Last year, workers at a small Muslim social service agency in Virginia received a disturbing letter from their bank. After six years, Wachovia Corp. was closing the account of the five-person agency that specializes in domestic violence services and other types of immediate assistance to families of all religious backgrounds.
“We were totally shocked,” said Margaret Farchtchi, board treasurer of the Foundation for Appropriate and Immediate Temporary Help, also known as FAITH. “We always kept our accounts in good shape.”
But the agency also had other reasons to think that they would not be targeted. “We felt very secure because we are a local charity,” explained Farchtchi. “We don’t have donors from overseas. We thought we were out of what you might call the danger zone.”
Many people thought the same. As such, the story of FAITH illustrates the challenge now facing the Muslim community. Since 9/11, the government has frozen the assets of six large Muslim organizations and shut them down – although no one has been convicted of any crime.
People, in turn, have begun donating in larger numbers to local charities, assuming these organizations to be free of international ties and safe from government interference. But the experience of FAITH suggests that there are no guarantees.
“Until recently it was being said that what we are confronted with, here, is ‘a civil war’ within Islam. That’s what all this was supposed to be: not a clash of civilisations or anything like that, but a civil war within Islam. Well, the civil war appears to be over. And Islamism won it. The loser, moderate Islam, is always deceptively well-represented on the level of the op-ed page and the public debate; elsewhere, it is supine and inaudible. We are not hearing from moderate Islam. Whereas Islamism, as a mover and shaper of world events, is pretty well all there is…. we respect Islam – the donor of countless benefits to mankind, and the possessor of a thrilling history. But Islamism? No, we can hardly be asked to respect a creedal wave that calls for our own elimination…. Islam, in the end, proved responsive to European influence: the influence of Hitler and Stalin. And one hardly needs to labour the similarities between Islamism and the totalitarian cults of the last century. Anti-semitic, anti-liberal, anti-individualist, anti-democratic, and, most crucially, anti-rational, they too were cults of death, death-driven and death-fuelled.”
Iran’s former president decried a wave of “Islamophobia” that he said is being spread in the United States by fear and hatred of Islam in response to terror perpetrated by Muslims. “In the crime of 9/11, two crimes were committed,” Mohammad Khatami said. “One was killing innocent people. The second crime was masking this crime in the name of Islam.”
“This is a conference of appeasement to the communities which harbour individuals who will stop at nothing to bomb our cities and kill innocent people to force their religion on an unwilling population…. Thousands of Londoners and visitors alike still bear the physical and mental scars of the 7/7 Islamic terror attacks on the Tube yet our well paid senior police officers sit down to cornflakes and toast with so-called community leaders representing ethnic and religious minority groups that are prepared to bomb, kill, rape and maim to get their way.”