NEW YORK: Nov 1: Many Muslim Americans have become reluctant to donate to Islamic causes, including charities, according to a report in the New York Times. The Muslims are fearful that donations to an Islamic charity could bring unwanted attention from US law-enforcement agencies looking into potential ties to terrorism.
Since the 9/11 attacks the US Federal agencies, prodded by the Israeli government, have raided scores of Muslim charitable organisations charging them with funding terror organisations in Middle East.
Contributions across the board to the Muslim charities have been drastically reduced because of the fear; people associate contributions with risk and they don’t want that, a Muslim leader in Dearborn Michigan told the Times. “There’s a lack of trust in the US judicial system, with just an accusation you could end up in jail with secret evidence used as a means of prosecution.”
The Times noted that the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence at the Treasury Department has shuttered five major Muslim charities in the United States since 2001, seizing millions of dollars in assets, yet not a single officer or organisation has been convicted of anything connected to terrorism.
As an example of the fear afflicting the Muslim community in Dearborn, (Michigan) a largest concentration of Muslim-American, the newspaper interviewed Mrs Najah Bazzy who runs a Muslim charity, as saying that there has been significant drop in donations around holy month of Ramazan, which used to be the best time of the year for charitable donations.
Mrs Bazzy formalised the good works she had been doing for a decade among the tens of thousands of Muslims who live in the Dearborn area by establishing a charity, Zaman International.
But by the end of the holiday, charitable contributions were meagre. She said cash donations amounted to less than $4,000, and for the first time since she began her charity work she bought food to feed about 85 needy families instead of counting on gifts. Arab-Americans make up more than a third of Dearborn’s population of 100,000, and
Michigan has one of the country’s largest concentrations of Muslim Americans.
The sentiments expressed here are echoed in Muslim communities across the United States.
In yet another more vivid example of state of fear in the Muslim communities, the newspaper relates the story of the imam at the Islamic Center of America, Sayyid Hassan Qazwini, who is a favourite of the American government for publicly standing behind President Bush, both literally and figuratively, over the invasion of Iraq.
Imam Qazwini, by his own account, has been invited to the White House four or five times, with the president even photographed kissing the turbaned cleric on the cheek. Imam Qazwini delivered the opening benediction in Congress on Oct 1, 2003, the first Muslim religious figure accorded that honour after Sept 11.
Yet, his gleaming new $15 million mosque here, a handsome white structure with a gold dome and soaring twin minarets that is billed as the largest in America, remains $6 million in debt. Contributions dropped sharply this summer after the war in Lebanon, the imam said, when the Bush administration expressed its unreserved support for Israel. Other mosques report similar difficulties. The general sentiment is that the American government’s tilt toward Israel extends to hounding anyone supporting Arab causes, the Times pointed out.
Much of the fear comes from federal actions that many Muslim Americans view as unnecessarily invasive, the report said.
Imam Qazwini, the newspaper says, is the descendant of a long line of prominent Iraqi Shia Muslim clerics, points out that many Muslim Americans, particularly those from the Arab world, fled the region to escape repressive regimes, expecting the United States to provide both freedom and opportunity. Instead they find themselves facing similar problems.
