Lawrence Summers and Cornel West in the January 21, 2002, Weekly Standard.
