At first, the devout Muslims who gathered in a Washington, D.C., conference center seemed like they could have come from any mosque. There were women in headscarves and bearded men who quoted the Quran. But something was different. While mingling over hors d’oeuvres, they discussed how to change Islam’s future. A woman spoke about fighting…
A 32-year-old Iraqi immigrant fatally beaten in her home in El Cajon was buried in her native country over the weekend. Shaima Alawadi, who was found unconscious March 21 by her 17-year-old daughter, was buried in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, south of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad. “Oh God, take revenge on those responsible,” Nabil Alawadi…
WASHINGTON — One of two new members of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom has Muslim civil rights groups crying foul. Zuhdi Jasser, who lauded a controversial New York City police surveillance program that targeted Muslims and helped lead the opposition to an Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero, has been appointed to the…
WASHINGTON — The American Civil Liberties Union on Tuesday released records it obtained from the FBI that it said showed the bureau’s San Francisco division used its Muslim outreach efforts to collect intelligence on religious activities protected by the Constitution. Under the U.S. Privacy Act, the FBI is generally prohibited from maintaining records on how…
SAN FRANCISCO–Reports obtained by the ACLU show agents gathered intelligence under the guise of outreach programs and shared it with other agencies. A legal expert calls the practice ‘outrageous.’ Federal agents routinely profiled Muslims in Northern California for at least four years, using community outreach efforts as a guise for compiling intelligence on local mosques,…
