The day after 9/11, Texas police arrested two Indian Muslim men riding a train and carrying about $5,000 in cash, black hair dye, and box cutters like those used to hijack four planes just one day earlier. The police held the pair initially on immigration charges (their U.S. visas had expired).
(Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and the author of several books, most recently Militant Islam Reaches America. You may visit his website by clicking here and purchase his books by clicking here.)
When further inquiry turned up credit card fraud, that kept them longer in detention. But law enforcement’s real interest, of course, had to do with their possible connections to Al-Qaeda.
To investigate this matter — and here our information comes from one of those two Indian Muslims, Ayub Ali Khan, after he was released — the authorities put them through some pretty rough treatment.
Khan says the interrogation “terrorized” him. He recounts how “Five to six men would pull me in different directions very roughly as they asked rapid-fire questions…. Then suddenly they would brutally throw me against the wall.” They also asked him political questions: Had he, for example, “ever discussed the situation in Palestine with friends?”
Eventually exonerated of connections to terrorism and freed from jail, Khan is not surprisingly bitter about his experience, saying that he and his traveling partner were singled out on the basis of profiling: “I was caught because I was a Muslim.” This is self-evidently correct; had Khan not been a Muslim, the police would have had little interest in him and his box cutters.
Khan’s tribulation brings to attention the single most delicate and agonizing issue in prosecuting the war on terror. Does singling out Muslims for additional scrutiny serve a purpose? And if so, is it legally and morally acceptable?
In reply to the first question — yes, enhanced scrutiny of Muslims makes good sense, for several reasons:
• In the course of their assaults on Americans, Islamists — the supporters of militant Islam — have killed close to four thousand persons since 1979 and they are plotting to kill many more. No other group has remotely the same past record or future intentions.
• While most Muslims are not Islamists and most Islamists are not terrorists, all Islamist terrorists are Muslims. (In rare circumstances, non-Muslims provide help; thus the New York lawyer Lynne Stewart is charged with helping Omar Abdel Rahman, an imprisoned terrorist leader.)
• Islamist terrorists do not appear spontaneously but emerge from a milieu of religious sanction, intellectual justification, financial support, and organizational planning.
These circumstances — and this is the unpleasant part — point to the imperative of focusing on Muslims. There is no escaping the unfortunate fact that Muslim government employees in law enforcement, the military, and the diplomatic corps need to be watched for connections to terrorism, as do Muslim chaplains in prisons and the armed forces. Muslim visitors and immigrants must undergo additional background checks. Mosques require a scrutiny beyond that applied to churches, synagogues, and temples. Muslim schools require increased oversight to ascertain what is being taught to children.
Singling out a class of persons by their religion feels wrong, if not downright un-American, prompting the question: even if useful, should such scrutiny be permitted?
To ask this question is to answer it. If Americans want to protect themselves from Islamist terrorism, they must temporarily give higher priority to security concerns than to civil libertarian sensitivities. Preventing Islamists from wreaking further damage implies the regrettable step of focusing on Muslims. Not to do so is an invitation to further terrorism.
This solemn reality suggests four thoughts: First, as Khan’s experience shows, Muslims are already subjected to added scrutiny; the time has come for politicians to catch up to reality and formally acknowledge what are now quasi-clandestine practices. Doing so places these in the public arena where, to the benefit of all, they can openly be debated.
Second, because having to focus heightened attention on Muslims is inherently so unpleasant, it needs to be conducted with utmost care and tact, remembering above all that seven out of eight Muslims are not Islamists and fewer still are connected to terrorism.
Third, this is an emergency measure that should end with the war on terror’s conclusion.
Finally, innocent Muslims who must endure added surveillance can console themselves with the knowledge that their security too is enhanced by these steps.
