Council on American-Islamic Relations Quotes
You do not have to talk to the FBI. You have no obligation to talk to the FBI, even if you are not a citizen. Never meet with them or answer any questions without an attorney present.
By 2005 trust of many Muslims of the U. S. government had reached such a low point that loyal American Muslim organizations were recommending total non-cooperation with the FBI which had rounded up and held many loyal American Muslims while they were searching for fundamentalist terrorists. President George W. Bush made some very important speeches explaining that all Muslims were not responsible and the FBI worked hard to establish relationships with Muslim leaders and organizations. After a few years many of the roundup practices had stopped but there was a residual of mistrust thereafter.
Council on American-Islamic Relations, Know Your Rights Pocket Guide, 2005
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This is the classic argument given by those who would deny a defendant the Constitutional protection against self-incrimination. The belief that an innocent man has nothing to fear from the police is refuted by the many cases of innocent men being convicted by evidence they have given in the belief that they were innocent, and served long jail sentences only to later be proved by DNA evidence that they could not possibly have been guilty. Since Nott’s day, society has not only found many cases where honest error was made by the police or prosecutors, but many where there was venal prosecutorial misconduct and defendants were jailed even though the authorities were aware of evidence of innocence and kept it secret. There have been a number of these cases where a defendant was on death row and about to be executed when it was found he was innocent. Probably there have been men wrongly executed. See {629444} for a probable example.
This quotation was used both by those illustrating “Islamaphobia” even in the United States Congress, but also by those illustrating the level of ignorance or some members of Congress. While it is true, that the majority of terrorists at the time of this erroneous remark were Muslims, there were many others in addition to McVeigh. In addition to McVeigh’s accomplice, in America alone, there were many terrorists in prison for various bombings, sniper attacks, and the like. In Sri Lanka, the Tamil Tigers (Hindus), the inventors of modern suicide bombing, have been terrorizing that region for years. And in Nepal, a rash of Buddhist terrorists had almost paralyzed the country when she made her statement. And in the past, Muslim terrorism was far less than when she uttered the quotation and the Irish Republican Army, the Stern Gang in Israel, and dozens of others have been Christian and Jewish.
The health infrastructure of Nigeria was up to the job of containing the Ebola epidemic of 2014, but the police and military, notoriously corrupt, had not joined their services to fight and risk their lives, and would not do so, thus allowing Boko Haram, a radical Islamic terrorist group to thrive in the North of the country where there was a large Muslim population. Finally, in 2015 the government moved against Boko Haram but only with partial success.
The Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR) is a Muslim civil rights and advocacy group. It is headquartered on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., with regional offices nationwide. Through civil rights actions, media relations, civic engagement, and education, CAIR promotes social, legal and political activism among Muslims in America.
