US Muslims subject to racial profiling: Analyst

Press TV has interviewed Abdul Alim Musa, Imam of Masjid al-Islam in Washington, about civil rights groups criticizing a new FBI interactive website created to prevent violence in schools, saying it targets US Muslims under the pretext of preventing extremism.

Following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: What do you make of this video-game-like website? It is as many are putting it a classic case of Islamophobia, isn’t it?

Musa: What we have in America right now, we could just characterize it as a phobia of undesirables and we would take three basic classes of people. First of all, I just left California, some of the police departments, especially San Francisco, refused to turn over people who are arrested to ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency) - that is the immigration - because [there is] a specific profiling of Latinos in America by the police departments and by all the other agencies in America.

Then you understand Black Lives Matter. Now black people have always been profiled in America. Now at the top of that pyramid during this period we have this massive Islamophobia, so that means the Muslims are profiled. In fact I think I hold a record for being profiled in America because I have been denied flights to come back into America. I have never heard of an American with a legal passport, [who is in] Johannesburg doing programs, to be denied the right to come back to America. It took me two days in order to finally get on a flight back to America.

So we are profiled in all kinds of ways, not only at airports, in jobs, in driving. They call it driving while black. Now it is driving while Muslim because if you are driving, you are open to, let’s call it, being profiled by the police to be stopped. Now the danger of profiling is multifaceted but one of the main areas of danger is to come in contact with the authorities. If you notice Black Lives Matter just for a black person, used to be male but now you notice the young females…who have been hit in the head with baton by the police, so to come in contact with the authority nowadays places your life in danger.

Press TV: There are many who question how the government is supposed to protect its citizens from radicalization, from terrorism and from extremism as they have turned it?  

Musa: … Most of the threats inside of America come from conspiracies developed by the American government itself. In other words they justify, they create these environments of suspicion in order to justify the illegal activities with us.

In one of the so-called New York bombings, four people involved, the guy that arranged it had just got not a jail and he is a Pakistani brother never been to the Masjid, went to the Masjid, recruited the people in the Masjid and the Imam told him ‘we do not want you in this Masjid.’ The next thing we know these people taking a bomb to a synagogue and they do not even know what they are doing. Some of the people were so out of it that one of [them] being medicated and the judge asked him if he understood the proceedings and the person answered, ‘I think so.’

In other words the United States’ government does things, the 9/11, the infiltrating of Somalis and Africans and African-Americans, getting them to break the law and then that justifies their oppression of us.  So if we want them, the United States is not in any danger. The Muslims are some of the best citizens that they have in America. So they do not need any protection from us.

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