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Nov. 6, 2009
Rabbi Berel Wein: Choosing to hear
JWisdom.com Zero to 1/60th: How to Empower An Hour with Gavriel Aryeh Sande (7 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick The mullahs' big week
Suzanne Fields A Fallen Wall for Fallen Man
Nov. 5, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet: Three scrumptious -- but simple -- butternut squash dishes
JWisdom.com Hidden Hints: Unlocking Faith & Prayer with Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz (10 minutes)
Nov. 4, 2009
Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger: Should prayers be covered?
JWisdom.com When God played peacemaker With Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Nov. 3, 2009
Martin Peretz: Beware, Barack. Beware, Rahm. Beware, Axelrod
JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater? With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes)
Nov. 2, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The Holocaust is now on Facebook
JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes)
Oct. 30, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: Secret to Immortality
Caroline B. Glick Silencing dissent in America
Oct. 29, 2009
Lini S. Kadaba: Do tactics avert flu or reduce humanity?
JWisdom.com We Must Revamp our Religious Vocabulary With Gavriel Aryeh Sanders ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 28, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: Atheists in Bubbleland
JWisdom.com Why what we wear impacts who we are With Rabbis Mordechai Becher, Menachem Golberger and Aliza Bulow ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 27, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The United Nations Is Outraged Again, Or: Department of Mideast Static
JWisdom.com The Science of Love With Rabbi Jonathan Rietti ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 26, 2009
The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Damaging disclosures with a twist
JWisdom.com Wisdom and Wonks With Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 23, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: Are you ready for the ultimate pleasure?
JWisdom.com Watermark and oneness with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 4 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick Stop using limited powers in a way that expands our enemies' advantages over us
Oct. 22, 2009
Steven Emerson: Terror Cases Share Desire to Kill Americans
JWisdom.com No More More Family Fights --- Really? By Sarah Chana Radcliffe ( 5 minutes)
Oct. 21, 2009
Tonya Alanez: Holocaust denier sues survivor, calling Auschwitz memoir 'vicious lies'
JWisdom.com Meditating Jewishly: A Panacea for Success by Sarah Yoheved Rigler ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 20, 2009
Dennis Prager: Obama and Dalai Lama: Why Israel Worries about U.S. President
JWisdom.com Abraham was not religious By Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer ( 6 minutes)
Oct. 19, 2009
JWisdom.comWhy Good People Do Bad Things By Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 16, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: The Perfect Number
JWisdom.com Hearing Voices By Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 5 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick How Turkey was lost
Oct. 15, 2009
Jeff Jacoby: Peace vs. the 'peace process'
JWisdom.com: Former MTV producer and stand-up comedian Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff: Taming a Control Freak (A VERY fast 15 minutes)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review June 1, 2004 / 12 Sivan, 5764

‘If you are Muslim, you are suspect’

By Daniel Pipes


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http://www.jewishworldreview.com | The U.S. government wrongly arrested Brandon Mayfield, 37, of Beaverton, Ore. on May 6. A fingerprint sent from Madrid apparently connected him to the March 11 bombings there that killed 191 people and injured 2,000. When the Spanish government two weeks later identified the fingerprint as that of an Algerian, the Department of Justice requested that Mayfield be released, and he was.


Putting aside the technical mistake, the Department of Justice has come under severe criticism for having built its case against Mayfield in part by noting his Islamic affiliations. "I am an American Muslim," Mayfield declared on release; "I have been singled out and discriminated against, I feel, as a Muslim." His father Bill concurred: "They picked him out because they wanted someone who fit this profile. This was the closest they had, and he was a Muslim."


"If you are Muslim you are suspect," commented Samer Horani of the Islamic Center of Portland. Dave Fidanque of the American Civil Liberties Union piled on: "as far as the Justice Department is concerned, if you're Muslim and attend particular mosques that are suspect, you're presumed guilty until you're proved innocent." And the New York Times disapprovingly notes that the decision to detain Mayfield "was clearly influenced by his Muslim ties."


But did U.S. law enforcement err in noting Mayfield's identity?

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No, this was entirely appropriate. It would have been myopic to ignore Mayfield's many connections to militant Islam and the global jihad.

  • He prayed in the same Bilal Mosque as did several individuals (Maher Nawash, Ahmed Ibrahim Bilal, Muhammad Ibrahim Bilal) who pleaded guilty in 2003 to conspiring to help the Taliban. The mosque's website includes links to militant Islamic organizations, including some "charities" closed down by the U.S. government for funding terrorism. Saudi specialist Stephen Schwartz finds Bilal to be "a fairly typical Wahhabi-controlled mosque."

  • While studying law at Washburn University in Kansas, Mayfield helped organize a branch of the Muslim Student Association, a group described by analyst Jonathan Dowd-Gailey as "an overtly political organization" espousing "Wahhabism, anti-Americanism, and anti-Semitism … and expressing solidarity with militant Islamic ideologies, sometimes with criminal results."

  • In 2002, Mayfield volunteered to represent Jeffrey Leon Battle — who subsequently pleaded guilty to conspiracy to levy war against the United States and was sentenced to 18 years in prison — in a custody dispute over his then-6-year-old son. Strangely (according to Quanell X, national spokesperson for the New Black Panthers and a friend of Battle's), Mayfield flew to Texas at his own expense for Battle's sake.

  • Someone in Mayfield's house was in telephone contact with Perouz Sedaghaty (a.k.a. Pete Seda), director of the U.S. office of the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, a number of whose foreign branches have been designated as terrorist organizations.

  • Mayfield advertised his solo law practice in a "Muslim" yellow pages run by Jerusalem Enterprises Inc., a company owned by Farid Adlouni. Adlouni is a person "directly linked in business dealings" with Wadih El Hage, Osama Bin Laden's personal secretary in the 1990s and convicted of conspiring to murder U.S. citizens in 2001. In addition:

  • Mayfield's political profile fits that of many disaffected, U.S.-hating terrorists: he strongly opposes the USA Patriot Act, inveighs against U.S. foreign policy related to Muslim countries, and is "particularly angered," according to his brother Kent, by close U.S. relations with Israel. Mayfield speculates that the Bush administration knew in advance about 9/11 but chose to let the attacks go ahead so as to justify going to war. And on his release from custody, he compared the U.S. federal government to Nazi Germany.

  • In common with many violence-prone Islamists in the United States (including Maher Hawash, Mohammed Ali Alayed, Zacarias Moussaoui, and the "Lackawanna Six"), Mayfield went from being a nominal Muslim to one whose Islamic beliefs "got more and more intense."


Are government prosecutors, when they have apparently incriminating physical evidence, supposed to shut their eyes and disregard these many connections and patterns? The Department of Justice was simply doing its job in pointing them out.


Even Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations — an Islamist group with multiple connections of its own to violence — admits that "no Muslim is more than six degrees away from terrorism." Governments worldwide must take this reality into account.

Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in Washington and in the media consider "must reading." Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.

JWR contributor Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and the author of several books, most recently, "Miniatures: Views of Islamic and Middle Eastern Politics". (Click HERE to purchase. Sales help fund JWR.). Comment by clicking here.

© 2004, Daniel Pipes