“It is dangerous enough that the federal government keeps a secret watchlist of more than one million people, almost all of whom are Muslim, and treats these Muslims like second class citizens.”
Second class citizens? Really? In what way? What rights are Muslims denied? To what institutions or services are they barred access? How did Omar get into the House of Representatives as a second class citizen?
As for the watchlist, are there people on it who shouldn’t be? Have law-abiding, peaceful Muslims been inconvenienced? Probably. Mistakes will always be made. Patriotic citizens will put up with some inconvenience (while trying to have it redressed), knowing that the intent of the measures are to protect citizens. I have been stopped and given special searches at airports several times — once because police saw me working on “Jihad Watch” on my laptop and didn’t know what side it was on, and another time because a few pages full of Qur’an quotes fell out of my jacket pocket as I was going through security. In neither case, or in any of the others, did I complain. Targeting the terror watchlist as a whole only weakens our response to the jihad terror threat. Does Ilhan Omar want there to be no terror watchlist at all? Does she think there is no jihad terror threat? Or does that threat simply not cause her any concern?
“With CAIR’s Backing, Rep. Ilhan Omar Targets FBI Terror Database,” by Patrick Goodenough, CNS News, July 1, 2019:
(CNSNews.com) – Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and ten other House Democrats have written to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, requesting information about how information from the FBI-administered terrorist watchlist is shared with foreign governments – including governments with poor human rights records.
In doing so, she pointed to the support of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a sometimes controversial group that has mounted legal challenges against the watchlist, formally known as the Terrorist Screening Database (TSDB).
In a release Friday about the letter to Pompeo, Omar quoted CAIR national Executive Director Nihad Awad, who said the TSDB was “dangerous enough” in itself, but even more so when shared with “tyrannical regimes.”
Other signatories of Omar’s letter include Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.). The two freshmen are the first Muslim women to be elected to the U.S. Congress.
Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio), one of the more than two dozen Democrats running for their party’s 2020 presidential nomination, also signed.
“In our oversight role as Members of Congress, we are entitled to information as to which countries receive this sensitive and classified information about American citizens, many of whom have never been charged, arrested, or convicted of a crime,” the lawmakers wrote.
They believe that the TSDB has been shared with more than 60 foreign countries, well beyond the 38 Visa Waiver Program (VWP) countries. They said other countries with information-sharing arrangements were believed to include Albania, Slovenia, India, Brazil, Mexico, Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Tunisia, and Israel, they wrote. (Slovenia is in fact a VWP country.)
Omar and her colleagues voiced particular concern “that the federal government is sharing watchlist information with countries with dubious human rights records, including Saudi Arabia and China.”
“It is unacceptable for U.S. resources to contribute to the brutal repression of political dissidents abroad,” they charged.
The 11 House Democrats asked Pompeo to provide, within 90 days, specific information about the TSDB, including which countries get the data; what standards exist to determine whether the data is shared with foreign governments; whether foreign counties’ human rights records are taken into account when making decisions on sharing; and how and whether a data-sharing agreement can be rescinded once reached.
‘Second class citizens’
In her release, Omar quoted CAIR’s Awad as saying, “It is dangerous enough that the federal government keeps a secret watchlist of more than one million people, almost all of whom are Muslim, and treats these Muslims like second class citizens.”
“The danger, however, increases exponentially when this watchlist is shared with tyrannical regimes all across the world,” Awad continued. “Congress and the public ought to know which foreign governments receive the watchlist and what has been done to people targeted by a watchlisting system that now spans the globe. CAIR applauds this oversight.”
CAIR, which calls itself the nation’s biggest Muslim civil rights and advocacy group, is a long-standing critic of the TSDB.
“For years, CAIR has represented innocent Muslims — people who have not been charged, arrested, or convicted of a violent offense — who have been targeted by the watchlisting system,” the organization says. “Some have lost jobs, been separated from their families, and all have been stigmatized by being treated as ‘terrorists’ by their own government.”
In 2016 CAIR launched a class-action lawsuit on behalf of a group of Muslim Americans who said that being placed on the watchlist resulted in invasive travel screening and harm to their reputations….