Many in Bay Area feel under a microscope
The fact that federal agents had been hanging around mosques to monitor three Oregon terrorist suspects arrested Friday came as absolutely no surprise to Bay Area Muslims -- they're convinced the federal agents have been watching them ever since the Sept. 11 attacks and probably before.
"I assume that is standard operating procedure at this point," said Hatem Bazian, a UC Berkeley lecturer in Near Eastern Studies as he prepared to lead the Friday prayer at the Islamic Society of San Francisco's mosque. "It seems that the assumption, the attitude, is that Muslims are guilty and it is just a matter of catching them in the act."
Federal law enforcement sources in Portland said important leads in their investigation came, directly or indirectly, from agents' surveillance of some of the suspects at local mosques. Much of that surveillance has been driven by the post-Sept. 11 investigation of terrorist suspects in the United States, something that distresses American Muslims.
Saad Ahmad, an immigration and civil rights attorney in San Jose, has been run ragged by a deluge of requests from mosques and Islamic centers to speak about new laws expanding law enforcement investigatory tools.
Last week it was the Islamic Society of the East Bay in Fremont.
"A lot of questions were asked and a lot of people were concerned. I know a lot of people are very afraid," Ahmad said.
He said they aren't people who have done anything wrong but they worry that they could still be targeted when they see such events as the arrest of the three Muslim medical students whose car was searched last month in Florida after a woman thought she overheard them plotting terrorism in a diner.
"A lot of law-abiding citizens feel that they are being watched more closely, that any action they take is being watched, that they are under a microscope," Ahmad said.
Ebrahim Nana, who is on the board of directors for mosques in Mill Valley and San Francisco, said many Muslims came to the United States because this was a place of hope for them. They now feel that the freedoms they sought are precarious.
"It is this fear of arbitrarily being detained that is really scary. All these great values that many Muslims came to America for, the freedom, the legal system, the justice, the Bill of Rights, the civil liberties, those don't seem to apply if you are a Muslim," he said.
However, Helal Omeira, executive director of the Council on American Islamic Relations in Santa Clara, said that the FBI is welcome to "spend its time" monitoring his organization and mosque.
"This is what was done during the '60s," he said. "I've got bigger fish to fry. I've got people defaming my religion."
He said that the government should realize that worshipers would be the first to turn in someone in their mosque who they suspected of wrongdoing because they are just as concerned about domestic security as anyone else in the United States.
Outside the San Francisco mosque, Hussein Mohammed, an Egyptian researcher studying at UC Berkeley, said that he understands if the government has to keep tabs on what is going on at mosques to ensure domestic security. But he said that it should not be done covertly.
"If they work with the board of the mosque instead of just watching like the CIA, there will be benefits to both of them because sometimes you don't know who is doing something wrong," he said.
But Ahmad disagrees.
"I don't believe this is the way to prevent more terrorist activity because it breeds more hostility," he said.
E-mail Tanya Schevitz at tschevitz@sfchronicle.com
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