15 minute read
Terrorism” or “Marijuana-Induced
These issues don’t even touch on social matters, including how non-Black Muslim families view interracial marriage or perpetuate European standards of beauty as ideal, likely the result of centuries of Western colonization. And what about our own actions, whether intentional or not, that contribute to injustice or divisions among us?
While our faith teaches us that only our own level of God consciousness and good deeds elevates us above others, we’re still naïve enough to believe in our own immunity to the systems of oppression and inequity that surround us. There is far greater good in confronting such realities than pretending they don’t exist. In fact, acknowledging and accepting them will enable us to unite and challenge all aspects of anti-Black racism so that we may grow closer to one another as a collective, become a stronger ummah and unite as one community to advance the common good and advocate for justice in all spaces.
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Such resources already exist and are readily available. We don’t have to look very far to see the incredible opportunities to learn and grow together, thanks to the Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative (MuslimARC; www. muslimarc.org), the Muslim Wellness Foundation (www. muslimwellness.com) and similar organizations.
As we strive to educate ourselves, we must also learn about the larger Muslim experience in the U.S. While working as a community to eliminate Islamophobia and anti-Muslim bias, we should also recognize the work and sacrifices made by Black Americans, many of whom were Muslim, during the Civil Rights era. The laws we use today to argue for equal treatment of Muslims only exist because of their struggles.
We would do well to remember: “O you who have attained to faith! Be ever steadfast in upholding justice, bearing witness to the truth for the sake of God, even though it be against your own selves or your parents and kinsfolk” (4:135).
As Muslims, we must support calls for justice in this moment and always for everyone — not just for fellow Muslims. Neither the above verse nor our tradition supports such a limitation. And yet some Muslims remain silent until one of our own faces injustice and oppression. Too many of us became enraged over police officer’s Rusten Sheskey shooting at Jacob Blake’s back seven times on Aug. 27 in Kenosha, Wis., which paralyzed this 29-year-old man from the waist down and caused several non-fatal internal injuries — but only after learning that his father is Muslim and recited Surat al-Fatiha at the beginning of a press conference to address his son’s condition.
By remembering to love one another for the sake of God, our Creator, who made us into nations and tribes so that we may know one another, we might also know that we must strive to eliminate each and every act of injustice both in ourselves and each other. ih
Roula Allouch, who says she “went to law school to be an advocate for civil rights, access to justice and the rule of law,” is a litigation attorney with Graydon Law. She is chair of CAIR’s national board.
“Terrorism” or “Marijuana-Induced Psychosis”? Spot the Difference Disturbing trends in Canada’s judicial system
BY AZEEZAH KANJI
The grossly disparate treatment of two similar cases highlights Canada’s double standards on extremism.
The first is the “Canadian Tire attacker” — Rehab Dughmosh, a Syrian immigrant woman — which stimulated an outpouring of consternation in the Canadian media. National security consultant Jessica Davis warned in the Globe and Mail that “The government must … identify and mitigate the threat that radicalized women could pose to the security of Canada.” As columnist Christie Blatchford hyperventilated in the National Posteven before Dughmosh had been found guilty, the defendant “appears for all the world to be the face of the modern new (alleged) terrorist.”
The June 2017 attack’s actual details, however, indicate that it was a minor (Canadian) tire-fire involving more pathos than peril. Dughmosh had swung a golf club and a knife at store employees, bruising and biting one of them before being subdued. No one was seriously injured. Despite swearing allegiance to ISIS, she had no functional connections with it.
A court-appointed psychiatrist diagnosed her as likely schizophrenic and possibly “not criminally responsible on account of mental disorder” (a defense not pursued during the trial, at which she represented herself). Her years-long episodes of paranoid delusions and hallucinations had caused her to cover all phone jacks and light fixtures because she was being “surveilled.” Moreover, at the time of this episode she was displaying “intense psychotic symptoms.”
And yet Dughmosh was charged with 14 counts of terrorism and sentenced in February 2019 to seven years’ imprisonment: three for the assault and four for having traveled to Turkey in 2016 with the alleged intention of joining ISIS.
Although Superior Court Judge Maureen Forestell noted that Dughmosh’s punishment was reduced because of her mental illness, it
was still comparatively extreme, given that the average sentence for major assault in Canada is between 157 and 185 days. The three years she received for the golf club incident is comparable to the prison terms imposed for acts of violence causing significant injuries like brain hemorrhages or bone fractures.
Clearly, the sentence’s severity is due to why she had supposedly done these acts. “Terrorists … pose an existential threat to the Canadian community and to the Canadian way of life,” Forestell wrote in her sentencing decision, quoting a previous terrorism case: “They are not criminals in the normal sense. They are worse. Terrorists stand prepared to engage in virtually any form of murder or mayhem if it furthers their ideology.” Terrorism offences are a glaring exception to the general legal principle that crimes are defined by the perpetrator’s intentional actions, not his/her motives. University of Toronto law professor Kent Roach has cautioned that Canadian criminal law’s definition of terrorism as violence committed for a political, religious or ideological motive “authorizes state inquiries into the deepest convictions and beliefs of the accused … turning [terrorism trials] quite literally into religious or political trials … From the perspective of public safety, it should not matter why someone explodes a bomb” — or brandishes a golf club.
This particular case stands in revealing juxtaposition to the legal treatment meted out to Toronto lawyer Mark Phillips’ December 2017 rampage against a Colombian migrant family whom he believed to be Muslim. His weapon of choice was also a sporting implement — a baseball bat. Phillips screamed that his victims were supposed “members” of ISIS. Moreover, he caused considerably greater damage by cracking one of his victims’ ribs.
And yet he was neither prosecuted nor convicted of terrorism. In fact, he received no permanent criminal record and served no time in jail. Phillips did plead guilty to assault, but was granted a conditional discharge because his behavior was attributed to “marijuana-induced psychosis.” This was rather surprising, for Canadian law generally doesn’t consider “voluntary self-intoxication” to be a mitigating factor, whereas “hateful animus” is supposed to be an aggravating factor.
In stark contrast to the Black and Indigenous communities, which are disproportionately criminalized for nonvio-
lent possession of pot, Phillips was not only not criminalized for his drug use, but also managed to escape criminalization for his violence because of it.
In delivering his decision, Ontario high court judge John Skowronski informed the victimized family that racism is an aberration in Canada: “This is something that took place because of a mental illness … Canada is a country of immigrants, different nations, skin colors, accents, names,” he maintained — a statement that itself demonstrates a troubling dissociation from reality. The “country of immigrants,” the judge describes, was built by European settler colonists on stolen Indigenous land. Nationwide, at least 130 active far-right and White supremacist groups have been permitted to openly engage in live-fire paramilitary training exercises, border patrols, mosque stakeouts and convoys to Parliament without attracting the surveillance and police brutality seemingly reserved for the anti-racist protesters that oppose them.
The public square named after Phillips’ great-grandfather, former Toronto mayor Nathan Phillips, has been a site of regular anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant rallies.
Ironically, Skowronski’s decision itself manifests the pervasive racism he claimed doesn’t exist. This is just one of a series of recent cases in which judges or juries have either excused or explained away White men’s attacks on racialized targets.
In February 2018, for example, an allWhite jury acquitted Saskatchewan farmer Gerald Stanley for the point-blank killing of a Cree man, Colten Boushie — apparently accepting Stanley’s far-fetched defense that his handgun fired by accident directly into the back of Boushie’s head, even though an expert witness testified that the gun was not malfunctioning.
In June 2019, former military reservist Peter Khill was found not guilty of murdering an unarmed Six Nations man, Jon Styres, in Ontario. Although Khill admitted that he had shot and killed Styres when he caught Styres breaking into his truck, the extremism of his deadly overreaction was rationalized as the product of “military training.”
One year later, in June 2020, off-duty cop Michael Theriault and his brother Christian were acquitted of aggravated assault against Black teenager Dafonte Miller, who was beaten so badly that he permanently lost one eye.
While Muslims are represented as a source of regular violence, ordinary Canadians often dismiss White acts of racist violence as freak occurrences, the result of temporary insanity, mishap, malfunction or mistake.
In his comprehensive 2019 study of all Canadian terrorism prosecutions, University of Calgary law professor Michael Nesbitt concluded that “the terrorism charges laid to date in Canada would seem to disproportionately target one threat, implying that almost 100-percent of the (criminal) terrorism problem in Canada is related to
Islamist extremism and zero percent related to right wing extremism, although we know that not to be the case.”
The data reveal that the acts of White supremacist and right-wing extremists have resulted in more than nine times as many deaths (19 known) as the acts of Muslim ideologues have (2) since the passage of Canada’s anti-terrorism law in 2001. Last year, the Quebec Superior Court refused to sentence Quebec mosque shooter Alexandre Bissonnette as a terrorist because the judge deemed his targeted mass murder of Muslims to be “strictly personal and non-ideological.” Many of those who have been convicted of terrorism are Muslims whose struggles with mental illness and addiction have not been sources of exculpation, as in the case of Mark Phillips. Instead, state security agencies have exploited them as points of weakness and control.
The longest terrorism sentence meted out in Canada so far was against Chiheb Esseghaier, who was diagnosed with a severe mental illness, probably schizophrenia. He was given two life sentences for planning an attack with extensive involvement by a state informant, a punishment he is currently challenging now that he is receiving treatment.
In December 2018, an American court sentenced 20-year-old Canadian Abdulrahman El Bahnasawy to 40 years in prison after, according to his lawyer, a sting operation in which Canadian federal police shared medical records regarding his history of bipolar disorder and drug addiction with the FBI. “Both the FBI and the RCMP knew about Abdulrahman’s mental illness, the latter unlawfully providing the former with Abdulrahman’s medical reports; however, it was this fact that made him an easy target for entrapment” reads an ongoing petition to return El Bahnasawy home to serve his sentence in Canada.
“Canadian Tire attacker” Dughmosh is not so much “the face of the modern new terrorist,” as Christie Blatchford proclaimed. Rather, she is yet one more face of an old and deeply entrenched dynamic: scapegoating the most vulnerable for causing violence in order to justify society’s projects of violence, including a “war on terror” that continues to inflict state terror upon so many people with no end in sight. ih
Azeezah Kanji, JD, LLM (Islamic Law), is Toronto-based legal academic, writer, and director of programs at the Noor Cultural Centre.
Slavery Remains Legal in the U.S. Have you actually read the 13th Amendment?
BY ANTON KURATNIK
“Wait, that can’t be right,” you might say, “because the 13th Amendment abolished slavery.” That’s a conveniently common misconception that misses a glaring loophole that was left in the text of the amendment: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
That’s the exact loophole Southern legislators used to get around this amendment. By inventing new crimes, such as vagrancy, using obscene language, selling cotton after sunset, being unemployed and similar behaviors (Douglas A. Blackmon, “Slavery by Another Name,” 2008), they were able to imprison recently-freed African Americans and force them to work for free once more. In fact, so many of these new “criminals” were Black that “Negro” and “convict” were often synonymous in official records.
Under the convict lease system, these “criminals,” now called “temporary workers,” could be leased out to companies and their former plantations and forced to work under even more appalling
Tayba students conduct Eid congregation
conditions and with no health care provisions (Bryan Bowman and Kathy Roberts Forde, “Exploiting black labor after the abolition of slavery,” Feb. 6, 2017, https:// theconversation.com)..
W.E.B. Du Bois pointed out that the “slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery. … Slavery was not abolished even after the Thirteenth Amendment. There were four million freedmen and most of them on the same plantation, doing the same work they did before emancipation …” (“Black Reconstruction,” 1935).
Fast forward 150 years, and the U.S. has the world’s largest prison population: over 2.3 million people — more than China, nearly three times more than Brazil, four times more than Russia and five times more than India. The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that close to 40% of all prisoners are Black, although Blacks comprise just 13% of the nation’s population. Moreover, this $80 billion dollar industry (https://worthrises.org/theprisonindustry2020) continues to profit off prisoners and forced labor.
The nonprofit Tayba Foundation (https:// www.taybafoundation.org) offers a distance-learning program in basic Islamic education to incarcerated Muslims and their families through its holistic education, life skills and re-entry program, as well as helps them rediscover their inherent goodness and value as they reconnect.
Tayba students report being paid rates that often start at pennies per hour (pre-tax!) for high-impact jobs like teaching, cooking and manufacturing — sometimes without proper workplace safety measures in place. Many now produce Covid-19-related gowns and masks, ironically without themselves being properly protected. This work is often nonvoluntary, as prisoners in some states can be forced to work for free or face solitary confinement.
Although “crime shouldn’t pay,” calling relatives or attorneys (https://www.prisonpolicy.org/phones/state_of_phone_justice. html) and purchasing other essential services require money. For example, a female prisoner may need to work several weeks just to buy an extra tampon. One Tayba student reported having no money left for halal canteen items after spending his paycheck on bare necessities. Federal prisons, which contain only 10% of prisoners, accommodate religious dietary restrictions, whereas eating little more than daily peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for years.
Two companies control most of the correctional phone market, which is characterized by outrageously expensive telephone calls. These prices were poised to go even higher, until Securus, purchased in 2017 for $1.6 billion by a private equity firm headed by Detroit Pistons’ owner Tom Gores, failed to acquire ICSolutions (Inmate Calling Solutions).
Relatives can sometimes cover these expenses, which ends up costing those who didn’t commit the crime while enriching those who run the prisons. And let’s not forget that hundreds of thousands of prisoners shouldn’t even be there.
The common rebuttal is that such labor provides vocational training and reduces recidivism. The recent example is prisoners fighting California’s wildfires. Left unmentioned is the fact that California bars felons from working as firefighters. Prisoners earn between $2.90 and $5.12 per day, plus an additional $1 per hour during active emergency, while their fellow firefighters earn an average of $91,000 each year before overtime pay and bonuses (Nicole Goodkind, “Prisoners Are Fighting California’s Wildfires on the Front Lines, But Getting Little in Return,” Nov.1, 2019,
halal in a state prison can sometimes mean
https://fortune.com).
But for all the talk of recidivism, 77% of released prisoners are back within 5 years (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ once-a-criminal-always-a-criminal).
In the meantime, companies like the publicly traded Nashville-based CoreCivic (https://www.corecivic.com; formerly the Corrections Corporation of America) bring in nearly $2 billion in revenue and $200 million in profits every year (https:// time.com/5405158).According to Tanay Tatum-Edwards (https://www.marketwatch.com; June 30, 2020), CoreCivic considers lowered incarceration rates a material risk and thus spends millions of dollars every year lobbying for increased criminalization and longer sentences (https://archive.attn.com/stories/941/ who-profits-from-prisoners).
Crime, it seems, does pay. When it becomes profitable to imprison as many people as possible for as long as possible, there’s little incentive to change the situation.
IMPROVING LIVES
Tayba Foundation (taybafoundation.org) is among the many nonprofits working to help prisoners turn their life around and succeed on the outside. Thanks to Malcolm X and Warith Deen Mohammed’s community, Islam has become a beacon of hope and transformation for many prisoners. Muslims are nearly 10% of the prison population, despite being just 1% of the national population — the overwhelming majority convert while incarcerated.
They see Islam as a way to transform themselves for the better, but have a hard time accessing its resources, especially in state prisons. Many prison imams are themselves prisoners, for the Muslim community hasn’t provided one. Some students report waiting three years for a basic fiqh question to be answered.
Tayba fills that vacuum with a comprehensive, tailored Islamic curriculum of basic courses (e.g., praying and fasting) to complex studies in Hadith, fiqh, ‘aqeeda and other subjects (see taybafoundation.org/series). As many students were involved with drugs or suffer from mental health issues, our programs help them recover and prepare themselves for a successful post-prison life. The foundation also provides post-release support in terms of finding a job, renting a place and pursuing an education.
Several Tayba students have become community leaders, earned undergraduate and graduate degrees and even joined our faculty and staff. ih
Anton Kuratnik is online fundraising consultant for Tayba Foundation.
