Interstellar News Service

A.C.L.U. REPORT SAYS ANTITERROR FIGHT UNDERCUTS LIBERTY OF MUSLIM DONORS -TOP
Stephanie Strom, New York Times, 6/15/09

The fight against terrorism has dealt a harsh blow to Muslim charities and interfered with their donors’ religious freedom, a new report by the American Civil Liberties Union concludes.

The report says statutes that it describes as overly broad and enforced in a discriminatory manner, coupled with a lack of due process, have starved Islamic charities of money and impeded Muslims’ ability to fulfill zakat, their religious requirement to make charitable donations.

The report is based on interviews with more than 100 Muslim community leaders as well as experts on antiterrorism laws and regulations. Though it gives no estimate of the decline in donations to Muslim groups, it says a total of nine Islamic charities have closed as a result of government action against them since the Sept. 11 attacks.

That action ranges, it says, from declaring a group to be under investigation to designating it a terrorist organization and freezing its assets.

“While there is a legitimate concern about the use of charitable funds to finance terrorism, it does not outweigh the rights of American Muslims to fulfill their religious obligations or override constitutional requirements for due process,” said the author, Jennifer Turner, the A.C.L.U.’s human rights researcher.

President Obama mentioned the issue in his speech in Cairo this month. “In the United States, rules on charitable giving have made it harder for Muslims to fulfill their religious obligation,” Mr. Obama said. “That is why I am committed to working with American Muslims to ensure that they can fulfill zakat.” (More)

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BLOCKING FAITH, FREEZING CHARITY - TOP

Video Shows How Terrorist Finance Laws Alienate American Muslims And Chill Religious Practice Of Charitable Giving

Click here to watch the video.

NEW YORK, June 16, 2009 /PRNewswire/ — A new video from the American Civil Liberties Union, "Blocking Faith, Freezing Charity," shows how terrorism finance laws have created a climate of fear that hurts the ability of American Muslims to freely practice their religion through charitable giving.

The video accompanies an ACLU report by the same name. The report is based on interviews with 115 Muslim community leaders and American Muslims who say would-be donors are intimidated by laws that allow the use of secret evidence and non-transparent procedures to punish innocent giving and shut down legitimate charities. This hinders the ability of Muslims to practice Zakat, the religious practice of charitable giving, which is one of the five pillars of Islam. Observant Muslims are obligated to give, but some fear a visit from the FBI every time they write a check to charity. (More)

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MUSLIMS FACE RISK IN GIVING TO CHARITIES - TOP
Barbara Bradley Hagerty, NPR, 6/16/09

Click here to listen to the story.

President Obama is already popular among Muslims in the U.S., but one reference in a recent speech made many hearts swoon.

"Freedom of religion is central to the ability of peoples to live together," he told an audience in Cairo. "Rules on charitable giving made it harder for Muslims to fulfill their religious obligation. That's why I'm committed to working with American Muslims to ensure that they can fulfill zakat."

The idea behind zakat is this: If every Muslim gives 2.5 percent of his savings to the poor, that will go a long way toward eradicating poverty. Imam Mohamed Magid at the ADAMS Center, a large mosque in Virginia, says that's why zakat is one of the five pillars, or obligations, of Islam.

"It's a really big deal," he says. "A Muslim will not be able to fulfill his religious obligations and be fully a Muslim without fulfilling zakat."

But how do you do that without running afoul of the law? With some difficulty, according to a new report by the American Civil Liberties Union. Researcher Jennifer Turner says she interviewed more than 100 Muslims in Michigan and Texas to see what happened to them after they donated money to large Muslim charities working abroad.

"Donors and their lawyers told me that FBI agents were knocking on donors' doors at home and at their workplaces to interrogate them about their donations," she says, "asking questions like, 'Did you write a check to a charity?' or, 'What do you know about that charity?' "

After the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. government suspected that some Muslim charities were funneling donations to terrorist groups like al-Qaida. Under the regulations, anyone who gives to one of those charities — even if he did so before the charity came under suspicion — could be accused of giving material support to terrorists.

This has made Ashraf Sabrin, who worships at the ADAMS Center, a little nervous. Each year, he spends hours researching charitable organizations, poring over the biographies of the officers and records filed with the government for any hint of wrongdoing.

"It's a lot of work," he says. "And I bet most people don't want to go through all of that. And I bet most people say, 'Allah knows my intentions, but I can't give because maybe three years from now, someone will be investigated and my donation will be scrutinized in some way.' "

Sabrin and others say there's another problem: So far, the U.S. has frozen $20 million in assets from seven large Muslim charities. Money that was supposed to go to the destitute sits in a government bank account.

For years, Muslim leaders have asked the Treasury Department for a "white list" that offers guidance on which charities are safe to give to. (More)

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CAIR-OK: OBAMA SPEECH MAY BE WATERSHED MOMENT - TOP
William F. O'Brien, The Edmond Sun, 6/15/09

In a meeting that took place in the spring of 1963, President John F. Kennedy asked his French counterpart, Charles De Gaulle, if he thought that then-British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was a great man.

De Gaulle replied that he thought Macmillan was in fact a great man, and pointed out to Kennedy that Macmillan, like Winston Churchill, had an American mother.

The French president went on to say that the truly great leaders of England are not totally English, and reminded Kennedy that Benjamin Disraeli was the grandson of Iberian Jewish immigrants, that William Gladstone was a full-blooded Scot, and that David Lloyd George was Welsh and began his political career as a Welsh nationalist.

Harold Macmillan is perhaps best known today for a speech that University of Oklahoma President David Boren referenced in his recent book “Letter To America” that has become known as the “Winds of Change” speech.

That address was delivered by Macmillan in April of 1960 to the South African Parliament in Cape Town, South Africa. The British prime minister had spent the previous month traveling through British colonies in Africa that were in the process of receiving their independence. The majority of the members of South African parliament on that day were members of the National Party of South Africa, which had won control of that body in 1948 and imposed a policy of Apartheid that was intent on denying the black majority of that nation any role in its governance. Macmillan told them: “The winds of change are blowing through this continent, and whether we like it or not, the growth of national consciousness is a political fact. We must all accept it as a fact, and our national policies must take account of it.”

Macmillan went on to suggest that South Africa should begin the process of granting political rights to its African majority. The assembled parliamentarians listened in stony silence and South African Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd delivered an angry rebuttal to the speech.

But in 1994, after South Africa had its first election that blacks were allowed to participate in, it was said that if Macmillan’s advice had been heeded much turmoil and violence could have been avoided.

And the speech that was delivered earlier this month at the other end of the African continent in Cairo, Egypt, by President Barack Obama, also may be of historical importance.

Obama told the Muslim world that “I have known Islam on three continents before coming to the region where it was first revealed.” He also spoke of Islam’s contributions to Western civilization and referenced the Koran that Thomas Jefferson kept in his library. He told his listeners of the contributions made by Muslims in the United States to American society. That statement was greatly appreciated by the Oklahoma City area Muslim community, said Razi Hashmi of the Oklahoma Chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations.

Obama also reaffirmed America’s commitment to the creation of a Palestinian state, and also spoke about Israel’s right to exist in peace with its Arab neighbors. But the president criticized the Arab world for its overall poor performance in the fields of human rights, education and economic development. He also decried the support for extremism that is found in some Arab states. The president chose to end his oration with quotes from the Koran, the Talmud and the Bible, which served to emphasize the similarities among those three faiths.

Future historians may conclude that his doing so caused people of the Muslim, Jewish and Christian faiths in time to realize that what united them greatly exceeded the things that divided them.

WILLIAM F. O’BRIEN is an Oklahoma City attorney.

Interstellar News Service

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

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