“I’ll be honest, some of the worst micro and macro forms of racism I’ve experienced as a black Muslim have not been at the hands of white people but white Arabs/desis.”
(Remaz Khalaleyal, Sudanese-American activist)
Who knew!
Here is a further discussion about how the death of George Floyd is producing much soul-searching within the American Muslim community about the fact that Arab Muslims are often racists.
I told you about the issue herelast week, but was surprised this morning to see an opinion piece published at none other than the New York Timesexposing the hard truth.
Why Did Cup Foods Call the Cops on George Floyd?
Nuisance abatement laws force stores in low-income neighborhoods to operate almost as an arm of law enforcement.
Don’t be deterred by the subheading, it is interesting, but almost seems to me to be a way to turn off readers to the juicy part of this piece by Moustafa Bayoumi.
Ever since George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police officers on May 25 after a grocery store reported that he had used a counterfeit $20 there, Muslim Americans have been asking why the store’s workers called the cops in the first place.
Palestinian immigrant-owned Cup Foods where it all began!
Like many grocery stores in low-income neighborhoods, Cup Foods is owned and largely staffed by an immigrant Muslim family, and the police call has prompted some to see racist motives.
Mahmoud Abumayyaleh, the Palestinian-American owner of Cup Foods, the grocery store, was away when a 17-year-old worker made the call.
A statement from the store referred to a “state policy that requires stores” to notify the police about counterfeit bills and Mr. Abumayyaleh described the practice as “standard protocol” for businesses. He vowed that his store will no longer do so “until the police stop killing innocent people.”
For many small-business owners in low-income neighborhoods, the decision to not call the cops is not so easy. The problem isn’t that you will subject yourself to more crime without the police. It’s that the authorities often force the business owners to operate almost as an arm of the police. If they refuse, they risk being shut down by the city through nuisance abatement laws.
After a discussion about the stores that were once owned by Jews:
Today, many of these stores in major cities around the country are run by Arab-American and South-Asian-American merchants, but the justifiable resentments remain the same. [Resentments about how the owners go home to better neighborhoods at night.—ed]
Okay, enough of the nuisance laws etc. Here, fifteen paragraphs in, comes the admission that Arabs and South Asian Muslims are racist.
The facts of third-party policing do not take away from the need for conversations about anti-black racism within Muslim American communities. Although Muslim Americans routinely have to deal with the bigotry of Islamophobia, many have been in denial for far too long about the anti-black racism among the believers.
Remaz Khalaleyal
About a third of American Muslims are African-American and the history of Islam in the United States is deeply connected to the African-American story. Yet research by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, which studies American Muslims, shows that African-American Muslims still often feel unwelcome in South Asian and Arab Muslim circles.
In a powerful Instagram post, Remaz Khalaleyal, a Sudanese-American activist, addressed the owner of Cup Foods. “I’ll be honest, some of the worst micro and macro forms of racism I’ve experienced as a black Muslim have not been at the hands of white people but white Arabs/desis,” she wrote. (“Desi” refers to people from South Asia.)
She is right. Nonblack Muslims have a lot of anti-racist work to do.
And even if our current system of policing didn’t use crime and crime prevention as a way to pit stores and customers against one another, nonblack Muslims would still find ways to buy into anti-blackness. Racism isn’t limited to store owners, after all.
The death of George Floyd ought to show nonblack Muslim Americans two important things. As Americans, we must strive for better public safety for everyone. And as Muslims, we must find better versions of ourselves.
Read it all here. How great is that to know that white ethnic Europeans are off the hook for a change.
“How long did you think you were going to be able to run and operate a store that continued to harm and exploit black folks … without reaping what you sow?”
(Sara Hamdan, an IMAN organizer)
Who knew?
As I have said in a couple of previous posts, here andhere, we wouldn’t have known that Arab and Asian (New American!) shop owners in Black neighborhoods treated their customers badly, sold them booze, cigarettes and unhealthy food and then went home to nicer neighborhoods every evening if it hadn’t been for the death of George Floyd.
The tensions in ‘diversity-is-strength’ neighborhoods that led up to Floyd’s death is further explained in this story at Religious News Service yesterday.
It seems this isn’t a case of white vs. black racial tension, but one of immigrant Arab exploiters vs. African Americans.
Did you even know that the store that called police on Floyd was a convenience store owned by a Palestinian?
Minneapolis Cup Foods where George Floyd allegedly tried to pass a counterfeit $20.
Floyd’s death spurs debate on how immigrants should run stores in black neighborhoods
(Emphasis below is mine)
(RNS) — George Floyd was killed after employees at a convenience store owned by a Palestinian American Muslim — with a Muslim prayer space in its basement — called Minneapolis police over a suspected counterfeit $20 bill.
The role that the store played in Floyd’s death May 25 and in all that followed has been a bitter pill to swallow for many Muslim and Arab communities.
This moment has also reignited ongoing debates in Muslim communities over the ethical duties of immigrants who own businesses in black neighborhoods, from when and if they call the police to the role they can play in creating healthier food ecosystems.
“We know now that escalating situations to the police almost always does more harm than good, even for something as harmless as a fake bill,” Mahmoud Abumayyaleh, owner of the Cup Foods store that called the police on Floyd, wrote in a Facebook post.
Cup Foods, which has served customers in a largely black neighborhood for three decades, will no longer involve the police in nonviolent incidents, Abumayyaleh said.
“By simply following procedure we are putting our communities in danger,” he said in his social media post. Instead, he urged, “Work within your communities to find alternatives to policing, until the point that local and state officials decide to seriously hold police accountable once and for all.”
Food and liquor stores, often owned by Arab and South Asian immigrants, are common in mostly black, low-income neighborhoods. But the relationships between these store owners and the communities they serve have often been fraught with racial tension.
[….]
Rami Nashashibi
Rami Nashashibi, director of Chicago’s Inner-City Muslim Action Network, says a massive cultural transformation is needed for nonblack Muslim corner store owners to be allies for those they serve.
[….]
Since the police killing, IMAN has partnered with the Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative, a racial justice education organization, to launch “Corner Store Witnesses,” a new training curriculum aimed at nonblack Muslim business owners.
[….]
Imam Jihad Saafir, who heads Islah LA, an inner-city Muslim community center in South Los Angeles, said stores and restaurants run by Muslim immigrants were often the source of alcohol, cigarettes, drug paraphernalia and unhealthy foods that have taken a toll on locals’ health.
Beyond overpolicing, common concerns with immigrant-owned corner stores include gentrification; exploitative pricing; racist hiring practices; hostile security measures such as bulletproof glass and cages; the sale of alcohol and nicotine products; and the sale of junk food, as well as a lack of fresh produce and other healthy foods.
“In many ways, residents in those neighborhoods perceive those store owners in the same way those Palestinian store owners perceive Israeli settlements in the West Bank,” Nashashibi, who is Palestinian American himself, argued. “What justification are you using to be in that black community?”
Linda Sarsour: We have a long way to go to build relationships with the black community.
But we are marginalized so we can marginalize others!
RNS continues….
Many Arab and South Asian store owners respond to allegations of racism by pointing to their own marginalized identities and their need to protect their income. Many are working-class; some are undocumented.
Activist Linda Sarsour, whose father owned a store in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood for 38 years, urged Muslims not to blame Cup Foods’ owner for Floyd’s death, noting that the store has a positive relationship with locals.
“I understand that we have a long way to go to build transformative relationships between Arab/Asian store owners and local Black communities,” she wrote in a Facebook post. “These communities deserve business owners who are contributors to communities not just takers.”
Absent from the list: U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, or any other elected official or candidate.
This was intentional. Responding to questions via phone and email, Imam Tawakal states that the project is strictly “charity work,” and that he has been explicitly rejecting political partnerships and forbidding campaign photo or video opportunities.
On May 5, GMCC posted a formal news release announcing the program’s growth and success, and again listing partners and major donors. No political campaigns had joined, as expected.
Unexpectedly, Rep. Ilhan Omar tweeted this fundraising appeal the same day….
Thanks to ‘meanymom’ for catching the story from a week ago.
Pakistani Doctor on H-1B Visa Indicted for Jihadist Plot
How’s that vetting going?
Muhammad Masood
During his two years working as a “research coordinator” on an H-1B visa for the Rochester, Minn., Mayo Clinic, Pakistani medical doctor Muhammad Masood allegedly saw himself as having gotten “behind enemy lines”where “not many people cant [sic] even reach here to attack.”
A federal criminal complaint almost lost in the nation’s Corona-19 virus crisis alleges that Masood planned from the day he arrived in America on his H-1B visa in February 2018 that he would use the rare access it afforded to learn something useful about his enemies so as to conduct violent jihad in line with his perceived religious duty.
By January and February 2020, according to the complaint, the 28-year-old was messaging on an encrypted platform about how sick he had grown of smiling every day at the “passing kuffar”, a derogatory term for non-Muslims that often justifies execution. All the smiling was “just not to make them suspicios [sic] … I cannot tolerate it anymore.”
He messaged that he could not let his H-1B visa go to waste. “Sometimes I wantto [sic] attack enemy when I am behind enemy linea [sic] itself,” he messaged in January. “[I] wonder if I will miss the opportunity of attacking the enemy when I was in the middle of it.”
By the grace of an undercover FBI investigation, Masood will do no such thing.
Agents arrested Masood on March 19. By then, he had changed the plan from attacking the local kuffars he hated so much to joining ISIS in northeast Iran and Afghanistan, or in Syria as a medic, or maybe engineering drones “and also fight”. It’s unclear why he changed his mind about attack on U.S. soil.
Editor: This is a guest column by my friend Bob Enos of Willmar, Minnesota. Regular readers of Refugee Resettlement Watch may remember Bob who compiled a great deal of information on the economic cost of migrant and refugee labor and wrote several articles for RRW in the past.
Go hereto read previous posts at RRW either written by him or about his work.
As the hysteria-driven lockdowns of coronavirus persist, constitutional conservatives are slowly emerging from under their beds. Spear carriers for social isolation and economic constriction in America have reacted to critics with the same derision accorded wearers of red MAGA hats. In less than thirty days, Americans have been persuaded to swap Constitutionally-guaranteed civil liberties in exchange for the illusion of protection from a virus that has touched a relative few.
This is not to say that the virus does not exist, nor that pockets of America do not suffer disproportionately from the health consequences of COVID-19.
However, neither the vast majority of Americans, nor family, friends, or neighbors, have been infected by the virus. Yet, the American public is expected – no, required – to support a one-size-fits-all national response that, to this writer, is akin to killing a flea with an elephant gun.
As international travel is acknowledged as the world’s COVID-19 courier, I’m led to an inescapable conclusion:
COVID-19 is, first and foremost, an unintended consequence of three factors, in order of significance: Open Borders movement, business globalization, and international tourism.
Presently, the nation of Sweden has the most relaxed posture in western Europe regarding COVID-19; she has no lockdown whatsoever. Many media pundits are nearly gleeful in reports of higher infection rates in Sweden compared to the rest of Europe. However, in its daily briefings on the virus, the Sweden Department of Public Health insists that its infection rate would be much lower, had the government enacted screening measures early on, for Swedish vacationers returning from Italy.
According to the state department of health here in Minnesota, our rate of infection as a percentage of the population is the lowest of any state in the nation.
The mean age for deaths attributed to COVID-19 here is 86. Pre-existing health problems accompany nearly all the fatalities, and the majority have been residents of nursing homes.
This past week, several meatpacking companies throughout the Midwest – names like Smithfield, Cargill, Tyson, and Brazilian conglomerate JBS – reported closures of plants in which anywhere from 20 to 80 employees tested positive for corona virus. What do nursing homes and meatpacking plants share in common? The majority of workers in both industries – industries hard-hit by labor shortages- are recent arrivals from third-world nations; populations for whom international travel is commonplace.
New York City – the epicenter of COVID-19 in the United States – is also America’s symbol for the “nation of immigrants.” Additionally, she is a preeminent international business center. Business travelers from across the globe travel in and out of New York City by the hundreds every single day.
Finally, New York City may be the most popular tourist destination in America for foreign travelers. Walk down Fifth Avenue on any given weekend in Autumn if there is any doubt.
Is it any wonder, then, that COVID-19 fatalities in the New York Tri-state area make up as much as half of the nation’s COVID-related deaths?
What we are witnessing is the unintended consequence of unbridled, open borders migration, be it for business, escaping third world poverty, or tourism.
Globalists are hard at work on damage control. Their messengers of doomsday scenarios will claim victory regardless of the outcome. If the death count is high, they’ll say “we told you so”. If the death rate is low, they’ll take credit for convincing the world to heed their warnings.
And let’s not forget the icing on the cake.
Leftists the world over are not about to pass up an opportunity to exploit a crisis that could hurt the President’s re-election campaign. If turning a blind eye to civil liberties sends President Trump packing and derails the conservative/national sovereignty contingent, well, you gotta break a few eggs to make an omelette. Collateral damaged be damned.
And the collateral damage? There are many versions of death. Nearly all agree that economic recovery will be long and drawn out, at best. The fallout will certainly be the death knell for many rural towns throughout the Midwest that have been hanging on by fingernails for years as it is.Hospitals will go broke. Record numbers face unemployment. Children are kept from schooling. Small retail businesses and the hospitality industry are crushed, many for good. Socializing is verboten. All in the name of containing a virus for which attributable deaths in New York’s Tri-state area (a population of nearly 20 million) make up roughly FIVE ONE HUNDREDTHS OF ONE PERCENT of its population.
My late mother, a nurse, had a one-liner of dark humor she picked up on the hospital floor: “the operation was a complete success, and the patient died.”
