Muslim groups’ message inconsistent with actions
By Daily Bruin Staff
Jan. 22, 2007 9:00 p.m.
This week, the Muslim Student Association is putting on its annual Islam Awareness week.
According to Suwila Habib, vice president of MSA-UCLA, the purpose of this event is to educate the campus about the true nature of Islam.
“The aim is to create awareness about Islam on campus, to help dispel many of the misconceptions many Americans have about Muslims. After 9/11, many Americans … hear from the media many things about Muslims,” Habib said.
She said that the main misconception about Islam is its reputation as a violent religion: “Obviously a lot of people, when they hear of Islam, they think about Muslims as terrorists.”
But ““ like some national Muslim groups ““ MSA’s attempts to spread a view of Muslims as being peaceful is negated by the group’s alarming record of support for terrorism and violence.
Last year, MSA brought a Muslim speaker named Amir Abdel Malik to speak out against Israel at Meyerhoff Park on campus during the “Obstacles to Peace Week” they co-sponsored with other groups.
After the event, I asked the speaker ““ based on his past statements that gays “need to be rehabilitated” ““ if he supported the execution of gays in the U.S. under Shariah (Islamic law). Malik said that he would support such a policy.
I posed the same question to the crowd, which appeared to be composed mainly of members of the Muslim Student Association, as most were wearing the group’s T-shirt. The crowd replied resoundingly, confirming that they agreed with this stance.
Yet, when I called a Daily Bruin reporter to the scene, members of the crowd denied the statements they had unabashedly made just moments earlier.
In response, Sabiha Ameen, president of MSA, said that while she was not involved in planning events last year, she would not rule out bringing the speaker again in the future.
“We might bring him this year, if we need him for something,” Ameen said.
One would think that MSA would do everything in its power to drown out the voices of those who support terrorism in the name of Islam.
But MSA’s actions often seem to contradict its goals. For example, they chose Malik to speak on campus, though he is a public supporter of Hamas.
Hamas is classified as a terrorist organization by the U.S. and the European Union, and its charter calls for the destruction of the state of Israel.
When I asked Ameen to explain this ostensible paradox, she told me, much to my surprise, that she and her group support Hamas.
“I believe there’s a perception of people that it’s a terrorist organization, but (from) the facts that I know, it is a legitimate government,” she said.
That MSA would attempt to hold this position while simultaneously seeking to overturn misconceptions of a violent Islam is an insult to the intelligence of the campus community.
According to Nonie Darwish, author of the book “Now They Call Me Infidel,” which details the decades she spent living in the Muslim world, this inconsistency is not unusual.
“They claim they’re moderate and that they’re against terrorism, and that Islam is a religion of peace, and that we should not associate Islam with any kind of terrorism. But the same people ““ and it’s amazing how many of them there are ““ who are defending that stance very strongly are contradicting themselves,” Darwish says in her book.
Darwish will be speaking on campus Wednesday following a screening of the film “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West,” an event co-sponsored by the Bruin Republicans and Bruin Democrats.
The deceptions and shocking inconsistencies Darwish described can be seen among national Islamic organizations. Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., recently retracted an award given to a leader of the Sacramento chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations over concern about the organization’s connections to terrorist groups.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, according to its Web site, is the largest Islamic civil rights organization, whose goal is to “promote a positive image of Islam and Muslims in America.”
But CAIR, like MSA, has reinforced a more negative conception of Muslims through its statements and actions.
The founder of the Texas chapter of CAIR was convicted of financing the terrorist group Hamas by means of an Islamic charity, the Holy Land Foundation, that was also a main source of donations for CAIR.
Similarly, Randall Royer, national civil rights coordinator and communications specialist for CAIR, was convicted for conspiring to support terror overseas and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Royer committed these crimes while still a prominent national leader of CAIR.
Mainstream groups need to cut ties with groups or speakers that spread radical Islam, or else efforts to fight the notion of Islam as an inherently violent religion ““ such as this week’s Islam Awareness Week ““ will be in vain.
E-mail Lazar at [email protected]. Send general comments to [email protected].
