Easy targets: Muslims in US still hit by hate crimes

By Ahmad Naeem Khan

Lahore, Pakistan, Nov. 19— Last week’s assault on two Pakistan-born brothers in New York, in what community leaders call the worst instance of post-9/11 hate crime in the area, shows that attacks against Muslims in the US continue unabated, despite FBI claims to the contrary.

The two were waylaid by a group of American teenagers, shortly after the brothers stepped out of a mosque in Corona on Friday.

“They shouted ‘You are Taliban,’” says the older Javad, 17, who suffered a large bruise below his left eye, a bump on his head and a gash over one eye.

“They started pushing me and my brother around. They threw the first punch and I fought back. I think they really meant to pick a fight,” he says.

Still in a state of shock, Javad can’t figure out why it happened. “We’re taught to respect other religions and other types of people,” he says. “They should respect other faiths and different colors.”

His brother, Junaid, 16, also required treatment for minor injuries. They requested that their last name not be released, saying they feared reprisal.

But the feds don’t believe Muslims are being singled out for attacks. According to the FBI’s annual report released last week, the number of hate crimes in the US declined in 2002 after a sharp rise in violence against Muslims and Arabs after the 9/11 terror strikes.

The FBI’s report compiles data from more than 12,000 law enforcement agencies from across the US.

The report claims that incidents of anti-Muslim bias dropped 67.7 percent, from 481 to 155, the report claims, adding that overall the number of hate crimes declined from 9,730 in 2001 to 7,462 in 2002.

Those statistics are contested by Washington DC-based Islamic civil liberties group, Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in its 2002 report.

CAIR maintains it has registered a 15 percent increase in complaints of discrimination by Muslims in the US. The council received 602 complaints of discrimination during the year.

The report titled “The Status of Muslim Civil Rights in the United States” alleges that Muslims in schools, workplaces, public areas, airports, and in encounters with the courts, police and other government agencies were profiled and singled out for religious and ethnic identity.

“FBI agents and other local law enforcement authorities have sometimes responded to hearsay and conducted questionable raids and interrogations,” the CAIR report declares.

CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper asserts that his group receives many complaints that are not reported to the authorities. Many Muslims are vulnerable, especially those with visa issues, and choose not to talk to the authorities.

“Mistreatment at the hand of federal government personnel continues to be reported in substantial numbers,” adds Hooper.

Last month, a 24-year-old Pakistani died after he was brutally attacked by three youngsters in Orange, New Jersey.

Syed Asif Alam, the president of the Association of Pakistani Professionals, an active community organization, says the three attackers should be treated not as juvenile delinquents but as adults and charged with violent assault and attempted murder.

In a statement, he has urged the Pakistani community to address e-mails, fax messages and make phone calls to authorities in Orange.

Again in July, two Pakistanis, Hammad Afzal Chaudhry and Saeed Butt, were killed in Washington in what is being considered a hate-crime.

Gangsters shot dead Hammad and Saeed in Prince George County, Maryland. Both were studying information technology at Strayer University in Washington.

Hammad’s brother Jawad says his brother went to the US for higher studies and was not involved in any anti-social activity.

He says the Pakistani government should take serious note of the incident, demanding that the killers be handed over without delay.

The leader of the Pakistani party, Jamaat-e-Islami, Mian Maqsood says the Pakistani government should demand the immediate arrest of the killers who should be handed over to Pakistan.

He urges, “If America can demand criminals, why can’t Pakistan?”

Hate crimes are not confined to Pakistanis alone, as Muslims from other countries continue to face harassment and vandalism, besides damage to their places of worship in the US.

In March this year, a 37-year-old Afghan businessman was injured at his restaurant in Indianapolis, Indiana, when two men burst into the kitchen and tried to set him on fire.

On a complaint by the American Muslim Council (AMC), the FBI’s Indianapolis Division launched an investigation into the incident.

“In the backdrop of the war in Iraq and the images of burning structures, the news of a Muslim man allegedly being set on fire in an American town is not helpful,” says AMC chairman Yahya Mossa Basha.

Rights activist and lawyer Sohail Raza believes that the recent incidents of hate-motivated crimes were spurred by state policy, which singled out and demonized a certain group of people.

“This is plain and simple discrimination in action, which emboldens other sick and racist elements in society to target the same hapless people with impunity,” he argues.

He blames the Homeland Security Act — which is biased against Arabs and Muslims, viewing them as security risks, imprisoning them on mere suspicion and requiring them to register with the Justice Department — for the sharp increase in hate crimes.

Source: OneWorld.net

Activists plan dynamic response to RNC far in advance

By Mike Burke

New York, New York, Nov. 21-- “I see the power of this being grandmas from Harlem, Palestinian teens from East New York and kids from the South Bronx coming and being on the street and showing first and foremost Bush does not represent New York City. To have New York City come out and say this would be a huge and powerful thing.”

That’s how William Etundi describes his vision of what the streets of New York may look like in nine months when the GOP rolls into town for its for 2004 Republican National Convention, scheduled for August 30-Sept. 2. Etundi is one of many New Yorkers who have begun organizing a response to the convention which starts less than two weeks before the third anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

United For Peace and Justice, which organized the historic Feb. 15 anti-war protests, has already applied for a permit to hold a march and rally for up to 250,000 people on Sunday Aug. 29. How law enforcement officials will respond to protests remains unclear.

On July 8, Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge designated the convention to be a “national special security event.” This puts the Secret Service — not the NYPD — in full control of security near Madison Square Garden. “The Secret Service or the Bloomberg administration might seek to freeze streets or blocks or areas of the city and make it very difficult to protest,” said Bill Dobbs, spokesperson for United For Peace and Justice. “Already we are thinking how to plan ahead for all of that and one of the ways is to get that concern right out to the public and say: Beware because it is time to start asking questions about how police are going to handle protests next year.”

Other groups have set up two web sites to serve as the main clearinghouses for information on the convention: counterconvention.org and rncnotwelcome.org.

On the counter-convention site, over 60 groups have already signed on as organizing groups. And Etundi said organizers will make efforts to reach out to others in New York. “We really need to be engaged in the communities that are being affected,” Etundi said.

From Iraq to Madison Square Garden: The Republican National Convention has tapped Jim Wilkinson to serve as the director of communications for the convention, i.e. to serve as the party’s main spin doctor. During the invasion of Iraq, Wilkinson served as director of strategic communications for Gen. Tommy Franks and was credited with playing a crucial role in crafting much of the war coverage including the “rescue” of Jessica Lynch. [For a good read on Wilkinson check out Ben Smith’s recent article “Iraq Media Guy Rebuilds Qatar at the Garden” in the New York Observer.] Wilkinson, who once trained to be an undertaker, gained national attention in Florida where he worked for President Bush in the weeks following the contested 2000 election. When Republican protesters helped shut down a voter recount he told the Associated Press: “We find it interesting that when Jesse Jackson has thousands of protesters in the streets, it’s O.K., but when a small number of Republicans exercise their First Amendment rights, the Democrats don’t seem to like it. Since the Democrats have tried to reinvent election law, it’s not surprising they have tried to reinvent the First Amendment.”

But it appears the question may soon be: will Wilkinson and the GOP allow critics of President Bush to exercise their First Amendment rights on the streets of New York?

Source: The NYC Indypendent, a publication of the Independent Media Center, via Allied Press Syndicate (www.allied-press.org)

Mystery surrounds death of State Dept. official

By Wayne Madsen

Washington, DC, Nov. 20-- In a case eerily reminiscent of the death of British Ministry of Defense bio-weapons expert, Dr. David Kelly, an official of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research Near East and South Asian division (INR/NESA), John J. Kokal, 58, was found dead in the late afternoon of Nov. 7. Police indicated he may have jumped from the roof of the State Department. Kokal’s body was found at the bottom of a 20 foot window well, 8 floors below the roof of the State Department headquarters near the 23rd and D Street location. Kokal’s death was briefly mentioned in a FOX News website story on Nov. 8 but has been virtually overlooked by the major media.

Interestingly, the FOX report states that State Department officials confirmed Kokal’s death to The Washington Post yet the Post — according to an archive search — has published nothing at all about Kokal’s death.

Kokal’s INR bureau was at the forefront of confronting claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Washington police have not ruled out homicide as the cause of his death. Kokal was not wearing either a jacket or shoes when his body was found. He lived in Arlington, Virginia.

However, a colleague of Kokal’s told this writer that the Iraq analyst was despondent over “problems” with his security clearance. Kokal reportedly climbed out of a window and threw himself out in such a manner so that he would “land on his head.” At the time Kokal fell from either the roof or a window, his wife Pamela, a public affairs specialist in the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, was waiting for him in the parking garage. Mrs. Kokal had previously worked in Consular Affairs where she was involved in the stricter vetting of visa applicants from mainly Muslim countries after the Sept. 11 attacks.

State Department officials dispute official State Department communiqués that said Kokal was not an analyst at INR. People who know Kokal told the French publication Geopolitique that Kokal was involved in the analysis of intelligence about Iraq prior to and during the war against Saddam Hussein.

Another INR official, weapons expert Greg Thielmann, said he and INR were largely ignored by Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton and his deputy, David Wurmser, a pro-Likud neo-conservative who recently became Vice President Dick Cheney’s Middle East adviser. Kokal’s former boss, the recently retired chief of INR, Carl W. Ford, recently said that Bolton often exaggerated information to steer people in the wrong directions.

A former INR employee revealed that some one-third to one-half of INR officials are either former intelligence agents with the CIA or are detailed from the agency. He also revealed it would have been impossible for Kokal to have gained entry to the roof on his own. INR occupies both a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) on the sixth floor that has no windows and a structure on the roof that has neither windows nor access to the roof, according to the former official. The other windows at the State Department have been engineered to be shatter proof from terrorist bomb attacks and cannot be opened.

INR and other State Department officials report that a “chill” has set in at the State Department following Kokal’s defenestration. A number of employees are afraid to talk about the suspicious death. It also unusual that The Northern Virginia Journal, a local Arlington newspaper, has not published an obituary notice on Kokal.

Source: From The Wilderness

Landlord blacklist threatens tenants

By Steve Wishnia

New York, New York, Nov. 21— If you are a tenant and you have ever been to Housing Court, you may have a very hard time finding an apartment if you try to move. A growing number of landlords are using tenant-screening companies that offer detailed data on prospective renters far beyond routine credit checks.

One of the largest tenant-screening companies, First American Registry, based in Rockville, MD, says it issues 17,000 reports a day, which include “Tenant Account Records” from a “nationwide network of landlords and property managers” and numerical risk ratings based on a tenant’s credit and court records. It advertises “fast, accurate, and complete access to over 33 million landlord/tenant eviction court records covering over 80 percent of the US.”

If a tenant has been to Housing Court, that lowers his or her chances of getting an apartment “dramatically,” asserts one Manhattan real-estate agent, who estimates that about half the landlords he works with use the screeners. “If you were an owner, and somebody’s got a job and good credit, but it came up that they’ve been to court, would you rent to them?” he asks.

“If it’s nonpayment, obviously not. If it’s a holdover, that’s worse. If it’s an HP action, that’s even worse.” A “Housing Part Action” refers to when a tenant sues the landlord to force repairs.

“Right away, thousands of red flags go up,” adds another Manhattan real-estate agent, who says about 80 percent of her clients check for court history. “Unfortunately, it’s not always fair -- sometimes the tenant is right.”

“It’s happening everywhere,” says tenant lawyer James Fishman. “This is a really big problem.” With around 365,000 residential Housing Court cases filed each year“ about 90 percent nonpayment eviction attempts, the rest “holdover” lease-violation evictions and HP actions, a lot of tenants’ names are making the companies’ lists.

“The only time people realize this is when they try to look [for an apartment],”says Fishman.

He calls the practice “pernicious.” The records last for seven years, and are often not updated. Most landlord-tenant cases are dropped or settled, but he says the registries still list them as “case filed.”

Earlier this year, a broker told one of his clients not to bother trying to find an apartment, because her file showed three nonpayment cases from 1996. In another case, the executor of a tenant’s will got on the lists because he had been named as a defendant in a suit against the deceased man’s estate. Tenants named in owner-occupancy evictions also make the lists, as do tenants where the eviction attempt was pure harassment.

Government housing agencies often tell tenants that the best way to get repairs done is to go on a rent strike, but “that advice gets you blacklisted,” Fishman says. And if you file an action, “then you’re a real troublemaker.”

As the screening companies and databases are national, he adds, the blacklist can follow tenants if they move out of the city.

Fishman is planning a federal class-action suit against First American Registry, on the grounds that, by not properly updating their records beyond “case filed,” they’re violating Federal Credit Reporting Act requirements that credit reports have to be “complete and accurate. ”New York law classifies renting an apartment as a credit transaction, he explains.

According to records obtained by Fishman under a Freedom of Information Act request, the state makes about $1 million a year selling Housing Court records in electronic form to tenant-screening companies.

The use of court records to screen tenants may be somewhat less common in the outer boroughs than in Manhattan, but it still happens. “We don’t use that at all,” says an Astoria real-estate agent, but another Queens broker says, “We use them all the time. When you do a credit check, you automatically check landlord-tenant records to see if there are lack-of-payment issues.”

“Credit reports show if they’ve been to court or not,” says an agent in the Fort Greene-Clinton Hill area of Brooklyn. How it affects the landlord’s decision, she adds, “depends on what they went to court for.”

There is not much tenants can do about it, says Fishman. In one case where the landlord refused to renew the lease because the apartment wasn’t the renter’s primary residence, the tenant agreed to move out in exchange for the holdover eviction being filed against “John Doe,” keeping his name out of the court records.

Ultimately, Fishman believes that the lists would be fairer if they only recorded cases where an eviction was actually ordered. But “once landlords have done a three-day notice, there’s no way to stop the proceedings,” he says. “I have not heard a story where the tenant with the report got the apartment.”

Source: The NYC Indypendent, a publication of the Independent Media Center, via Allied Press Syndicate (www.allied-press.org)