Despite concerns that the Fort Hood shooting rampage would lead to a new backlash against American Muslims, optimism pervaded a Sunday gathering of hundreds of Bay Area members of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
“There is hope for Americans who happen to be Muslim,” said host and Fremont dentist Mohammad Rajabally, who said attitudes toward Muslims have improved but could fall back into misjudgment and hatred without persistent advocacy.
The fundraising banquet for the Bay Area chapter of the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights group carried a cheerful name — “A New Era of Hope” — but came on the heels of a litany of bad news locally and nationwide.
“I know that Muslims have said after Fort Hood, some of them have said they felt the same way they felt after 9/11,” said Zahra Billo, a Bay Area outreach director for the council.
Maj. Nidal Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, has been charged with 13 counts of premeditated murder in connection with the Nov. 5 tragedy on the Texas military base. He had been trying to leave the military and had complained of anti-Muslim discrimination, according to media reports. Some feared the attack and questions about Hasan’s religious motivations would fuel misguided anger at the minority group.
For the most part, however, Billo said initial fears have not been met with examples of backlash. That is an improvement, she said, over the time following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when Billo was a college student and remembers feeling a deep-seated concern about how she and other Muslims would be perceived.
“I didn’t feel that same way,” she said of her reaction to the shooting. “Yes, we got hate calls, but we also got supportive calls.”
The Bay Area chapter says it responded to about 200 civil rights calls in the past year, a little over half of them from Muslims facing some kind of difficulty with a government agency, usually about immigration or citizenship questions.
Three of those dozens of government-related calls were from Muslims facing questioning from the FBI, the group said. Most of the other cases were about discrimination in workplaces, schools and elsewhere.
Some of those cases have had a high profile, such as the August beating of a cabdriver in Pleasanton. Police said the Sikh driver’s assailants mistook him for a Muslim, labeling him a “Taliban” before they beat him, breaking a tooth and causing other injuries that required stitches. The group called for the attack to be treated as a hate crime.
Though vilified by its fiercest opponents as a group sympathetic to terrorists, the council has a mainstream reputation in the Bay Area, as evidenced by the dozen or so East Bay and Silicon Valley mayors and city council members who took part in the banquet at the Fremont Marriott.
Local members said the organization faces more difficult challenges nationwide. Four Republican Congress members demanded an investigation of the group’s Capitol Hill interns last month, citing their ability to infiltrate high-security committees.
The group also has been busy responding to last week’s news that federal agents intend to seize a Sacramento County mosque that is owned and leased out by a foundation tied to the Iranian government. Confusion about the inquiry has led to racism against the mosque’s members, the council’s directors said.
Many of those examples were of concern to banquet attendee Sajid Khan, but the San Jose attorney said he was also convinced that years of advocacy and education have made a difference. Born and raised in the Bay Area by parents who moved from India in the 1960s, he said he has never faced discrimination because he is Muslim.
“I tend to look at the positive side of this country,” Khan said. “The negative does take place but I think it’s on the fringes, it’s not the norm.”