WASHINGTON: The Council of American-Islamic Relations, CAIR, announced this week that it elected North Carolina State Sen. Larry Shaw as their new Board Chair.
Sen. Shaw was the country’s highest-ranking Muslim elected official before the election of Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minnesota, in 2006. He has served on CAIR’s national board for three years.
A member of the North Carolina Senate General Assembly and a former member of the North Carolina House of Representatives General Assembly, the six-term legislator told Arab News that CAIR “speaks volumes with regard to freedom, justice and equality in the US, and for the great ideas of the pluralistic society,”
Sen. Shaw said he met with Nihad Awad, CAIR’s Executive Director, years ago when he was visiting Islamic communities, “asking them to get more involved in the US political life because they were not visible at all.”
He used the opportunity to explain to America’s Muslims that the “American way” of doing business was “to get involved — to join the PTA, enroll their children to be Girl or Boy Scouts, and to attend all the various boards and commissions in the country and state — to become politically active.”
He said that if people don’t bother to vote and don’t bother to get involved in local politics, “then you have no right to complain about anything.” CAIR, he said, is very much needed in the US, as it “provides a vehicle from which people could have redress. This is a very important mechanism to promote the understanding of Islam, to air out grievances in a respectful way, and to bridge understanding.”
Admitting that times have been hard since 9/11, when peoples’ attitudes changed about Islam, he said: “The battles that are fighting here, and in various states, are numerous. “Since 9/11 there’s been a wholesale attack on Muslims and on Islamic communities. Everything that we stand for is being questioned and challenged, both openly and in a secretive way.
“The secret agendas — some of the things that are now coming out in classified documents as to what was going on during the Bush administration during the last eight years are very disturbing — eavesdropping, wire tapping, and agent provocateurs.... there is a list of misdeeds and illegal tactics have been employed by the Justice Department and the FBI against Muslim and Islamic organizations,” said Sen. Shaw.
He said he is hoping for more support from the Obama administration, “so we can begin to shed light on this subject.
“The Obama administration has squashed a lot of the court proceedings about the detainees in Guantanamo Bay. This is an about face of the persecution of these non-combatants, and he (President Obama) intends to bring some of them here to civil courts,” CAIR’s new Chairman said. “You can’t keep them locked up forever without due process.”
Sen. Shaw said he also is very concerned that during the two years of the presidential campaign, the question that most dogged President Obama was if he was Muslim.
“Up until the last days of the elections, his faith was questioned, and it cast Islam as something very negative. This made us look as though our religion is suspect and not what it purports to be. It had a bad effect on our youth, who asked: ‘What’s wrong with being a Muslim?’”
Both Sen. Colin Powell and CNN’s Campbell Brown spoke out in defense of Islam, said Sen. Shaw. “Campbell Brown did an editorial questioning what’s wrong with being a Muslim. She was very articulate and it was brilliantly put together, and it took a lot of courage for her to do this.”
But, said Sen. Shaw, the constant questioning of whether President Obama was Muslim “cast a cloud over the entire presidential contest for two years.”
“This negative focus on Islam has been the kind of environment we’ve been operating in, said Sen. Shaw. “But we’re very positive and hopeful about the Islamic organizations in this country -- they’re very resilient, very resourceful and determined to achieve to justice.”
Sen. Shaw accused some within the conservative media for the deliberate distortion of Islam. “Since 9/11, the rightwing news media has vilified Islam. There are evangelists who had declared war on Islam and misrepresented Islam, just to make money, sell books and become famous.
“It’s become an industry to attack Islam. There are people here who do this every day -who look for any dirt they can find about Islam -- it might be ambiguous but they take it and twist it and they’re looking to benefit from it to increase their popularity.
“You have cable networks that focus their whole programming around attacking Islam, with personalities who articulate the negative views that they want to promulgate to the public. These guys have done very well; it’s become an attack industry. These are the kind of things that we should be against in America.”
