In Raleigh, Muslims view FBI with fear, mistrust
Muslim men had been arrested, charged with a terrorist plot to commit murder in foreign countries. An eighth suspect was being sought abroad. "It was like a bomb went off," said Jihad Shawwa, a member of the mosque and an officer of the Muslim American Public Affairs Council (MAPAC) in North Carolina.
He wasn't the only one who was rattled.
Officially, the Muslim community reacted cautiously to the arrests, professing their trust in the federal justice system while also warning, in the words of Khalilah Sabra, executive director of the Triangle chapter of the Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation (MAS-Freedom), against "a rush to judgment" by the press and public.
But within the community, many received the news with mistrust or fear. To one another, they questioned why the FBI pounced so soon after the open house, asking if the arrests weren't a deliberate effort to ruin the goodwill the event created. Some who read the 14-page indictment called it flimsy, full of vague accusations that the defendants were plotting "violent jihad" and their own suicides, but with no details about where or against whom they planned to strike.
Was the indictment backed up by evidence of crimes, they wondered, or merely the result of loose talk by the suspects combined with the authorities' ethnic stereotyping? And if the latter, would it serve to alienate newly arrived Muslims, many of them refugees, as they try to adapt to a new and foreign culture in America?
Comments