20 March 2011 By
Juan Cole A San Diego Muslim
woman wearing a headscarf who was removed from a
Southwest Airlines plane at Lindbergh Field on Sunday
has received several apologies from the airline and a
voucher good for a free flight "as a gesture of
goodwill". But the woman, Irum
Abbasi, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations,
an advocacy and civil rights group which has taken up
her cause, said at a Wednesday morning news conference
at Lindbergh Field that this event is a sign of a
anti-Muslim sentiment spreading through the country. A Pakistan native and
U.S. citizen, Abbasi was removed from a flight to San
Jose on Sunday after an attendant thought she heard
her say "It's a go" on her cell phone. Abbasi said she
actually said "I've got to go" because the flight was
ready to depart. "I was in tears," said
Abbasi. "I have lived in the United States 10 years. I
am a U.S. citizen." While she was quickly cleared,
Abbasi said she was told she could not re-board the
flight because the crew was uncomfortable with her
presence. Abbasi and CAIR both
link her ejection to last week's controversial
congressional hearing on "The Extent of Radicalization
in the American Muslim Community" by Rep. Peter King,
R-New York. "Apart from the
negative image it portrayed of the Muslim community in
front of all the people at the airport, I strongly
believe that this was a direct result of the hearings
held by Peter King," said Abbasi, a graduate student
in experimental psychology at San Jose State who was
returning there for a research project. Melvin
Bledsoe: King Witness' Story Undermined By Reality
By Juan Cole The Tennessean's
Bob Smietana has another blockbuster story, this time
questioning the premise of one of
Peter King's star witnesses, Melvin Bledsoe. Bledsoe testified
yesterday that his "happy-go-lucky" son Carlos became
a different person after converting to Islam. He
claimed Carlos, who changed his name to
Abdul Hakim Muhammad, was "brainwashed" by his
conversion. Muhammad has admitted to attempting to
burn a
Nashville rabbi's home and shooting an Army
private at a recruiting station in Arkansas in 2009. Bledsoe was just one
one of just
two
witnesses called by King in his attempt to
prove that young men are susceptible to recruitment,
radicalization, and violence in their local Muslim
communities. As was evident yesterday at the hearing,
these individual stories were inadequate to prove any
sort of broader phenomenon. But now Smietana's piece
demolishes King's argument. Muhammad, it turns out,
had quite a bit of trouble even before his conversion,
and was not "radicalized" in mosques. While the elder
Bledsoe claimed his son was radicalized and made
violent in mosques, local Muslim leaders in
Tennessee don't remember the young man. From
Smietana's piece: "Something is wrong
with the Muslim leadership in Nashville," Melvin
Bledsoe said, testifying in Washington. "What
happened to Carlos at those Nashville mosques isn't
normal." But local Muslim
leaders say they don't tolerate any violent behavior
or rhetoric in their communities. They say Muhammad
attended prayers at two Nashville mosques — the Al-Farooq
Islamic Center and the Islamic Center of Nashville —
for a short period of time. Then he disappeared. What's more, although
Bledsoe blamed his son's conversion to Islam for his
mental health problems, records show those issues
pre-dated his conversion: On Feb. 24, 2004,
according to police reports, Muhammad was arrested
in Knoxville after police found a shotgun and a
loaded assault rifle in his car. During a mental
health evaluation to see if he was fit to stand
trial for the
Little Rock shooting, Muhammad said that he
had been a gang member and had used alcohol heavily
and marijuana regularly before converting to Islam
in late 2004. This is what King said
yesterday, of Bledsoe and another witness who said his
nephew was radicalized: Their courage and
spirit will put a human face on the horror which
Islamist radicalization has inflicted and will
continue to inflict on good families, especially
those in the Muslim community, unless we put aside
political correctness and define who our enemy truly
is. I'm not holding my
breath on a correction from him. UPDATE:
My coverage of the hearing is over at the Nation,
in which I report on how the proceedings were an
effort to portray American Muslims as clueless and
"not intellectually equipped." Comments 💬 التعليقات |