The Chickens Come Home to Roost - Losing our Civil Rights

by Sheila Musaji

When a 2004 Cornell University poll showed that nearly half of Americans thought it was reasonable to restrict the civil rights of American Muslims, the general population wasn’t particularly concerned.  After 9/11 people somehow thought it made sense to give up some freedom in the interest of safety.

As Americans (hyphenated in some way for everyone except the Native Americans) we all need to be concerned about everyone’s civil rights.  We need to heed the words of Benjamin Franklin:  Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

We need to heed these words because whenever we overlook injustice towards one group of people and allow ourselves to make excuses for that injustice, it is only a matter of time until the injustice will also affect us.

A recent article Airport tells faithful to take off turbans, veils notes that after an incident at Brisbane Airport, a “federal investigation has been launched into an edict by the company in charge of the airport’s security to demand passengers remove for security checks religious headwear, including turbans, veils and Jewish skull caps.  At least one international flight was delayed at the weekend when staff from the company, ISS Security, demanded 13 people of the Sikh religion remove their turbans and a Muslim woman to take off her face veil.” ...  It is standard airport practice around the world that religious headwear is only removed after conventional screening methods raise an alarm.  But ISS employees yesterday said a directive was issued on Saturday demanding all passengers remove their religious headwear for security checks, regardless of whether there was any cause for suspicion.

This incident happened in Great Britain, not the U.S. but that gives little comfort as in this globalized world we live in the general prevalent attitudes of the populations of most Western countries can be gauged by such incidents.

Sikhs have had such experiences at American airports.  A Jewish Police Detective was prohibited from wearing head covering, and beard on the job in Nevada.  In New Jersey there is a constitutional discussion over whether or not Newark can dismiss two police officers who wear beards because of their Sunni Muslim beliefs.  A Muslim child has been asked to remove her hijab in an Oklahoma public school.  A civil rights lawsuit has been filed in New Jersey against an ordinance passed to restrict use of a Rabbi’s home for prayer services.  The Pentagon has sought citizens’ bank records without court orders. 

The first amendment protects our right to wear religiously mandated clothing and that should be the end of the discussion.  Limiting this right is only one small piece of a much larger trend towards limiting and even taking away the civil rights of all Americans.  It is just one step in dismantling the Constitution.

All of the examples I have just given affect only minority groups in the U.S. so the majority haven’t been too concerned.  However, the reality is that they affect us all.  Senators Specter and Leahy are attempting to get people’s attention and have introduced a bill to restore our right of Habeas Corpus.  This wouldn’t be necessary if we hadn’t already lost this right.  We now have warrantless domestic surveillance, the FBI’s ”Library Awareness Program”, secret evidence, and ethnic profiling, and there have been serious discussions about a national ID Card. 

Nowadays, states are usurping responsibilities that are rightfully those of their citizens. Western so-called democracies, in particular, are supposed to have governments that are servants of the people, whereas, in fact, the opposite is true. Under the guise of doing what’s best for us or ensuring our security, governments are exercising more and more control over our lives. And, tragically, we are facilitating this erosion of our own freedoms, mostly because we’re not even aware it’s happening. Linda Heard

The Military Commissions Act of 2006 although supposedly aimed at “enemy combattants” has much wider implications as even Garrison Keillor has pointed out, and may also affect American citizens.

Also in 2006 it was announced that a subsidiary of Halliburton KBR was awarded a $385 million contract by the Department of Homeland Security to build detention centers in the U.S.  These centers might be used for immigration, or for disaster relief, or vaguely “… to support the rapid development of new programs.” A good question might be WHY?

The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act - H.R. 1955 was passed by a landslide vote (a bipartisan vote of 404-6) in the House of Representatives in October of 2007.  How many Americans are aware of this act or its provisions, or how it undermines their personal freedom, and even whether or not it along with other provisions might allow the imposition of martial law in the U.S.?

Why are all of these things being put in place, and why is the American public not up in arms?  As I said in a previous article on this act:

Most of these limitations on our freedoms as Americans including the loss of habeas corpus have come about as a result of the fear arising after 9/11.  ... If the neo-con pundits are to be believed, Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda attacked us on 9/11 because “they hate us for our freedom”, (rather than because of our Foreign Policy as OBL himself says).  If that were really the case, we would have nothing more to worry about because we have given up most of our freedoms without a fight.  We have allowed them to be taken away from us by political forces within our own country.  Because we have allowed ourselves to generalize from a real (and beatable enemy) al Qaeda to a generalized “enemy” (all Muslims - also known as Islamophobia) we have allowed for exceptions to our civil rights that will in the end take away the very freedoms that made this country great.  As an American Muslim who loves both Islam and the United States, I find this particularly tragic.

Americans need to get out their copies of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and study them.  It might also help to understand the direction we are going to read Rep. John Conyers’ (D-MI) report ”The Constitution in Crisis” which details the civil rights and constitutional crisis that we are facing.  It might also help to read some of the articles in our article collection on Civil Rights and the Patriot Act. 

Do this, and I believe you will agree with David Michael Green that “if you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention”.  And, I believe that we all have to take responsibility for what is happening, because it could not happen without our participation, even if that participation is “only” a matter not being informed or getting involved to defend the Constitution.