Muslim Legal Defense Fund of America (MLFA)

Guantanamo North:  Muslim Prisoners in America

By Geoffrey Cook, TMO

I. Summer Hararah

Union City (Calif.)–Although the Observer has covered the Muslim Legal Defense Fund of America (MLFA) in its Macro-environment of fighting Islamophophobia, this author would like to look at this phenomenon in its microscopic detail by covering the First Annual MLFA monetary reserve-raising dinner of the (San Francisco Bay Area’s) during last May (2013) at one of the large Indo-and Pakistani-American restaurant/community focal points, Candani restaurant and banquet hall, half way between Oakland and San Jose in the S.F. Bay Area of Northern California.

The dinner was advertised as a gala featuring Imam Siraj Wahhaj, Rabab Abdulhadi, Charles Swift, Ahmed Ghappour, Amir Surlaiman in memory of Sanabel Abubaker.

Summer Hararah, the Greater San Francisco area director pointed out that the regional offices opened up in the fall of 2012 to address the legal discriminatory policies enforced against American Islam post-9/11.

Summer, who was born and raised here in the Bay Area, put forth the question of what it would be like if and when total freedom would be withdrawn.  Women who were dying of curable diseases in Palestine would have been saved if they were allowed to immigrate into the States.  Hararah was strong in putting forth the “Woman” issue within which the West in misnomer claims to be superior.

(Your writer, having served three years as the Chair years of a refugee rights organization in the East Bay here, which advocated for those whom the organization screened, and were deemed to have the right for political asylum status, but, yet, at the same, he has to admit there is an inherent prejudice to certain ethnic and religious backgrounds in the decision of our immigration courts, and it was a tremendous battle for us to convince the immigration judges of their rights under immigration law.  This is particularly true for Islamic Palestinians!)

By the way, one of the lights in the tunnel are what are known as the mainline Christian dominations, which, with education, are becoming more attuned and allied to the Muslim population within our common Commonwealth, and see their civil and religious rights (the Constitutional right of freedom of religion) as synonymous with their own.  Unfortunately, this is not as true with the fundamental Churches who believe the “Second Coming” of the Prophet Issa will occur after the founding of a new Israel to be followed by thermo-nuclear war in the Middle East.  Your essayist has written more about this several years back upon these pages.  Are these believers more dangerous than (violent) Islamic fundamentalist Jihadi Movements?   Succinctly, this should be an active point of debate against the merits of Islamophobia within the vulgar American discourse.

While the woman refugees are turned away unjustly at our borders, their brothers and fathers are charged with illegal combatant status or are put away in prison for possible terrorist connections because of their ethnicity and/or religion.    “The same government that [supposedly] offers the “best” legal guarantees takes our fathers away from us!”

“We have to stand solidly with any family [within our community] to which this has happened!”  The MLFA, through its legal aid, supports the community under its current duress.
Your correspondent shall consider this fund-raiser with its ramification over several forthcoming installments.

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