Has America Lost its Sanity?

By Ali Sina
Dec, 20, 2002

The INS is now jailing new immigrants and other refugees in the hope of finding terrorists among them. Is she on the right track or is she targeting the wrong people? 

Yesterday the Los Angeles (Reuters) reported: “Hundreds of Iranian and other Middle East citizens were in southern California jails on Wednesday after coming forward to comply with a new rule to register with immigration authorities only to wind up handcuffed and behind bars.” 

“The head of the southern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union compared the arrests to the internment of Japanese Americans in camps during the Second World War.” 

Although the INS officials are not releasing any numbers, it is believed that more than a thousand men have been arrested, jailed and placed into cramped cells for the crime of “overstaying their visas”. 

This so-called special registration program is an expansion of an anti-terrorism directive intended to clamp down on illegal immigrants from 20 countries who are considered to be of high risk to America. 

Lawyers who have sat in on the proceedings said they found it chilling. Jacqueline Baronian and other immigration lawyers said that if a man was found to be violating the terms of his visa, he was turned over to an investigation officer and detained. If the violation is minor, bond is set at $1,500 to $7,500. 

“One such man”, reports the New York Times, “who would not give his name because he said he was a member of a prominent Iranian Jewish family in Los Angeles, said he came to register last Tuesday and was immediately detained because his pending application for permanent residency had been held up in I.N.S. proceedings for five years. The man, whose family fled Iran after the 1979 revolution, is an Israeli citizen but came to the United States in 1997 to be reunited with his family.” 

The question is, is this is the way to catch the terrorists? Here we have law-abiding people who have hearkened to the call of their government to go and register, but instead were jailed, in a most inhumane way. Are they really the terrorists? Would terrorists even go to register like this? 

In the midst of all this, and as if this irrational behavior of I.N.S. was not enough, the P.B.S. another publicly funded American institution has made an unexplainable decision to broadcast a documentary made by Muslims that purports to tell the story of the prophet Muhammad in the best light.  Using a rich blend of lies, deceptions and misinformation, this documentary, artfully misleads the public into believing that Islam is so beautiful a religion that the 67 offensive wars and subsequent murder of thousands of people perpetrated by its founder in the last 10 years of his life, were done as a matter of self-defense. It also strains to suggest that the hallucinations of this madman of Arabia, through his conversing with a ghost called Gabriel, his delirious ascension to 7^th heaven (wherever that may be) via Jerusalem (as if Jerusalem is the gateway to heaven), and his meeting with the deceased prophets and God should go unquestioned as historical facts.  But when it comes to actual historical facts, such as the unprovoked, cold-blooded massacre of 750 Jews, who had surrendered with no fight, and the consequent enslavement of their wives and children, truth becomes the first casualty, as history, devoid of any suggestion of its far uglier reality, is packaged as a consumable good for the viewing public. The documentary does not mentions that up to his last breath, Muhammad, unbowed in his hatred of the Jews and the Christians, did not relent in his desire for conquest and in his deathbed, he ordered his devotees to cleanse Arabia from the followers of these two religions. It also overlooked the fact that Muhammad was a misogynist that he called women “deficient in intelligence”, that he allowed his followers to rape them when captured in wars, and that he advised men to beat their wives if they are disobedient and goes on to insinuate that Muhammad was some sort of feminist for his time. 

Such a deceitful documentary as this is not only an insult to the intelligence of American citizens but is a betrayal of their trust and a clear misuse of their tax money. Is PBS the pulpit of Islam now? What right it had to shove Islamic propaganda down the throat of the Americans with their own money? Why no one was invited to counter that deceitful propaganda so that the public could hear both sides of the story and make its own mind? 

As if all this inconsistencies were not enough, we have the President of the United State dining with various Muslim leaders, receiving them in the White House, chatting and joking with them while calling their cult of terror a “religion of peace”. Has Mr. Bush read the Quran? Does he know that the author of this religion of peace recommended to his followers to fight him for being an infidel and promised them that Allah will punish him by their hands, cover him with shame, and help them to victory over him? Does he know that the sacred book of this religion of peace tells the believers not to take the non-believers as friends and not to obey them? Where is this religion of peace? Islam is the cult of terror. Has Mr. Bush read the Quran?    

It is as almost as if America has lost its sanity?  Does the I.N.S. actually think that an Iranian Jew could be part of the Islamic terrorist network? Most of these immigrants, especially the Iranians are refugees. They are persecuted in their own country. They are Jews, Christians, Baha’is and Zoroastrians. Many of them are not religious at all. Many of them have left Islam and now denounce it as a cult of terror. What do any of these people have to do with Islamic terrorism? In what ways America will be safer if these law abiding, tax-paying immigrants and refugees are once again persecuted, fingerprinted, humiliated, fined and jailed? It seems that America has lost the notion of right and wrong and in desperation is infringing the human rights of innocent people. Terrorists do not go to register. Terrorists have multiple IDs. America is persecuting the wrong people. These are not the terrorists. Putting them in jails and fining them with thousand of dollars is not going to make America a safe country.

If the Government is really interested in finding terrorists, it should instead round up those who attend mosques, read the Quran and believe in Muhammad. Do not just look at their color of the skin or their country of origin. This terrorism is not ethnically motivated. It is religiously motivated. The terrorists are Muslims. They want to kill you because Muhammad told them so. Muhammad told them to kill the infidels, “smite above their necks and smite all their finger-tips off them”. He told them “fight and slay the Pagans wherever ye find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem”.  This terrorism has nothing to do with people’s nationality; it has everything to do with their beliefs. There are American terrorists, born and raised in America. What are you going to do about them?  

On the one hand, PBS is sugarcoating and promoting the religion of terror, all paid by taxpayers’ money.  On the other hand, the I.N.S. jails innocent men just because they are from the Middle East. Where is America’s sanity? If you want to find the terrorists go to the mosques. Grab them there. There is where terrorists are made. There is where terrorism is taught. Treating innocent people like criminals just because they have overstayed their visa or broken some immigration law is ethically wrong. You are targeting the wrong people. Most of these people have left their home countries to escape Islamic terrorism.  They came here to be free. They are not endangering American lives. They are working, paying taxes and contributing to the continual building of this nation. What happened to America’s sanity? What happened to its respect for human rights? Is this the definition of the land of the free?