NEW YORK, June 1: Frustrated and angry at being constantly profiled, Muslim advocacy groups have called upon the United States to come up with a better screening system at airports and other ports of entry in the country.
The American Muslims say they are having a harder time than most other ethnic or religious groups, sometimes facing an intimidating maze of barriers if not outright discrimination when being processed to travel at various ports of entries.
In a report on Thursday, the New York Times said advocacy groups had taken to labelling their predicament “travelling while Muslim” and accused the government of ignoring a serious erosion of civil rights.
Next month, the American Civil Liberties Union would go back to court to broaden a suit on behalf of Muslims and Arab-Americans who were demanding the United States government come up with a better system for screening travellers, the newspaper said.
However, the newspaper said profiling of Muslims who travelled within the United States was not abating any time soon as the US Department of Homeland Security had not been able to develop a system wherein persons on the watch list were not confused with innocent travellers.
The delays, humiliation and periodic roughing up have prompted some American Muslims to avoid travelling as much as possible. Some even skip meeting anyone at the airport for fear of a nasty encounter with a law-enforcement officer.
“I find myself enunciating English like never before, totally over-enunciating just because I want the guy to know that I am an American,” Maz Jobrani, an Iranian-born, Berkeley-educated actor told the Times. “Middle Easterners are just as scared of Al Qaeda as everybody else, but we also have to be worried about being profiled as Al Qaeda. It’s a double whammy.”
Many Muslim Americans fault the Department of Homeland Security and its various agencies, chiefly the Transportation Security Administration, as failing to develop an efficient system to screen travellers. In particular, they deplore the lack of a workable means for those on the federal watch list by mistake to get themselves off, the newspaper said.
In an interview with the newspaper, Azhar Usman, a burly American-born Muslim with a heavy black beard, said he elicited an almost universal reaction when he boarded an airplane at any US airport; conversations stop in mid-sentence and the look in the eyes of his fellow passengers says, “We’re all going to die!”
