
“This individual came to the attention of the FBI because of things he said and things he did. That’s appropriate. What should not be cause for alarm is somebody’s status as a member of a particular religious faith or how devout they may happen to be,” Congressman Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) said in an interview this week with Tamron Hall on MSNBC.
Ellison was speaking about the recent arrest of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the sole surviving Boston bombing suspect who is being held in police custody and charged with crimes that could carry the death penalty if he is convicted. Ellison, one of only two Muslims elected to the U.S. Congress, has tried to stave off the onslaught of accusations against Muslims living in the U.S., pitting himself against other elected officials calling for broad FBI surveillance of Muslim communities.
“Ninety-nine percent of the Muslims are outstanding Americans,” said Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) on “Fox News Sunday.” “The fact is, that’s where the threat is coming from. When the FBI was after the Westies, they went to the Irish community. When they were after the mafia, they went to the Italian community. If you know a certain threat is coming from a certain community, that’s where you have to look.”
The FBI and U.S. police departments began broad surveillance of mosques and Muslim communities in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, a method some believe has unfairly targeted a group of people for their religious affiliation and physical appearance.
“All Americans should be concerned,” said New York City Democratic Councilmember Daniel Dromm after the release of “Mapping Muslims,” a report issued by the Muslim American Civil Liberties Coalition, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund and the Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility (CLEAR) project last month. “The policing that’s going on now encourages mistrust or distrust within the Muslim community. It is not good policing.”
These rights groups claim that the NYPD has targeted Muslim communities around the city. The report alleges that since 2001, the NYPD “has mapped, monitored and analyzed American Muslim daily life throughout New York City, and even its surrounding states.”
In the present case, some elected officials are calling for similar surveillance techniques for Muslim communities in the wake of the bombings and shootings that killed four and injured 170.
Ellison has led the pushback in Congress against expanding surveillance based upon religion or physical appearance, saying, “In all these cases, where you see acts of radicalized individuals using violence, they may have a religious affiliation, but oftentimes, when they give reasons for why they did what they did, it is politics.” He added, “The FBI did not go after all Italians or all Irish people. No one ever said let’s surveil a whole ethnic community. They went after people who were criminals and who were exhibiting criminal behavior … To say that because of the Westies that every Irish person was under suspect; Everyone in America knows that is ridiculous. But still, [King] wants to cast a wide net with regard to Muslims.”
Innocent bystanders were erroneously identified as suspects in the aftermath of the Boston bombings because of their physical appearance and countries of origin. One student from Saudi Arabia who survived the bombing had his apartment searched by police, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies while still recovering from shrapnel wounds in the hospital.
Mohammed Hassan Bada, his roommate, was questioned for five hours. The FBI and police department later cleared the man of any wrongdoing after it was determined that he had no connection to the bombing.
“I was five hours with the police,” said Mohammed Hassan Bada, 20, of Saudi Arabia. “I was scared.”