06/14/10 – Pierre Tristam – The Scott Horton Show

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Okay, now, our next guest on the show today is Pierre Tristam and he is the editor of FlaglerLive.com, F-L-A-G-L-E-R, live.com, a non-profit news service based in Palm Coast, Florida.
He's also the Middle East guide for About.com and a frequent contributor to Common Dreams and other progressive websites.
Once again, his site is FlaglerLive.com.
Welcome to the show, Tristam.
Pierre, pardon me, how are you doing?
Well, it's all right.
Thank you.
It's very good to be here.
I used to know somebody named Tristam, so first name off the top of my head there.
Pardon me.
Pierre Tristam.
Such an important story here, and this got, you know, as best I can tell, very little coverage, but it really jumped out at me apparently the same way it jumped out to you.
And I'm so glad that you wrote this piece.
It's called From Times Square to Jacksonville When Terrorism is a Double Standard.
Well, I don't remember hearing about any Al-Qaeda attacks in Jacksonville, so what exactly are you talking about here?
Well, precisely because this story has not gone out the way it should have, let me sort of set the stage so people know what we're talking about.
We all remember what happened in Times Square on May 1st.
Of course, that's when the bomb was discovered, and 56 hours later Faisal Shahad, the 30-year-old financial analyst, was caught on the plane and taken into custody.
That was on May 1st.
Now, on May 10th, and of course, you know, you have the 10-day, 2-week circus of coverage and so on.
On May 10th at 9.30 p.m., 60 people were praying inside Jacksonville's biggest mosque.
A bomb went off outside, a firebomb.
No one was hurt.
There was a little damage.
This happened in the middle of a worship service in the largest mosque in Jacksonville.
Whoever said it got away.
Now, hardly anybody other than local media, the Times Union in Jacksonville did a great job covering the story.
A couple of TV stations picked up on what the Times Union was doing, but beyond there, it didn't get that much attention.
This didn't take place in a vacuum.
This took place in the middle of a debate that was going on at the city council, involving a man called Parvez Ahmed.
This is a professor who teaches at the University of North Florida.
He's a Muslim.
He was a former chairman of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and the council was debating his appointment to the city's Human Rights Commission.
The guy has a stellar record.
His background is just unbelievable.
He goes back many years with great credentials.
He's an ACLU member in Florida, a board member of ACLU Florida.
He was not a Rhodes Scholar, a Fulbright Scholar, and of course his academic credentials go back eons.
Now, they debated this on the city council, saying that this guy should not be appointed because he's a Muslim, and they debated this for two weeks.
It was pretty shameful.
It finally ended in a 16 to 6 vote, where he was finally appointed, or a 13 to 6 vote.
He was appointed, and in fact he took his position just a few days ago, but this became a major story in Jacksonville, and he was part of that context during which that bombing at the Islamic Center took place.
So a lot of hate was stirred up along the way because of that debate, and it's difficult and sometimes dangerous to make connections between one event or another, but the coincidence in this case is a little bit too much to overlook.
So that was the context.
All right, so we still don't know who did it for sure.
We still don't know who did it for sure, and when we're talking about double standards, here's another interesting part of this story.
It took the FBI several days to come up with a reward if this guy was caught, and they came up with $5,000, and they only did so when the Islamic Center itself put up $15,000 or so, along with a nearby church and another group, and the FBI joined its reward money to that.
Now, it was quite different when the rewards were being offered for Faisal Shahad and so on.
Right, yeah, well, it's pretty apparent why.
Well, I guess maybe there's two reasons.
Jacksonville is a little off the beaten path, right?
But especially, you know, it's because of who's the victim here.
You point out in your article with not too much irony, it comes across as a little deadpan that, somehow, Morris Dease and Mark Potok on the Southern Poverty Law Center can't be found anywhere.
Here they are, Southern, and here's a terrorist attack against a persecuted minority group, and all I got is crickets in my ears?
Well, I wouldn't really go too much out of my way blaming Morris Dease.
He does a great job, usually, with the number of things he has to deal with, and the irony is that it's unspoken to the extent to which he has to actually track the amount of hate and what he calls terrorist activity, justifiably so, across the country that has nothing to do with Al-Qaeda and so on.
I don't know why he missed this one, and I haven't checked in the last ten days to see if that has finally made it on their tracking list.
I'm almost certain it has, or it should.
Well, it's worth pointing out that he goes around pointing the finger at anybody he doesn't like and calling them terrorists.
He doesn't just focus on the Ku Klux Klan and the Aryan Nation and people who are actual right-wing, neo-fascist, racist terrorists at all.
Everyone to the right of him, which may include you, is a Timothy McVeigh neo-Nazi bomber to Morris Dease.
I say he had more responsibility for that than you or I, since he had informants inside the plot, but I guess that's neither here nor there.
Well, to get back to Jacksonville, really, which is where this matter is, Jacksonville is one of the country's largest cities, and for this story to not really get out as much as it should have is, I think, quite an issue.
Now, interestingly, Previz Ahmed asked about this, and he wrote about it, about that double standard, and he took a very moderate and commendable line and said, well, I would rather, this is sort of, I'm paraphrasing what he said, he said, I'd rather use this as a teachable moment and provide more information to people as to why we, the Muslim community, and there's about 15,000 Muslims in the Jacksonville metro area, obviously are not a danger to anybody, and it's kind of insulting to refer to them that way to start with, and to create more bridges rather than be too accusing, just because of what happened.
Now, the investigation carries on.
And the shame about this is that the city council kind of brought on the lousy image that Jacksonville developed over that debate about Muslims, because of the way they handled him.
And remember, this individual, this gentleman, Ahmed, three days after the attacks on 9-11, he was writing in the Harrisburg newspaper, he was writing a letter to the editor immediately condemning the attacks, and I think writing a pretty good line saying, using religious labels to describe them, meaning the terrorists, is an affront to any great religion and insults the glorious history and the common sensibilities of the millions that practice their faith in right earnest.
And so on.
Now, this is the same guy who, when he was before the city council, one of these, I think, very idiotic city council members, live in front of everybody, and this was broadcast on TV and on the web, literally tells the man, when they were debating his nomination, he tells him, say a prayer to your God.
He summons him to the mic, and he tells him, say a prayer to your God.
This is Don Redmond, a city councilman, trying to sort of show this conflict and contrast between, you know, the right-thinking Christians in the group versus this Muslim.
It was embarrassing.
Incredible.
It creates that sort of atmosphere in which not much good can come out of.
Tell us more about this city council.
Who are these people?
What the hell are they doing?
Thank you.
The city council, I haven't covered them myself.
I came to know them a bit better because I watched them in action through the video, which, by the way, is available.
If you go to the article at my site, there's a link to the video, with the entire debate over Pervez Ahmed.
That's the Muslim individual who was nominated to be on the Human Rights Commission for Jacksonville, and that became an issue only because he was a Muslim.
So several council members made an issue out of it.
Now, these council members don't necessarily know they're Sunnis from their gators, seriously.
And I mean that in the best sense.
It's not that they're ignorant, it's that they don't, you know, they had no reason to be mean-hearted toward this guy individually.
They were primed to be mean-hearted and to bring out sort of, well, not sort of.
It was outright bigotry.
And the way this happened was Act for America got involved in Jacksonville, the Jacksonville chapter of Act for America.
Who are these people?
They were created by Bridget Gabriel.
She's the author of a book called Because They Hate.
This is a Lebanese woman who was born in Lebanon and raised there for a few years in South Lebanon.
She's a Christian.
And incidentally, I was born and raised in Lebanon myself.
We are the same age.
I'm a Christian as well.
I lived several years over there under the bombs.
She lived several years over there under the bombs, except she exaggerated the case a little bit.
And she survived, made it out of the country through Israel, and has since become essentially a Lebanese version of your neocons.
She is extremely hateful toward Muslims.
She has nothing good to say about them.
And she essentially makes these broad, broad statements declaring, you know, Islam as a whole just a terrorist religion and so on and so forth.
Very, very, you know, bigoted language.
And her organization raises money to try to bring that sort of nasty awareness to her message.
Her Jacksonville chapter is the one that put together a dossier full of holes, full of misinformation, full of, you know, inaccuracies and connecting of dots that made absolutely no sense about Parvez Ahmed, this individual nominated for the Human Rights Commission, and sent those dossiers to the council members and sort of stirred them up.
Now, was there any specific accusation against this guy at all?
I mean, you said before it was they picked on him just because he was a Muslim.
But what did they say?
He was a member of this group or that one or something?
The specific accusation was that because he had been chairman of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, therefore, he had ties to terrorism.
Now, the way they connected this is that way back several years ago, the FBI investigated the Council on American-Islamic Relations because of some allegations that some of their donations had ended up in the wrong hands and maybe been sent to some Palestinian group, which is another story altogether.
But CARE, as it is known, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, really none of that stuck.
None of this actually was evidence that was either proven or even came close to the truth.
The Council is still a very reputable national organization that advocates on behalf of nothing but awareness about Muslims and protection of Muslims and so on.
So because he was their chairman at one point several years ago, Gabriel's group, Act for America, said this guy can't be trusted.
He has terrorist ties and so on.
It was an unbelievable exaggeration based on nothing.
It was one assumption building up on another.
It's been almost a decade since September 11th.
It really worries me that people just still can't get their head wrapped around the world they live in and what these things are in relation to each other at all.
If they said, okay, from now on Muslims have to wear a green star and crescent on all of their shirts, including their little kids and everything else, and we're going to start constructing concentration camps, I expect the American people would go along at this point.
If you build enough of a sense of urgency and danger and bigotry, I think they very well might.
We don't have a very good history when it comes to how we've treated other races.
As you remember, the 1940s and the concentration camps for the Japanese at the time, that was bad enough.
We've got that on our record.
We've got the way we've treated Filipinos at the turn of the century, the previous century.
And, of course, after 9-11, we've got a pretty bad record of when you've got 3,000 Muslims rounded up by our good friend John Ashcroft in the aftermath of the bombing, and they were questioned and interrogated all the way from Detroit to West Virginia, to Virginia and the West Coast, where you've got big concentrations of Muslims.
And now you've got groups like this that create incidents, literally create incidents out of nothing, and use them to bankroll themselves, to basically fund-raise and to say, look, we're active, we're protecting you.
And it's bull, of course.
Now, this is creating further problems, because just last week there was an envelope with white powder sent to a teacher, a Muslim teacher in Jacksonville, that got, by the way, the Council on American Islamic Relations involved again.
This was simply an intimidation thing.
We don't know who did it.
It's just like previous attacks.
But this keeps going on, and people don't really pay much attention, because once again, well, they're Muslims.
Well, you know, a friend of mine was pointing out to me the other day as we were driving around in Los Angeles that, wow, isn't it cool, you just look out the window on Hollywood Boulevard and you can see every single sort of ethnicity of person that a good artist could draw a cartoon of or whatever that exists in the whole world, everybody.
There they are, Koreans and Armenians and Russians and American black folk and everybody.
And the reason we all get along is because basically we all use the same currency, we're all trading with each other, and it's when times are getting harder and harder, as it seems to me we're kind of in the eye of the economic storm right now waiting for the next shoe to drop, this is when people start reverting back to hanging out more and more and identifying more and more with their so-called own group based on these sort of artificial distinctions rather than getting along.
And it really worries me that there are so many people so willing to demagogue against the weak when, look, the reason we're all screwed is because of the powerful.
I mean, what's so hard to understand about that?
Well, economic insecurities are a great instigator of other kinds of insecurities and one of the easiest ones is you look at people who are different and you go after them and you make them scapegoats.
Yeah.
Well, and how big was this bomb?
I mean, you said no one was killed, no one was injured.
Luckily, in this case of this bombing in Jacksonville, the Times Square bomb did nothing but fizzle.
I guess a few firecrackers went off, but could people have been killed by this thing?
Was this a serious attempt to kill people?
Well, the thing is the perimeter of the Islamic Center is large enough and this was thrown against a wall so it didn't really go further than that.
It was sort of a pipe bomb sort of thing.
Okay.
Now, obviously, back in April, on April 4th, a man actually entered the Islamic Center and yelled, stop this blasphemy!
And then, you know, he was chased out.
Imagine if the bomb had been set off with that guy inside.
Right.
Yeah.
I'm sorry we're out of time.
Thank you so much.
Everybody, it's FlaglerLive.com.
Pierre Tristam, Antiwar Radio.