A network of Muslim attorneys across the nation has formed the Muslim Legal Defense and Education Fund to give legal representation to the more than 1,400 Muslims who have been detained by the U.S. government since Sept. 11, organizers said Sunday.
LaDale George told an audience at the Islamic Society of North America's conference that while the fund is in its "infantile stages," it is an absolute necessity, as Muslim attorneys such as himself "have been inundated since Sept. 11" by requests for help.
The defense fund now is representing several cases, including a class-action lawsuit against America Online for what its clients say is the carrier's failure to protect the civil rights of people in its Muslim chat room, George said.
Lawyers from the Muslim defense fund have also written a letter asking that lawyer Alan Dershowitz be censured by his bar association for comments he made in an article in the Jerusalem Post. In the March 11 article, Dershowitz proposed that as a means of stemming the tide of suicide bombings, the Israeli government institute a policy of bulldozing a Palestinian village in retaliation after each suicide bombing.
The defense fund also is representing a young Pakistani man from the New York area who is being deported for a visa violation after he dropped off a roll of film to be developed at a local drugstore. Some of the pictures were of a visiting friend and were taken in the young man's backyard. In the distance was a water-treatment facility. Drugstore employees called the FBI, which investigated and found that the Pakistani man was not plotting to poison the water supply or planning other nefarious acts, George said.
But in the process of the kind of broad investigation now allowed by the Patriot Act and greater leeway given to federal investigators by the U.S. attorney general, the FBI discovered that another man living in an apartment the Pakistani man rents, but does not live in, had a visa violation. So the Pakistani man is being deported for harboring a visa-violator, which violates his own visa.
"It's that level of intrusion," George said Sunday, that is typical of the infractions against Muslim Americans' civil rights.
"When you reach a point of societal hysteria, 'vigilant' means anything," George said, referring to President Bush's charge to American's about national security."
When asked by an audience member if it would be better for Muslims to be as accommodating as possible to U.S. authorities and to try to "blend in," another panelist, Jamilah Koloctronis of Kansas City said no.
"We can stay ourselves or we can assimilate," said Koloctronis, a retired teacher. "I think it's better if we just stay who we are and then, Inshallah [God willing], in 10 years they'll find somebody else to pick on."
The three-day Muslims in America conference, sponsored by ISNA, the largest Muslim organization in the nation, ended Sunday.