Gray Lady Down (18 page)

Stories involving Muslim disloyalty in the armed forces are another
Times
taboo. In early 2003, just before the invasion of Iraq, Sergeant Hasan Akbar of the 101st Airborne Division “fragged” members of his unit, killing two officers and injuring fourteen noncoms. Other news organizations such as Reuters and NBC News reported that Akbar objected to the war on religious grounds, saying that the Army was going to kill “my people.” But the
Times
didn’t mention this until months later, after it had done
many stories. One front-page story casually referred to Akbar as a “Muslim convert.” The only link I could find in the
Times
to the religious motivation for Akbar’s crime was in a story of late June 2003, which described an Army major testifying by video hookup that “They asked why he had done it and Akbar said he had deliberately targeted the leadership of the brigade because they were going after Muslims.”

In 2009 and 2010 there were news pegs galore to justify examining the issue of dual loyalty on the part of Muslim immigrants and even the native-born. One was the September 2009 attempt by Najibullah Zazi, a naturalized Afghani immigrant, to blow up the New York subway system. In 2010, a New Jersey man named Sharif Mobley was arrested among jihadists in Yemen, joining a long list of Americans, many of them ex-convicts, who have traveled there to fight. Shortly before this, an American convert from the Philadelphia suburbs, Colleen LaRose, who called herself “Jihad Jane,” was arrested for plotting to kill the Swedish cartoonist who had parodied the Prophet Muhammad. There was the Fort Hood attacker, Major Nidal Hasan, who openly proclaimed that his loyalties lay with the Koran over the U.S. Constitution. Hasan had been inspired by the charismatic Internet preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born cleric of Yemeni descent who was put on a government hit list in 2010, and who asserts that “jihad is becoming as American as apple pie.” In May 2010, Faisal Shahzad, a naturalized Pakistani immigrant who was married to a U.S. citizen, tried unsuccessfully to set off a car bomb in Times Square, and was apprehended while trying to board a plane at JFK International Airport two days later. At a court hearing where he pleaded guilty, Shahzad called himself a “Muslim soldier” and said, “I don’t care for the laws of the United States.” He declared that he would plead guilty “100 times over” until the United States stopped killing Muslims abroad and reporting Muslims here to the government.

It’s not that the
Times
has avoided the issue of radicalization, but in some cases it has tended to give jihadists the benefit of the doubt. In the case of the five American citizens of Pakistani descent who were captured in Pakistan trying to volunteer
for jihad, the
Times
downplayed the “farewell video” that one of them made, and did not carry the statements quoted by the Press Trust of India that they were intent on killing “American imperialists” and wanted to be hanged as martyrs. What is almost never brought out in the discussion of radicalization is the elephant in the living room: the failure of the assimilative process and the lack of loyalty to America. It’s as if the idea were so archaic that people might not understand it, or might think it chauvinistic. What’s usually cited instead is the putative discrimination against Muslims in America, the length of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the view among many American Muslims that the U.S. government is waging a “war against Islam.”

Right after the 9/11 attacks, some news organizations went into Islamic schools and found disturbing evidence of a separatist mentality, with virtually no emotional connections to the American commonweal. The
Washington Post’
s Marc Fisher, for example, visited an Islamic school just outside the District of Columbia and reported that one South Asian eighth grader said, “Being an American means nothing to me. I’m not even proud of telling my cousins in Pakistan that I’m American.”

The
New York Times,
however, treads carefully on the subject of Islamic education, avoiding the issue of divided loyalties. When Susan Sachs did a piece on attitudes of Muslim teenagers in a private Islamic academy in Brooklyn, some of the Pakistani, Egyptian, Yemeni and Palestinian immigrants she interviewed exhibited the same ill will toward their new nation. They made no separation between religion and state, and thought the ideal society would follow Islamic law. One 17-year-old boy said he would support any observant Muslim leader who is fighting for an Islamic cause, even if that meant abandoning the United States or going to jail to avoid U.S. military service. Other students expressed “empathy for the young Muslims around the world who profess hatred for America and Americans.” Instead of seeing such sentiments as worrying examples of dual (or no) loyalty, Sachs tepidly described
them as a sign of “the strain” that immigrants can feel “between their adopted and native culture.”

In a similar vein, Michael Luo wrote in August 2006 about a madrassa-like school in Queens where students, all boys, spend their entire educational day memorizing the Koran. “The carpeted room is full of children in skullcaps crouched on prayer mats, reciting verses from a holy text. Some mumble the words under their breath; others sing them out. They rock back and forth as they chant, their disparate voices blending into an ethereal melody,” Luo wrote, obviously transported. “But they are not studying math, science or English. Instead, they are memorizing all 6,200 verses in the Koran, a task that usually takes two to three years.”

Luo did acknowledge that “By not offering instruction in other subjects, the school may be inadvertently running afoul of state law, according to city and state education officials.” Private religious schools are required to provide instruction “substantially equivalent” to what is offered in public schools. “But tracking every school-age child who leaves the public school system can be difficult,” Luo pointed out. Nevertheless, the parents he talked to felt confident that their boys were “smart enough to make up the academic work” like math and science so they could become lawyers, doctors and other kinds of professionals. The parents liked the school because their children were “free to have it both ways,” to be Islamic and American. Luo never explained how memorizing the Koran would serve that end.

A TimesWatch editor asked dubiously whether Christian homeschoolers who taught the Bible and nothing else would be allowed to make the thin excuse that their kids (all boys, no girls) are “smart enough to make up the academic work”? In such a case, the
Times
would probably have called for an investigation, amid lamentations about violations of church-state separation.

The
Times’
worst reporting on Islamic education involved the establishment of the Khalil Gibran International Academy in 2007 and 2008. The academy was to be a public charter school built around the theme of Arabic language and culture, using a “full immersion” method of teaching. Its students would become
“ambassadors of peace,” according to the proposed principal, Debbie Almontaser. The announcement of the school, however, set off a huge culture battle.

Having immigrated from Yemen at the age of three, Almontaser was depicted as a moderate Muslim by the
Times
reporters Andrea Elliott and Dan Wakin. In fact, she was a radical activist whose record of anti-American remarks was widely distributed by a coalition of New Yorkers that formed to protest the school. In one interview she said, “I have realized that our foreign policy is racist; in the ‘war against terror’ people of color are the target.... [T]he terrorist attacks have been triggered by the way the USA breaks its promises with countries across the world, especially in the Middle East.” Almontaser also refused to reply when asked whether she considered Hamas and Hezbollah to be terrorist organizations and who she thought was behind the 9/11 attacks.

The campaign for Almontaser’s principalship was not helped by the fact that all the members of her board were clerics, three of them radical Islamists. Also working against Almontaser were her unwillingness to indicate what books would be used in the curriculum, and her links to the often-militant Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which had given her an award. What finally did her in, though, was her seeming support for an organization for young women in the arts and media who had printed up T-shirts with the words “Intifada NY.” Almontaser tried to shrug the matter off by saying that it merely meant “throwing off oppression” and had nothing to do with support for terrorism. In short order she was forced to resign, as announced by Mayor Michael Bloomberg on his radio show.

Through all this, the
Times
defended Almontaser. It ignored her anti-American statements, made the opposition to her candidacy seem like an exercise in McCarthyism, and implied that Islamophobia was at the root of her travail. In his education column, Sam Freedman angrily accused Almontaser’s critics of having run a “smear campaign” and asserted that her resignation represented “the triumph of a concerted exercise in character assassination.”

In reporting the story, the
Times
did not touch on the question of whether separatist schools like the Khalil Gibran Academy should exist at all. On the contrary, six months after Almontaser’s resignation, Andrea Elliott wrote about the “Dream School” brought down by “the work of a growing and organized movement to stop Muslim citizens who are seeking an expanded role in American public life.... As the authorities have stepped up the war on terror, those critics have shifted their gaze to a new frontier, what they describe as law-abiding Muslim-Americans who are imposing their religious values in the public domain.”

The double standard that the
Times
displays on Islamic education is echoed in its deferential attitude toward Muslim sexual apartheid and the oppression of women. Consider Neil MacFarquhar’s ode to arranged marriage, American style, facilitated by Muslim-only “speed dating” with parents in attendance to arrange meetings. Many participants at these events prefer “not to be assimilated,” MacFarquhar reported, adding that parents still equate “anything related to dating with hellfire” and many don’t even let their kids meet in public at all. Buying into the premise, MacFarquhar noted that one imam says having families involved in picking mates reduces the divorce rate. (The fact that Muslim culture stigmatizes divorce to such an extent that it can lead to ostracism and even “honor killing” goes unmentioned.)

MacFarquhar and others at the
Times
have expressed enthusiasm for another manifestation of gender apartheid: the practice of veiling. In September 2006, MacFarquhar wrote a profile of Dena al-Atassi, a 21-year-old Syrian American girl, for “Echoes of 9-11 Define Life Five Years Later,” an anniversary collection of reported reflections on the terrorist attack. Al-Atassi claimed to have lost a job opportunity at the Jenny Craig weight loss chain because she chose to wear a Muslim head scarf, or hijab. She had begun wearing it, along with a floor-length trench coat, during a three-year stay in Syria as a teenager, MacFarquhar reported.

About a year later, in July 2002, al-Atassi was passing through the airport in Amsterdam on her first trip outside the Arab world after the September 11 attack, she said, when the security screeners singled her out, questioned her and made her remove her coat. Feeling violated, she went into a bathroom, where she tore off her scarf and wept. “I had gained such a strong relationship with God that I didn’t want to do anything to distance myself from him, and I felt like I was doing just that,” she told MacFarquhar, who closed the piece with his subject heroically declaring: “I made the decision when I put it back on that I will never take it off again.”

The Style section weighed in on the subject of veiling in June 2010 with “Behind the Veil,” by Lorraine Ali. It featured two Muslim sisters in Albuquerque who since 2001 had worn Islamic attire that entirely covered their heads and faces—which many Muslims say has no Koranic justification and isolates the wearer from society. One of the women told Ali that she wanted to offer a positive example of her faith after the 9/11 attack. Ali quoted her as saying that the garb was “liberating,” since men “have to deal with my brain because I don’t give them any other choice.” The other sister said, “The more clothes you wear, the closer you are to God.” When the strain of wearing the conspicuous attire in American society gets to them, she said, “We think of paradise at that point. Heaven is where we’re supposed to rest. That’s what gets us through.”