When in last week’s presidential debate Donald Trump suggested that Muslims in the United States should “report when they see something going on,” he sparked a satirical backlash on Twitter mocking the idea that every Muslim has some secret knowledge of terrorism.
But the FBI has also aggressively sought terrorism leads from Muslim Americans; a presentation published by The Intercept last month suggested looking for informants in mosques and Muslim student associations, and that disclosure has prompted its own pushback. Several student leaders contacted us to decry the bureau’s invasion of spaces where young Muslims thought they could just be themselves.
Nabintou Doumbia, a sophomore at Wayne State University in Detroit, described her MSA as “a place where you hang out and feel comfortable, see friends, have real, raw discussions about anything, including controversial things, say, feminism, or very serious discussions about spirituality and your relationship to God.”
“You work so hard to build that trust, to have people open up in a space,” said Doumbia. The effect of government surveillance, she said, was that “you start to notice very subtle things, like being careful with the words that you use, and you notice your Muslim peers doing the same thing. There are times I’m not speaking, because I’m worried about how it might be heard.”
The presentation, which was prepared for the FBI’s Directorate of Intelligence, instructed agents on how to cultivate informants among Yemeni communities, with an emphasis on identifying “younger, more devout sources.”
The presentation stated, “Since we’re looking for young people re-engaging with their Islamic faith, the local MSA is a great place to start.” It also suggested looking on Facebook “to find individuals who are dramatically increasing their levels of piety.”
But by contemplating the targeting of MSAs, the FBI undermined a prized refuge for a group of students facing unique pressures.
“You have all the normal stress of college, from academics, from being away from home and family,” said Maheen Ahmed, a recent graduate of UC Davis who was president of her MSA. “And then on top of that, because you’re Muslim, you always have to be on your guard, who you are hanging out with, who you’re talking politics with.”
Although the presentation, which is undated, appears to have been prepared in 2010 or 2011, Muslim student leaders interviewed by The Intercept said that it adds to a long list of revelations of undue scrutiny of Muslim communities.
The idea that the FBI may be recruiting informants in student groups brought back unpleasant memories for Ibaad Sadiq, who was president of the MSA at Rutgers University, in New Jersey, when it came out that the NYPD had deployed undercover officers in MSAs around New York and New England, and had a safe house near campus from which to monitor Rutgers students.
“There was such a chilling effect,” said Sadiq. “There was a lot of talk of people just suspecting random people who they thought might be spying on them, a lot of worry in the community. People’s parents told them to stop going to MSA. We had to go through a lot to regain trust.”
The NYPD disbanded the “Demographics Unit” responsible for widespread surveillance of Muslim communities, including student groups, in early 2014, admitting that it had never generated a lead. Despite the unit’s closure, the NYPD apparently hasn’t ceased using undercover operations on campuses; Gothamist reported last year on the case of an undercover cop who was active in Brooklyn student groups until at least sometime in 2015.
Maheen Ahmed, who is now on the board of MSA National, said that her community had still been reeling from learning of Craig Monteilh, an FBI informant who trawled mosques in Southern California and then went public about it. She said awareness that law enforcement might be watching made many Muslim students she encountered as a regional organizer reluctant to get involved in political or advocacy work.
Ahmed, Sadiq, and Doumbia each highlighted their frustration with a thread running between comments like Trump’s at the debate, government “countering violent extremism” initiatives aimed at Muslim communities, and this FBI presentation.
“It’s like people think that Muslims are all privy to who the terrorists are among us, like it’s some secret we’re keeping,” said Sadiq.
“When you have people like Trump saying we need the Muslims to report things,” said Doumbia, “you sit with it, and you sit with yourself, and you think: Is that all my country thinks I’m good for?”
Top photo: New York University students attend a town hall to discuss the NYPD’s surveillance of Muslim communities on Feb. 29, 2012, in New York.
The MSA is a creation of the Muslim brotherhood. It’s unfortunate that innocent people are made to feel stigmatized, but this is what’s required to keep us safe from violent religious supremacists. It’s a shame it had to come to this but infidels have a right to live. The MSA’s ties to terrorism are well-documented. Until the doctrines of jihad are sufficiently repudiated by this student group, the FBI will have to keep tabs. If a white supremacist campus organization funnelled money to the KKK, I would expect the authorities to treat the same. The FBI isn’t infiltrating Hindu student groups. Why do you think that is?
Muslims should condemn colonial politics, they should be against the war, nobody should be able to take their right to have and express their opinion. In Denmark the parliament made the law: if you support terrorism, you will go to jail as a terrorist, even if you express your opinion at the Facebook in which you like Taliban and not Americans. Well, I am not striving so much to get the career and money, and I say my opinion, spies can kiss me in the rear part of my body. Danish spies drive cars on me, they use hells angels against me, but they will not succeed to forbid me to have and express my opinion. I will always be on the side of anyone who is fighting against occupation, against colonialism, and I know such anti-colonist fight can be brutal the same as American bombs are brutal. Don’t drop bombs and there will be no need for anti-colonist fight. and I am not a Muslim, but I am against colonialism.
Glad to see that the Intercept touched topic of infiltration of students organizations, Danish spies infiltrate students organizations and their spies are racists, they spread propaganda against immigrants at the university, they are not fighting terrorism, they fight immigration. They produce hate between domestic citizens and immigrants. Hate produce attacks, attacks are misused to implement bigger repression against the whole society, to build totalitarian system. French president is No1 in Europe in realizing the CIA politics: more conflicts = more money from selling arms. French deputies are sending bombs but they are also harassing Muslim in France (deciding how they should dress, etc). All of that is done to create conflict and implement totalitarian system.
We should all condemn colonialism.
It serves no one but a handful of obscenely wealthy parasites. The most disparate wealth gap in human history has spawned the most disconnected class of inhuman creatures in human history.
It is outrageous that Denmark THREATENS its inhabitants, on behalf of the American government.
Allow me to say what you’re likely not allowed to: Denmark should not only be ashamed of occupying such an oppressive position in relation to its people, but it should ALSO be embarrassed to occupy such a servile position in relation to America.
America’s crusade against Muslims has cost Americans $5,000,000,000,000.00 so far.
Weapons manufacturers, and the politicians they own, CREATED the enemies with which they coerced a cowering American public into submitting to this never-ending, perpetually escalating, multi-trillion dollar protection racket.
The fact that these wars were started by war profiteers, SHOULD be enough reason for even the most stubbornly uninformed to LOOK at how brutally dishonest these wars are.
First, America’s war-mongers did what was CERTAIN to create enemies (invade countries full of innocent people).
Then, America waited for the rest of the world to tell it that it was wrong, before finally acknowledging that arbitrarily slaughtering people – and treating the victims, and their loved ones, as if THEY are the murderers – causes people to FIGHT BACK.
Now, despite undeniably KNOWING that our hostilities only INCREASE the number of enemies America has, America just keeps doing the same thing anyway.
In a domestic context, it’s the FBI that provides the persistent oppressive threat, necessary to make enemies of innocent Muslims.
America’s ruling class has no interest in decreasing terrorism. War profiteers capitalize on every ounce of fear they can squeeze out of the American population.
Well put. The entire phony/manufactured ‘terror’ war served/serves to transform the US to a post-constitutional, de facto police state via imposed C.O.G. plans (the origins and *intent* of the Patriot Act–look into Peter Dale Scott’s research!) while affording the deep state carte blanche militarism and war profiteering. I don’t know what’s more frightening at this point…that the world could likely go out in a blinding white flash due to these socio/psychopaths who are running the show/media, or that such a mind-boggling percentage of the populace has yet to figure out which entity is indeed behind the curtain. Willfully ignorant?
Looking into him now.
I’ve just seen one lecture so far, but what a valuable perspective.
Thanks for the recommendation.
Barry the Kenyan has had “If you see something, say something” plastered all over the place for years.
Where is the whingeing about that?
The infection of racial profiling is endemic throughout law enforcement and does indeed come from the POTUS on down to the streets, but the Democrats are careful to hide it all under language of tolerance (except for people like Bill Maher, who is scared silly of Muslims and wants the world to know it).
The morons in the supposed “right wing”* haven’t helped expose Obama’s real crimes, though, since they think his bloodthirsty murdering overseas is insufficiently large-scale, and his tolerant language domestically makes him a wimp. Many Republican morons also believe Obama is a secret Muslim himself, just as they also stupidly believe Obama and Clinton are left-wing instead of the malevolent corporatist, warmongering imperialists that they are.
(*I put “right wing” in speech marks because Republicans are generally reactionary neoconservatives politically (corporatist warmongering imperialists just like the Dems, only with another social veneer), which is really unrelated to the paleoconservatism or libertarianism of the true right; the true left wing is similarly not neoliberal like the current mob of Democrats, either, as I indicate above, but is manifest in the Green Party of Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka.)
Basically the establishment has cornered the market and gives us the choice of disguised or undisguised corruption, and that’s all we can have.
Bill Maher represents plenty of Democrats; he’s no outlier. He speaks for the mainstream of their Boomer contingent. He’s a selfish creep; see any Daily Kos thread for less talented versions.
I don’t doubt your observation, as I went to Daily Kos once but found the comments shamelessly Clinton-adoring and really hard to navigate – I scrolled down one section and one post was…
s
q
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s
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d
d
o
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…like that, and I gave up after the next article had the same two problems.
My point was about “people like Bill Maher,” by which I meant public or famous advocates of the Democrats, as distinguished from Democrat policy-makers. Many Baby Boomers, famous or not, sure seem to have remained steadfastly loyal to their vanity at every stage, as you indicate.
Some Boomers are right on, though; the pacifist civil rights activist inside was just too strong in them to roll over completely. They tend to shun both major parties, though, as do the idealist whippersnapper millennials like me.
I attacked a pretty specific demographic, not every boomer.
Vanity isn’t the issue, it’s that all of recent American history has been organized around their evolving worldview. This is in part due to demographic prominence, but it’s more than that —- as Perlstein points out in Nixonland, they really WERE publicly told they were unbelievably significant when they were still children.
Here, I’ll prove it. The cliche version of America just so happens to match:
pre-50s: wars & depressions & cowboys & indians
50s: The years of innocence
60s: Teens. Years of rebellion
70s: their twenties Pleasure-seeking years
80s Gettin’ serious about making money
90s: The corrupt middle-aged affluent years / midlife crisis
00s: midlife crisis continued: oh wow the world is kind of scary now
10s: the Get off My Lawn years
See? Does this little chart not perfectly encapsulate a cliche American history?
Dear Bill the Dipshitian: The slogan predates the “Kenyan” reign. (ooh Kenyans, me so scared of Kenyans because i am fuckingretardeddumbshitwhiteman):
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/11/nyregion/11slogan.html?_r=0
Dear Bill Jones: go hide under your bed, and bring some shit to eat while you huddle there
During the era of CO-INTELPRO, “Agents were advised, in a newsletter prepared for such agents, to ‘enhance the paranoia … and … get the point across there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox’.” (From Betty Medsger’s 2014 book, “The Burglary.”
Could it be that the FBI is deliberately attempting to inspire suspicion and thus disrupt communities, again?
Somewhere an East German is playing his violin song about how a look back at history is a look into the future.
I’m paraphrasing Arundhati Roy. She said something most eloquently about how by studying history, one learns to predict the future. Damn that woman. Too smart.
One day people will realize that Islamophobia is a deliberate distraction, for the establishment is fully aligned with many Muslims (Saudi Arabia, the Gulf Emirates, for example), even Wahhabi lunatics like the vicious House of Saud. The drive to demonize Shia Islam and to promote Saudi-controlled Sunni Islam beneath the blood-drenched umbrella of preferred Salafism (Isis are Wahhabi, just not the Saudi kind) is hidden away from the public in an oversimplified picture of ‘liberals tolerating Islam and conservatives resisting it,’ when in fact for the establishment one kind of Islam (Shia) is being demonized and another (Sunni, as controlled by the institutional Wahhabis of the Middle East) is being protected. An agenda is in play of which the populace of the West is largely ignorant.
I attended an American state university that has a large international student body. Thanks to this and my studying of Arabic at that university, I have many Muslim friends, primarily from Saudi Arabia and Bangladesh. Unfortunately one of my Bangladeshi friends got deported last year for suspected terrorist activity. It was a shock to me, as he simply did not strike me as the type. Now he is writing anti-terror propaganda blogs back in Dhaka, putting his own life at risk. After he was deported, some of our shared Bangladeshi friends seemed a little wary of me. I could not shake the feeling that they no longer fully trusted me. Even my friend who was deported openly told me from Dhaka that he was worried that I was an undercover agent. I of course am not an agent and I think he believes me now. But I still cannot let go of the sense that my friends don’t trust me.
This behavior by the FBI is driving a wedge between open, warm Americans like myself and their Muslim peers. If we cannot trust each other, we cannot bridge decides. This issue needs to be addressed in a very public way and has yet to garner the attention it deserves.
To The Intercept staff, I’d like to thank you all for the journalistic work you all have been doing.
Requiring people to play “watchdog” over others creates an operational environment contrary to the human species. But who said that people who come up with this crap or go along with it are human?
Divide and rule at the basic building block of the human species level my friend.
There is a lot of ‘all’ in this piece of text. Whey used in an empirical statement, ‘all’ almost always makes it FALSE.
Counted 3 uses. Lets go over them:
“You have all the normal stress of college”
“It’s like people think that Muslims are all privy to who the terrorists are among us, like it’s some secret we’re keeping,” said Sadiq.
“you sit with it, and you sit with yourself, and you think: Is that all my country thinks I’m good for?”
None of these are empirical statements, nor are they framed as such. They reflect the opinions and concerns of the people interviewed.
Anyone comes to this site and expresses discontent with the content is ………….. fill in the blank with your own adjective. This piece is one example of the value TI brings to the community.
Seems to me that sending undercover agents to surveil Trump terrorists might be more useful…
Couldn’t agree more, but the director of the FBI has already demonstrated the fact that he is a white supremacist confederate terrorist sympathizer, so we know why the FBI isn’t doing that.
> he sparked a satirical backlash on Twitter mocking the idea that every Muslim has some secret knowledge of terrorism
> “It’s like people think that Muslims are all privy to whom the terrorists are among us, like it’s some secret we’re keeping,” said Sadiq.
clearly, neither trump’s suggestion nor the government surveillance implies the belief that all muslims, or even a significant percentage, have knowledge of terrorist activity. so why repeat this nonsense? is it laziness or dishonesty?
o why o why do they not grasp the subtle nuances of these finely calibrated policy stances? ‘Tis clearly not racist, nay.
Now Vic, droug began his sentence with the word “clearly.” Therefore, all that follows is manifestly so. Wuttsamaddayu?
You’d be saying similar things if you felt the government was not just spying on you, but singling you out. You miss the point entirely.
Obama and Hillary and most in Congress supporting “rebels” in Syria who actually are terrorists puts all of this into another perspective.
The hypocrisy on display by our “leaders” is so far beyond the head shaking and eye rolling point.
A long time ago, Bob Dylan said, “Look out kid, they keep it all hid.”
Apparently, TPTB got it backwards: “Look there’s kids. They’re keeping it all hid.”