Essay No. 1
February 9, 2003

Response to “FBI's Tracking of Muslims Raising Alarm with Some”

Have Muslims been treated unfairly in this country? In an essay “FBI’s Tracking of Muslims Raising Alarm with Some,” posted on the Internet on October 6, 2002, Philip Shenon and David Johnston write about how FBI set a surveillance campaign to track young Muslim men they think have terrorist cells inside United States to assist Al-Qaeda. They monitor the suspects’ telephone calls, e-mail messages, Internet use, and their credit card charges. They also dare to monitor the suspects’ gathering places, including mosques. The surveillance program has helped the FBI to arrest dozen of young Muslims in western New York, in Detroit, in Seattle, and in Portland, Oregon since late summer. Philip Shenon and David Johnston, the authors of the article, say that the surveillance campaign is centered in the Detroit, Michigan area because the largest population of people of Arab descent lives there. In the article, the authors report that some Arab-Americans and Muslim groups are not happy with what is going on inside their communities. They have complained about the FBI’s unfair accusation that these young men have some connection with Al-Qaeda. In my opinion, the authors of the article have done a valuable thing to make people aware of these problems. I think that the FBI is not doing a great job. I don’t think it came with a right idea to solve this problem. The FBI’s effort to go after these young Muslim men will not eliminate potential terrorists. Their actions will just cause more people to turn into terrorists to protest this treatment.

The authors of the article quote Hussein Ibish, communications director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, as saying, “Young Arab Men, in particular, are being treated as suspicious, possibly dangerous.” He also