We have known for some time now that liberty and security live in opposition to one another. Liberty requires that individuals be allowed to act and choose as they desire, unfettered by the restrictions of government. Security, meanwhile, requires that personal freedom be restricted so that deviant behavior can be seen and snuffed out. Giants of history like Benjamin Franklin, men who have created nations, have convinced us of this much. And so, when terrorism does hit home and governments respond by strengthening security to protect against future attacks, they must know that every choice they make in the pursuit of security weakens the very liberties they claim to cherish.
No matter how obvious a truth this is, governments will never admit it; to do so would be to invite unwelcome scrutiny into the ways in which governments have weakened the freedoms of the people they purport to serve. And so it falls to journalists and libertarians, advocates and whistleblowers, to alert us to the ways in which our governments have robbed us of our freedom for the sake of our security. In this, Mohamed's Ghosts is a revelatory and frightening tale.
Mr. Salisbury, a journalist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, describes here the manner in which the US government, in response to the September 11th Attacks, have used the insinuation of possible links between American imams and foreign terrorists to jeopardize and then shut down mosques across the United States. The author's case centers on a particularly egregious incident in which the mosque of Mohamed Ghorab, an Egyptian living in Philadelphia, was left to decay after immigration officials discovered that Ghorab was in the United States on an expired student visa. Launching an investigation, the authorities used rumor and innuendo, along with an old airplane seat in the basement of ghorab's mosque -- a one-time garage in one of Philadelphia's worst neighborhoods --, to justify his deportation back to Egypt, severing him from his American family and leaving his community work on Philadelphia's troubled streets to wither on the vine.
From this, Mr. Salisbury expands the scope of his investigation to document other cases in which the US government, paranoid of further attacks, overreacted to a swath of expired student visas by heartlessly uprooting the offenders from their lives and expelling them from the United States. The author concludes that this overzealousness may have lead to the expulsion of up to a thousand Islamic leaders from the country, mistreatment which would surely not have befallen Christians had Christians been responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
Mohamed's Ghosts is a challenging read. Though Mr. Salisbury undoubtedly infers too much from a handful of gross injustices, the picture of a nation struggling to cope with the psychic wound of 9/11 is both vivid and convincing. While then president Bush was on television, asking Americans to be tolerant of Muslims, arguing that Islam was a peaceful faith, his government was scraping together rumor and shards of half-truths in order to banish innocent Muslim from its shores. It eagerly seized upon the expired visas as proof of ill intent while failing to acknowledge the widespread incompetence of the immigration service which allowed those visas to lapse and stay lapsed without sanction or comment. More over, the author documents the unwillingness of the US government to acknowledge, or vigorously prosecute, the numerous cases of anti-Arab crime which played out across the country in the days and weeks following the attacks. The case for the Bush administration's extraordinary duplicity is well-made.
But while Mr. Salisbury succeeds in demonstrating how the overreactions of governments ensnare and criminalize innocents, his longwinded digressions into his own past as an activist in the 1960s are unnecessary distractions from the work's primary thrust. In fact, given that the author fails to provide much in the way of proof that Mohamed Ghorab's treatment has been duplicated with a thousand other imams in the United States, his reflections on the 1960s, which are meant to exemplify the flaws of the security state, read like filler.
This is chilling work. Mr. Salisbury nails the duplicity, he nails Ghorab, he nails the culture that gives rise to the foolishness of the post 9/11 security state, but the weakness of the case for the broader picture is troubling. Nonetheless, a worthwhile read. (3/5 Stars)
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