Hey everybody, I'm Scott.
It's fundraising time again at antiwar.com.
We need your help and here's how you can help.
Stop by antiwar.com/donate or call Angela Keaton, our development director, at 323-512-7095.
That's 323-512-7095 or you can shoot her an email over to akeaton at antiwar.com.
Thank you very much for your support.
This free program is paid for by the listener members of KPFK.
If you're not already a member, consider joining with us and keep free speech alive.
This is Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest is joining us on the phone.
It's Maya Berry from the Arab American Institute and the Muslim Public Affairs Council.
She's a former legislative director for David Bonior, the congressman, and next Wednesday, March 2nd, at the Rayburn House Office Building, she will be hosting a symposium called Islamophobia, a challenge to American pluralism, which will feature such friends of Antiwar Radio as Suhail Khan, Max Blumenthal, and Leon Hatter as well.
Welcome to the show, Maya.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well.
Delighted to be here.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
Tell us, so what was the genesis of this project?
Well, very pointedly, Chairman Peter King.
When Congressman King announced that he was going to be holding hearings as the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee addressing what he called the radicalization, quote unquote, of the American Muslim community, like many others, we had a great deal of concern about the direction that he might be headed in, and we decided that it was very important to frankly respond directly to those hearings either before, after, or during when they took place, with the idea being that the very premise of Chairman King's hearings is that he is engaging in what we think is Islamophobic behavior.
So we wanted to assemble a panel to discuss this problem, the sort of bigotry that exists today towards both the Arab American and the American Muslim community, and frankly, it's a politically motivated approach that's being taken.
So we put together this panel to talk about it, specifically on the Hill, designed so that congressional staffers can have a broader conversation, and we're hoping that it helps provide an alternative view, we think one that's based in reality, frankly, more than perhaps Chairman King's is.
Well, there's something about the Republican Party.
They just figured out the formula that they just, every couple of years, I guess, they switch which party of weak people they can target and demagogue against, whether it's homosexuals, or whether it's illegal Mexican immigrants, or now with the Muslims, they just turn on a dime and start demagoguing against someone else.
And I think that's reflected in the polls that show that people in America are far more afraid of Islam and Muslims than they ever were after September 11th, in which, you know, at that time, even George Bush, who was killing a lot of Muslims, was telling the American people, no, they didn't do it because they're Muslim.
This is a twisted, strange offshoot or something.
The Muslims are okay, George Bush said, and they pretty much took his word for it.
But now with him gone, it's like, you might as well let Frank Gaffney determine the entire debate on the right now.
Yeah, it's a really valid and interesting point.
Post 9-11, there was, I think, a national awareness that on that horrific attack, those days when that happened, that the religion of Islam was also hijacked, and that those particular individuals did not represent either the American Muslim community or the faith itself more generally.
And you're absolutely right, since the polling that we've done since then has demonstrated that people's genuine fear has increased with regards to religion.
And I think that a lot of that has happened for, you cited Frank Gaffney, but there's a whole industry, whether it's Frank Gaffney, whether it's Pam Geller, and there are others there, where they are, I mean, I specifically use the term industry, because they're making a lot of money on selling this hate.
And it is a new form of the Red Scare.
It's a new form of, it's a way for them to frankly put their message out there.
It's an appeal to the lowest common denominator, the sort of most basic base reaction.
And it's really problematic.
And I think what's important is we can have open debates and conversations about these things.
One can talk about national security strategies, one can talk about counterterrorism approaches, and you can debate those things from the left and the right.
And I do want to make the point, though, that that battle that's happening within the Republican Party is actually a fierce debate.
There are many Republicans who have completely, people like Suhail Khan, who we have on the panel, who have said this kind of bigotry does not belong in their party, and they're working very hard to oppose it.
But you are right that most of the folks propagating this message tend to be from the right perspective, the Republican right on these.
So the hope is that when we have the discourse and we have the conversations, we can have those on a substantive level.
But in reality, they're just propagating hate, and it's ignorance, and it's really problematic.
But the reason we're assembling our panel on Wednesdays, it's one thing when Pamela Geller or Frank Caffney or the others that do it, do it, and Steven Emerson, there's a whole list of that camp that engages in this behavior.
It's one thing when they do it, but when you have a policymaker, when you have a chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, a person that represents his constituents that are from, that are both Arab American or American Muslims, when you have a person like that that's engaging in this type of bigotry, then it becomes more problematic.
And it's not, I mean, we know about Chairman King in terms of his perspectives, best articulated by himself.
This is a man who said simply, and I quote, there are too many mosques in America, not too many extremist mosques, not too many that I don't like in terms of their views, just too many, period.
And that's the perspective that he brings to this.
So it's not that he's an unknown commodity here.
Unfortunately, we know quite well his perspective.
And while he tries to advocate it further in Congress, we think it's very important to respond to it.
Well, and it's not just, you know, calling names.
The fact is they're creating a climate wherein the FBI, for example, can run roughshod over Muslims' rights and, you know, infiltrate their churches and trap them into saying something dumb into a microphone that makes it sound like they're a terrorist and put them away for dozens of years.
There's a case going before the Supreme Court now, right, about whether the FBI can just pretend that you're a material witness to someone, someone else's crime in order to just hold you because they can't think of an actual legal reason to hold you under arrest.
And this is the kind of thing where, you know, maybe the average American figures, well, but they're just doing that to a bunch of terrorist Muslim-type people that it doesn't affect me.
And so they're allowed to get away with that.
Real people are having their rights violated because of this sort of demagoguery.
Right.
And I think that's a very valid and important point to note here, that the more that you can do to make Arab Americans or American Muslims the other, that they're not like us, the easier it is to propagate, whether it's provisions of the Patriot Act, whether it's things like OFAC, the Treasury, material support laws, as long as it's the other, as long as it's not, you know, the common person that's like me, then perhaps it's easier to do that.
So that is absolutely true that the rhetoric has a policy implication and it's dangerous.
And frankly, the other point to be made here is it's incredibly counterproductive.
The law enforcement needs the work that the American Muslim community and Arab Americans have done to counter our own extremists when this has happened.
And in reality, like every community, we have our own criminal element.
So taking that and jumping and making this leap to suggest that there are elements in our community that are collaborators are doing this or doing that, it's just, it's absolutely ridiculous.
And none of the, I mean, Mr. King was saying that he was going to have law enforcement officials testify at his hearings about these concerns that he had.
Well, at the end of the day, he said, no, actually, they're not going to testify at my hearing.
So when he was asked, well, why can't you produce them?
You keep talking about these law enforcement officials who are going to tell you that the American Muslim community is not cooperating with me.
Well, his answer to that was, oh, they'll only tell me privately.
That's simply ridiculous.
I mean, it's creating a circus and it's an unfortunate thing because this is now, you know, it's not a fringe element of Congress.
It's not a sensationalist like Pamela Geller.
It's someone that holds a position of power in Congress.
And that's the reason we have to respond to it.
Yeah.
Someone actually sent me a link this week from World Net Daily about how Hamas and Hezbollah and Egyptian Islamic Jihad and Al-Qaeda and the, I guess, probably the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade and everybody else.
I don't know why not the Russians.
They're all in on it.
They are infiltrated throughout the entire society and they're about to overthrow us and institute a liberal Sharia law in America or something.
The liberals and the Sharia law people in on it together against us.
And apparently there's a pretty good market for this kind of nonsense.
It doesn't seem like it's going away yet.
I sure do appreciate the fact that you guys are trying to put up a fight there, especially in D.C. where it counts and especially to the staffers of the congressmen where it counts.
That's very smart of you.
Yeah, absolutely.
Anytime someone starts using an Arabic word, I start to worry.
It started with madrasas, which is just the word for school.
It can shift to jihad, which has multiple meanings, but on the most basic level, the idea of an internal struggle.
Now everybody knows what Sharia law is.
It's problematic in that obviously these are terms being tossed around when no one has frankly any idea what they're talking about.
So our hope is that we...
I don't want to spend time talking about Sharia law.
Nobody talks about Sharia law in a substantive way in terms of the ability to...
So it's not what we want to talk about to bring the conversation back to understand that Islamophobia, unfortunately, the bigotry against the Arab-American and American-Muslim community is very real and it has policy implications and it has implications in terms of our own national security.
All right.
I'm sorry.
We have to leave it right there.
Everybody, that's Maya Barry.
I really appreciate your time on the show today.
That's the Arab-American Institute and the Muslim Public Affairs Council.
I'm sure you can look them up online next Wednesday.
They're giving a symposium there for the congressman at the Rayburn House Office Building.
Thank you very much again for your time on the show today, Maya.
Thank you, Scott.
AIUSA.org.
Take care.
Okay.
Appreciate it.
All right, everybody.
That's it for Anti-War Radio.
We're out here.
Thanks a lot for listening.
