The Small Things

The Small Things
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John Robbins

I’m a Muslim civil rights advocate, and I’m not worried about President-elect Trump banning Muslim immigration or forcing Muslims to register in a database.

Obviously, the prospect that Muslim men, women, and children would be subject to this kind of stigmatization is horrifying. These are proposals that should appall anyone with the faintest belief in the value of our Constitution or democracy, and they’re utterly chilling to American Muslims.

But that’s the thing: they are horrifying, and to a lot of people. They are so grossly offensive to the sensibilities of a wide swathe of the public, and their implementation would be so visible and have such a demonstratively negative impact on the American Muslim community, that they would be immediately opposed by virtually every major group in the country. The ACLU has already announced that it would oppose it with vigor, as have countless other organizations across the United States. In the days following the news of Mr. Trump’s election, I’ve personally received hundreds of e-mails and calls from interfaith and government leaders, attorneys, and social justice advocates across the political spectrum offering their full support against such actions. I know that if Mr. Trump tries to institute such explicitly aggressive measures against the Muslim community, we will be defended by millions of Americans.

In short, I’m not worried about potential large offenses.

But I’m terrified about many small ones.

What keeps me up at night isn’t the thought that Mr. Trump would ban all Muslim immigration in one dramatic Executive Order, but that he would implement several policy changes – cutting the budget for vetting immigrants from the Middle East, stymying document translation, or adding additional steps to an already-laborious and lengthy vetting process – that would effectively have the same result. Instead of putting up one policy measure that would serve as an easy target for civil liberties organizations and rights groups to oppose, he could break it down into multiple smaller encroachments that might more readily pass unnoticed among the public, and that it would be harder for such groups to galvanize support against. And if you’re a Syrian refugee, or an Indonesian Muslim attempting to create a better life for your family, which path your disenfranchisement takes makes little difference.

Similarly, while the idea that American Muslim citizens could be required to register in a special database is chilling to any student of history, proposals to have an active informant in each mosque in the country, to tap the phone of each imam, to apply additional scrutiny to individuals who are on the boards of Muslim nonprofits, or to flag for analysis anyone reported to start becoming “extra religious” would likely be met with significantly less resistance. It’s much harder for the ACLU to ask their members to demand action on these kinds of encroachments, which can quietly become policy without having to wind their way through the House and Senate, than it is to renounce a

In fact, we’ve already seen examples of how Muslim civil rights have been trampled upon away from the public eye. For the last year, the Obama administration has been working to start a program termed “Countering Violent Extremism,” which effectively carries out a widespread stigmatization of the Muslim community. It calls for mosques to self-report individuals who are at risk of becoming “radicalized” (loosely defined as anything from a young man growing out a beard to a woman memorizing more of the Quran, or even a high schooler arguing more with their parents), has the potential to mandate school nurses and psychiatrists to report on their Muslim patients if they begin acting strangely (again, loosely defined and open to abuse), and has been employed to increase the FBI’s potential to use controversial informant networks to entrap Muslims who have engaged in protected free speech acts. CVE has been a federal policy action that threatens to curtail the rights and freedoms of American Muslims for the last year, yet it has received very little attention in the press, and the public is largely unaware of the program.

My message is therefore this: in the coming months and years, Muslim allies will need to be vigilant about not only the big-ticket points of discrimination, but also the smaller ones that can collectively represent massive threats to the American Muslim community. Whether Mr. Trump’s administration attempts to build a cage around the community all at once or piecemeal, it will have the same impact of impeding our liberty. Organizations will need to work together in coordination with Muslim civil rights groups to strategically implement programs to combat any encroachment on the community’s freedoms, and lay allies will need to be attentive and willing to speak up against policies identified by the Muslim community as threatening to its well-being. We are only going to weather attacks through forming strong coalitions that stand together regardless of whether the threat comes from one source or several.

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