|
|||
|
|
|
|
|
| The Impact of Islamic
Immigration on American Values and the Jewish Community
June 5, 2002
Hosts:
Moderator:
Panelists: Stephen Steinlight, Ph.D., Editor, South Asia in Review; Former Senior Fellow, American Jewish Committee Pennsylvania Region Mark Krikorian, Executive Director, Center for Immigration Studies MR. PUDER: I would like to welcome members and non-members. Those of you who are not members yet, I hope that you will become members after this evening. We have our literature right outside the door here. You can pick it up on the way out. Hopefully by the time you come home, you'll be convinced that the American Jewish Congress is your organization. I could introduce almost everyone here because we have a lot of board members and past presidents. We have a great program. In fact, we have an intellectual treat tonight for all of you. So I'll be short. I want to recognize two ladies that made a great deal of a difference this evening. They came and helped. One is Bernice Gross and the other one is Fran Netzman. I clearly also do not want to neglect Carl, who has always been here with the camera and has taken gratis pictures for us. So Carl we thank you, too. Finally, let me say that I want to thank every one of you for supporting this organization and I hope to see you in future events. I now would like to invite our president, Stewart Weintraub to tell you a little bit about the organization. MR. WEINTRAUB: Thank you. Welcome everyone. I'm glad to see we have such a nice turn out for this evening's program. Some people commented to me in anticipation of the program about what they thought various speakers would say. And I said I have no idea. So whatever they are going to say it's going to be news to me. My role tonight, I've been asked to tell you a little bit about the history of AJ Congress, and it's my privilege and pleasure to do that. The American Jewish Congress was organized in 1919 by Rabbi Stephen Wise and other Jewish leaders as a grass-roots organization to support a Jewish state and to support response to the conditions in Europe for Jews at the time. In 1933 Rabbi Wise was one of the first Americans to organize a rally to raise the voice of Jews in the United States and to call attention to Hitler's treatment of Jews in Europe. After the war we were among the first to call for the creation of the state of Israel. And our support to Israel and the peace process has been steadfast ever since. Our domestic agenda has also been in the forefront of our activities over the years. I almost hesitate to make this analysis and this comparison but I read once someplace and it may you know, it made some sense to me since I'm familiar with reorganization, a little bit familiar with reorganization, and people ask what's the difference between AJ Committee, AJ Congress and ADL. One article I read, it's not my thoughts, said that when something occurs, some discrimination, some event occurs AJ Committee will commission a study. ADL will have a press conference and AJ Congress will file the lawsuit. And for that reason AJ Congress has been known and come to be known as the attorney general of the Jewish community. Our positions on various issues I think are well known on the domestic scene in that we are what's the word I'm looking for steadfast in our support for the separation of church and state. Recently there was a decision coming out of the fifth circuit in New Orleans which reinstated a lawsuit that we filed in Texas challenging the Charitable Choice Program that then Governor Bush had initiated in Texas. Our position, certainly support a woman's right to choose and on our activities on women's issues has also been consistent and well known. We've also been at the front of the civil rights movement and joined with others in the NAACP and the ACLU to recognize that if there's discrimination against any minority, there's going to be discrimination against Jews. That's our organization in a nutshell. And with that I think I'll bring up our treasurer, Bob Guzzardi, who will introduce our panel for you. MR. GUZZARDI: Thank you, Stewart. And I'd to join in Joe's invitation to join the American Jewish Congress. It's $50 a year. I think it's a bargain at that price, and I hope you will consider it if you're not already a member. Dr. Steinlight and Mark Krikorian, I hope you won't mind if I introduce and mention Ted Mann first. Ted Mann is a board member of the American Jewish Congress in the Pennsylvania region and he has a been a past national president of the American Jewish Congress. He's a senior partner at Mann, Ungar, Spector and Labovitz, PC, a Philadelphia law firm specializing in securities and fraud litigation, antirust litigation and complex commercial litigation and constitutional law. Since 1997 Mr. Mann has been on the executive committee of the Israel Policy Forum. He's the founding co-chair of Project Nishma from 1988 to 1997, which was created to encourage American Jewish organizations to be more supportive of a Middle East peace process. In 1985 Mr. Mann was also the founding chairperson for the Mazon, the Jewish response to hunger. From '84 to '88 he was the national president of the American Jewish Congress. From '81 to '83 he was the chairman of the National Congress on Soviet Jewry. From '78 to '80 Mr. Mann was the chairperson of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. From '76 to '80 he was the chairman of the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council. From '67 to '70 Ted Mann was president of the Jewish Community Relations Council. In addition, Mr. Mann has been counsel in a number of major religious liberty cases, Bible reading in public schools, blue laws as applied to Sabbath observing Jews, state aid to parochial schools and has argued before the United States Supreme Court and other courts from 1957 to date. He has published articles on legal, international and Jewish communal matters, inter alia, in Litigation magazine, Juris, Notre Dame Law Review, Movement Magazine, Judaism, Congress Monthly, Journal of South Asian and Middle East Studies and national and international press. He's married to Ronni since 1954, has three children and two grandchildren. Mark Krikorian is the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. It has a website, www.cis.org, a non-profit, non-partisan research organization in Washington, DC which examines and critiques the impact of immigration upon the United States. The Center is animated by a pro-immigrant, low-immigration vision, which seeks fewer immigrants but a warmer welcome for those admitted. Mr. Krikorian frequently testifies before Congress and has published articles in the Washington Post, New York Times, Commentary, National Review and elsewhere and has appeared on 60 Minutes, Nightline, The News Hour With Jim Lehrer, CNN, National Public Radio and on many other television and radio programs. He holds a master's degree from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and a Bachelor's degree from Georgetown University and has spent two years at Yerevan State University in then Soviet Armenia. Before joining the Center in February 1995 he held a variety of editorial and writing positions. Dr. Stephen Steinlight has recently been appointed editor of the South Asia in Review, the new journal founded in the fall of 2001, which covers politics, religion, foreign policy, the military, economics and social and cultural forces in various countries, is a project of the United States Institute of Strategic Studies of South Asia. Prior to assuming the position, Dr. Steinlight was a senior fellow at the American Jewish Committee. Prior to this he was the director of national affairs at AJC for five years. Dr. Steinlight was the founder and senior advisor to the critically acclaimed Common Quest, the magazine of Black-Jewish Relations, co-sponsored by AJC and Howard University from 1966 to 2000. He is the co-author with Jonathan Rieder of Barnard College of the forthcoming Fractious Nation: Race, Class and Culture at the End of the Century, published by the University of California Press, Berkeley. Currently Dr. Steinlight is editing and contributing to a groundbreaking collective work on Latino- Jewish relations. Along with Khalid Duran, president of the IbnKhaldun Society of Independent Muslim scholars, he directed the creation of three books on Islamic-Jewish relations, the Children of Abraham Project, co-authoring The Children of Abraham, an introduction to Islam for Jews. He is also advisor to the newly formed American Association of Muslin Freethinkers. He was co-chief investigator of a major grant, funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, exploring charitable choices that resulted in the consensus document in Good Faith, a dialogue on government funding of faith-based social services. He is also working with the editor publisher of Pakistan Today, Tashbi Sayyed on a book depicting the evolving worldview of a youth growing up in traditional Islam in Pakistan. Dr. Steinlight has lectured and debated on public policy across the United States and around the world. Before joining the AJC, Dr. Steinlight was vice president for programs at the National Conference on Community Justice and before that director of Educational Outreach for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. For over 20 years Dr. Steinlight was a professor of English Literature with a specialization in Victorian studies. He has taught at the University of Sussex, England and the Institute Britannique de Paris, France, the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, and the Graduate School of New York University. Dr. Steinlight is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Columbia College, Columbia University and has been the recipient of the Columbia College Alumni Merit Award. He received his MA and Ph.D. from the University of Sussex, England where he was a Marshall Scholar. He has also been a fellow, National Endowment for the Humanities, Stanford University, fellow, Institute on Polish Jewish Relations and the Holocaust, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland, traveling scholar in residence in Eastern Europe, Woodrow Wilson fellow, the list goes on and on. He has two daughters, Emily 22 and Alexandra 15. Dr. Steinlight lives in Manhattan. He is also the author of this very, very interesting article, which is outside, the Backgrounder. I started to read a little bit of it and it just pulls you right along. It is a fascinating and well written article. I'll turn over the program to Lee Bender. Lee Bender is a member of the board of the American Jewish Congress, Pennsylvania region. He is a lawyer in Philadelphia, and he is the president of the Committee for International Affairs, which is what brings him here tonight. MR. BENDER: I'd like to welcome everybody again to the program. I'm going to be moderating tonight. Let me just tell you how the program is going to proceed tonight. We're going to give each speaker 10 minutes. I'll be keeping time, but I didn't bring a stopwatch. After the ten minutes each speaker will get five minutes to respond to the other speakers. After that we will be holding a question and answer session, which should give everyone ample time to ask questions of our panel. What I would ask everyone to do at that point is we have a microphone that's set up here in the aisle. If you can, and I know it might be difficult for some of you to get out of your seats, but if we can, I would ask that you come up to the microphone and ask your question. At the time when you ask your questions, you're going to try ask that you try to get to the point of your question, not make a lengthy speech, if you can. We want to get the program moving as swiftly as we can. Finally, we've given each speaker about five minutes or so to wrap up. That's how we're going to proceed tonight. I want to welcome our first speaker, who will be Ted Mann.
PRESENTATION OF THEODORE MANN, ESQ. MR. MANN: Thank you, Lee, Joe, and Bob. I asked for the privilege of taking my ten minutes first so that it would be hard to compare me to the two speakers who came before me. That's because I'm very far from an immigration expert. Like all of you, I have many questions of my own and my remarks will be more in the nature of inquiries to the extraordinarily qualified participants we have with us this evening. A few initial background comments. We know why American Jews have always favored a very liberal immigration policy. We are here, most of us, because of the phenomenal liberal immigration policy followed in America at the end of the last century and beginning at the end of two centuries ago and the beginning of the last one. And we've never forgotten that. More than that, as a community we're convinced that our physical security depends in a very large part in the end on pluralism, on the remarkable fact that America is the only nation in the world that has for so long maintained democracy and a huge degree of freedom for most of our people, notwithstanding the fact that there is probably no other nation in the world made up of so many different separate racial ethnic religious and national strands. We're not the only beneficiaries of that America, of that miracle but I guess all Americans are, but we certainly must be counted among those groups of Americans who have benefited most from it. And I should add that the separate interests of so many incoming groups has added to the antagonism of influence that James Madison or Hamilton, nobody knows for sure who, in Federalist Paper No. 51 and after them John Stuart Mill, believed were necessary for a non-despotic society to endure. Pluralism in a society like ours has a very short shelf life, maybe 75 of 100 years. And, therefore, must constantly be fed. And we feed it in the Jewish community relations field by working for a liberal national immigration and refugee policy. But there are two reasons that history teaches us to bespeak caution and moderation in that regard. Of course moderation is critical, I believe, in all aspects of public policy. But I think it is especially so in regards to immigration. And almost unanimous the United States Congress in 1924 enacted a vicious and racist quota system that you're aware of that virtually barred immigration of people in certain parts of the world. And that racist law remained in effect for 40 years, and I need not point out that those years include the years in which we lost one-third of our people, the children and the grandchildren of some of whom might otherwise be with us in America right now. That racist policy came about because the majority of American people deplored our open door policy which allowed so many so-called undesirables, that's us, into America. For the Jewish community the lesson of that experience, the direct lesson of that experience, I believe, is to always keep a careful eye on the mood of the general public in these matters so that we do not seek and obtain so liberal an immigration and refugee policy in America that ultimately there would be a legislative shutting of the doors altogether. The second reason that bespeaks caution and moderation arises out of the terrorism, the terrorism threat that was brought home to us so drastically and tragically nine months ago. While it has not been repeated here in America, we, the Jewish community in particular are reminded by the daily, daily suicides bomb attack attempts in Israel, there was a tragic one, as you know, this morning, that matters could develop the same way here in the United States. Our two oceans in no way protect us from such a development. The question how this very realistic concern about our physical security as Americans should impact on our immigration policy is a matter of almost constant commentary by opinion writers, by the Justice Department, by scholars such as we have with us here tonight and by all of us, really, in our thoughts and in our conversations every day. My own view I put forth tentatively, and it may upset some of our American Jewish Congress people. I put it forth with full knowledge of my own limitations in this particular field and in the hope that our other two participants will either set me straight or come forward with their own specific suggestions that might give guidance to the Jewish community as it develops its programs and policies in the months and years ahead. For me two apparently separate issues come together here as one. The first is how to build limits into our immigration laws that will keep out most potential terrorists without engaging in the kind of racial or religious profiling that is so offensive to all those living in a pluralistic democratic society such as ours. That issue in itself is exceedingly difficult. The second issue is America's obligation to use the bully pulpit and its extraordinary influence on so many nations in the world to change the actions and inactions of certain states whose policies are bringing about the increasingly frenzied anti-American, anti-Semitic, anti-Christian hatred which nourish the terrorism that we are all, frankly, afraid of. There are places in this world, as every one of you know, where government leaders themselves or government controlled newspapers and other media spew out this hatred. There are places in this world with no traditional separation of religion and government in which every Friday clerics in mosques throughout the land teach the hatred of Jews and Christians and all Americans. We as a nation already maintain a list of terrorist states. Syria, for example, is on it, just one example. I remember traveling to Damascus twice in the mid 1990s to meet with Syria's foreign minister and others, and our concern was not Syria's Jewish community, there were very few Jews left in Syria at that time and they were not being mistreated, our interest was in somehow attempting to advance the peace process. But the Syrian interest was in somehow getting off the State Department Terrorist list so that it might benefit from the presumed economic advantages of increased trade, et cetera, that that might mean. It seems to me that there should be another list besides the terrorist list, a list of those states in which government leaders encourage the hatred that bedevils us or permit the government controlled press and other media or textbooks in the schools that teach racial and religious and national hatred or fail to influence clerics to refrain from using their own pulpit to inflame worshipers against other religious or national groups. Such a list could be used for two separate but very interrelated purposes. The first would be to apply much stricter standards in considering the admission into America of nationals of those states, whether as immigrants or students or as temporary visitors. I can't think of many good reasons why we should be permitting immigrants into the United States from lands in which such hatred is being systematically taught and in which the government there is doing nothing to counter such teachers or to encourage the development of tolerance. And, secondly, perhaps even more importantly, I do believe based on my own experience and some things that we all know, that America's stature and influence in the world today is such that the leaders of most of the states that would be on that list would be working mightily to convince America that it no longer deserves to be on it and that American pressure on such states will gradually bring about change. America's pressure does work. If this were 15 years ago when I flew to Reykjavνk, Iceland one dark night to make sure that President Reagan who was meeting with Gorbachev would know that Soviet Jewry activist groups were watching him, I would be saying that even the Soviet Union, Ronald Reagan's evil empire, wants relationships with the United States and will sooner or later allow Jews to leave in order to improve those relations. And they did. American pressure does work. I proffer that modest suggestion as my own contribution to this evening's discussion. And I would like to urge Jewish organizations to join with others in calling for a congressional hearings on that kind of proposal. Having said that, now I am as anxious as you are to hear from my fellow panelists. Thank you very much.
MR. BENDER: Next we will hear from
Dr. Stephen Steinlight. PRESENTATION OF STEPHEN STEINLIGHT, Ph.D. DR. STEINLIGHT: Good evening and thank you very much for coming. Given the stature of my colleague and partner, Mark Krikorian, a distinguished expert on immigration, a rising celeb of sorts and one of the key and sanest players in the national debate on immigration, and on the other side Ted Mann, one of the truly great men of the organized American Jewish Community for many years, has fought many of the most important fights, I have little choice but to open my own remarks by posing the memorable question of Admiral Stockdale. You recall him of course. He was Ross Perot's vice presidential running mate, the amiable and worthy admiral asked himself in his opening remarks in the debate in which he participated was, who am I and why am I here. Now, whether he answered those questions to your satisfaction I will leave it up to you, or whether I will answer them to your satisfaction, I will also leave it up to you. My introduction, assuming you glanced at them, as you may have discovered I was for seven and a half years a senior staffer at the other AJC, the one that likes to do the research, and served as director of the National Affairs and as a senior fellow. No apology. Though I would like to note that I have no German Jewish blood. My father was born in Prague and my mother Latvia. I will spare you the needless trouble of trying to deconstruct where my ideas really come from by laying my cards face up on the table at the get-go. After some considerable introspection, I decided that my purpose is to be as unashamedly parochial as possible, to express a self-interest in Jewish point of view. For many Jews this is a psychologically challenging test. We wish so desperately to be loved and to be politically correct. But for better or for worse, this is not a difficult test for me. I know of course that we Jews have made many notable contributions to human civilization as a result of a dialectic at the heart of our identity as a people. We are simultaneously the most universalistic of people and the most intensely tribal. Indeed, there was a time in the first century where we might have become the dominant religion in the Roman Empire if we heeded our universalists. But some of our continuity experts of that era decided we should be a tribe rather than a universal faith. These idiots also insisted, as do their present day representatives, on endogamy and biological chosenness with the results that there are 12 million Jews in the world and say one and a half billion Muslims and about the same number of Christians. This has led me to the inescapable conclusion that we either have the worst religious product in the history of the world or the worst marketing department. I tend to lead to the former conclusion. My heretical desire to universalize the faith, to drop the concept of chosenness, even to proselytize, has led my many Muslim friends to tell me that I'm actually a Muslim at heart, something which I suppose would not represent much of a leap since no two religious systems in the world are closer are more alike than Judaism and Islam. I could do, I suppose, the Cat Stevens thing but it would kill my mother. Let me express this notion of Jewish parochialism in the immediate context of our panel by sharing an anecdote many here may know. This concerns one of the great men of the Jewish world. In the late forties the American Jewish community was anguishing over its relationship with the Zionist movement. Many Jews were afraid to rock the boat or appear disloyal. They had barely achieved acceptance in a still highly anti-Semitic America and were only beginning to be seen as racially white at a time when ethnicity was seen to be racially 'other.' There was a famous public debate between the dean of Jewish religious leaders of that age, Rabbi Stephen Meyer Wise, and a well known anti-Zionist rabbi and a New Jerseyan from Newark, Dr. Solomon Foster, of Temple B'nai Jeshuran who was a member of the American Council for Judaism, which was just then splitting off from the American Jewish Committee because of the ferocity of its anti-Zionism. In the course of that debate Rabbi Foster posed a series of flamboyantly delivered rhetorical questions to Rabbi Wise. "What would you think of Zionism," Rabbi Foster bellowed, "If you were an Arab what would you think of Jewish colonies in Palestine if you were Arab? What would you think of British suppression of Arab nationalism if you were an Arab? What would you think of having to share a mandatory Palestine with Jews if you were an Arab?" At the conclusion of all these questions Rabbi Wise coolly responded, "Well Rabbi Solomon, pray tell me, what would you think if you were a Jew?" Rabbi Wise's council can tell you what I think as a Jew. I could of course have selected a softer tone and a more user friendly persona and addressed this group as an ecumenist and a pioneer in inter-religious dialogue involving Muslims. When I was vice president of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, I organized two meetings with the International Scholars Annual Trialogue, the body that must really be credited under Mark Tannenbaum with beginning intensive interfaith work with local Islam. I helped organize meetings in Germany and in Israel with Muslim scholars from 17 countries. There were seminal encounters at those meetings that I had with some of the eminent groups of scholars from all over the world. I had the honor to chair sessions, the only non-Muslim to chair sessions of meetings of Ibn Khaldun Society, the great international meeting place of independent Muslim scholars. Recently I collaborated with Dr. Khalid on a book which earned him and me only a great deal of internal institutional misery. And when I ended my career at AJC after seven years, I left to take on a position as editor of South Asia in Review, a quarterly magazine of the United States Institute for Strategic Studies of South Asia, which produces what I think is the single best publication in this country on South Asia the weekly newspaper Pakistan Today. The institute and publication deal primarily with Muslim societies and with Islamism. And my publisher and dear friend is an ιmigrι Pakistani Muslim, who once directed TV news in Pakistan. That was before the coup led by General Zia ul Haq that Islamized Pakistan. I've also met on many occasions with Shaikh Kabbani of the Islamic Supreme Council of America, a truly great and pious man, and I dream of the day when he and I can combine forces. More to the point, I and several Muslim colleagues, including Khalid Duran, my publisher, Dr. Shaihk Ahmad Soby Mansour, one of the greatest minds at the El Ahzar University Mosque in Cairo, who is now seeking political asylum in the United States are working together to found a center for Islamic pluralism in the United States, an institution that we believe can help play a role in fomenting what is clearly needed, and that is a reformation in Islam. Now, to the heart of my subject, which is to draw attention to the evil of Islamism from a Jewish perspective and how it ought to affect our attitude towards immigration. What is this phenomenon of Islamism whose barbarous face we have had much opportunity to gaze at in the last months, although if we had the eyes to see it, we could have been at looking this monster for the last 20 to 30 years. It's a political ideology, spawned from the most aggressive and brutal interpretation of Islam with strong theocratic and fascist elements that seeks world domination and the imposition of a high bound interpretation of traditional Islamic law or Sharia on all human society. It is this that drives the Bin Ladens of the world, not as my left wing colleagues would have it that the U.S. eats too high on the world hog. The uneven distribution of wealth in the world undoubtedly contributes to the movement's appeal, but it is not what energies it. It is without a doubt the most powerful ideological movement in contemporary Islam worldwide, and it also is extremely strong in the American Muslim community. Islamism is profoundly hostile to pluralism, to religious tolerance, to democracy, secular civil society, to Jews, Zionism, Israel, the West in general and the United States in particular. It is a movement that festers and spreads in the impoverished conditions in the Muslim world in societies ruled by corrupt regimes. And it often flourishes in the actions in venality, inhumanity and tyranny of local secular regimes like those in Egypt, Syria and Iraq and the Gulf states and formerly in the Shah's Iran. In opposition it seems enormously appealing and even humane to its followers. Almost all Islamic societies lack even the most rudimentary social services. The Islamist organizations provide healthcare, education and even modest pensions, but once in power these kind of regimes are more brutal than the ones they replaced. The movement expresses itself through violent popular agitation, intolerant religiosity, irrational atavistic values, ruthless misogyny, aversion to individual rights, large-scale terrorism, hatred towards anything pursued as foreign and pie in the sky theology. It is the ultimate expression of, as my old professor at Columbia, Fritz Stern, once called "the politics of cultural despair." The movement represents pure despair, deep-seated cultural reaction to Islam's sociopolitical, technological, and military defeat at the hands of the West, Russia and India. That defeat has been manifested in a variety of ways but chiefly in the Islamic world's past conquest by Western and Russian Imperialism, which I would add parenthetically was only a response to empire attempts to conquer the West and its loss in the race to modernity and prosperity. It has been left behind historically, underdeveloped and overpopulated and relatively powerless while the West has developed mass democratic post-industrial technocratic and meritocratic consumer societies. There is an ocean of despair in the Islamic world this movement feeds on. An ocean so wide and so deep that we will have years and years of this problem ahead of us. Take the Arab world alone, I'm not talking about Indonesia, Pakistan, 70 percent of its population was born after 1970. Its young people are ultimately without economic opportunity. Unemployment rates average about 60 percent in these societies. These societies are run by a handful of powerful families who control huge and inefficient monopolies. They run the countries for their own interests and that of their foreign investment partners. Many of these young people are middle class, educated, and unprepared to accept the status quo. These are the shock troops of suicide bombing. Every Arab country without exception has a fallen GNP, and some of the great non-Arab Muslim states like Bangladesh, India and Nigeria not only face endemic violence and possible national disintegration but also are ecological time bombs with global warming causing the flooding of their coastlines, forcing the population into a barren interior. Islamism obviously found expression notably in the regime of Afghanistan, in the slave state of the Sudan, in the theology of rape in Iran, in the mass murder committed in the World Trade Center. It is also a movement that imprisoned my publisher, Tashbih Sayyed in Pakistan and tore out his fingernails, that has threatened the life of my friend Khalid Duran with a succession of fatwas issued by bigoted, mindless, ignorant mullahs at the instigation of American Islamists people, by the way, who are invited to the White House like Grover Norquist was and who take part in the ceremonies at the National Cathedral that assassinated 12 of 14 scholars, my friend, colleagues, who had been in Geneva in 1986 looking at the issue of human rights in the Islamic world. It may interest you to know, by the way, that these thugs don't live too far away in the world. A group in Passaic, New Jersey has been one of the groups that has most recently made an attempt on the life of Shaikh Kabbani. As a Jew I don't have the luxury of regarding this phenomenon with scholarly detachment. There is a simple reason for my inability to do this. While its first targets and victims have been independent thinkers in the Muslim world, thousands of writers, academics and journalists who it has murdered or forced into exile or intimidated into silence, its prime target is the Jewish people. The Islamists believe the Jews direct a worldwide conspiracy against it, with the Jews controlling the world through their stranglehold on America, its banks, it's media, not to mention the IMF and through the fortress state of Israel. As a Jew I have no intention of being devoured by this monster. On the contrary, I have every intention to helping to destroy and bury it. We should also note that Islamism is not only a problem in far away and unknown countries. The Jewish communities in England and France have already seen its ugly face in the recent riots in the English Midlands, which anti-Semitic invective formed a central component of the language uttered by the mobs and in France where the Muslim population now outnumbers Jews ten to one, and which is obviously influencing French foreign policy. That trend continues. I'm to going to stop here. I hope in the course of discussion what I will have an opportunity to do is to talk more about the Islamist movement in the United States and the Islamist organizations within the United States.
MR. BENDER: Now we hear from Mark
Krikorian. PRESENTATION OF MARK KRIKORIAN, CIS MR. KRIKORIAN: Thank you, Lee. Thank you all for having me. Daniel Pipes has introduced me to Bob Guzzardi last year, I think. Then Bob introduced me to Joseph Puder. And Joseph and I have been working on and off for a couple of months now trying to arrange this panel. And I think it's a really valuable panel. And I hope to replicate this in other places around the country. As a Gentile it may seem curious for me to be lecturing Jews on what's good for them. But I would just ask you to take into consideration that as an Armenian I'm only a bris away from being Jewish anyway. Take my comments for what they're worth. What I want to talk about is what are the implications for American Jews of Muslim immigration. And the news here I would submit is there's bad news and there's worse news. The bad news is the kind of violent attacks and anti-Semitic attacks that we're seeing in Europe are probably headed here but not for a while. There are reasons that the kind of violent Jew hatred that is manifested by Muslim immigrants in Europe has been a minor phenomenon here and probably will stay that way for a while. Muslims in this country are far more likely to be educated and have higher incomes whereas in Europe they're blue collar predominantly. I think that's really the primary reason that we have seen fewer of these kind of fire bombings and attacks on rabbis walking down the street, attacks on a Jewish soccer team in a Paris suburb. The worst news is that the affect on American Jews in the shorter term will be an erosion of American support for Israel. And, in fact, I think we're already beginning to see that. Support for Israel has been a cornerstone of American foreign policy for close to four decades by Republicans and Democrats. It's been one of the things that in a sense were maybe an exaggeration to say that politics has stopped at the water's edge with regard to support for Israel but probably it's closer with regard to support for Israel than anything else in our foreign policy. One of the reasons that that support is eroding, I would submit, one of the most important reasons is Muslim immigration. Again, this process is more advanced in Europe than it is here. The chief rabbi of France told Figaro recently, that's a French newspaper, "There seems to be a new perspective, an unconscious but very real response by authorities that there are now between five and six million Muslims in France but only 600,000 Jews, which means more consideration for the former." There are three reasons, I think, in the United States why we're already seeing this process, though it's obviously lagging compared to Europe. The first and most important is that more Muslim immigration eventually translates into more Muslim voters and more Muslim campaign contributors. And this is more than just simply a matter of numbers. Politically active Muslims are highly focused on changing U.S. policy in the Middle East. That is an overriding policy agenda. And because they're relatively well-educated and prosperous and aren't machine gun and kosher butchers, their intensity and commitment has a disproportionate effect on the foreign policy priorities that they set. We're already seen this in both parties. On the Republican side, you've already made an allusion to Grover Norquist, who is one of the most prominent and well-known conservatives, or I would say libertarian, Republican activists. But also I would point to Tom Davis, a congressman from Northern Virginia, my congressman I'm sorry to say, who is head of the Republican National Congressional Committee, the fund raising arm for congressional campaigns. His role was kind of conventional but nonetheless telling. He sponsored the Muslim religious stamp that was released in September of last year. Grover Norquist's role has been much more, I would submit, dangerous and proactive. Last year he claimed in the American Spectator magazine that Muslims were responsible for President Bush's election victory. He has made the conversion of the Muslim vote, if you will, to a Republican vote one of his top priority issues. He's already founding director of what's called the Islamic Institute, which you won't be surprised to learn has received funds from a Saudi charity that was raided by the FBI earlier this year. Grover has also, as Steve suggested, ushered into the White House a rouge gallery of anti-Israel groups, including the Council on American Islamic Affairs, The American Muslim Council, the Muslim Public Affairs Council and others. I don't consider the following gossip because I got it from a reliable source who can't put it in print. This person has talked to Norquist specifically about this issue of attempting to garner Muslim support and the effect it's likely to have on Jewish support for Republicans. And his response was something to the effect of, "Well, the damn Jews don't vote for us anyway, so who cares?" It's no better on the Democratic side for those of you who are Democrats. The anti-Israel Washington Report on Middle East Affairs earlier this year published its midterm 2001 report card for the first session of 107th Congress. Every member of it's Hall of Fame was a Democrat except for Bernie Sanders from Vermont, who might as well be. This included four of the nine house Democrats from Michigan, which is where the greatest concentration of Muslims is in the United States. Most notable among the Michigan Democrats championing Muslim causes is the person who could in a sense be seen as Norquist's Democratic counterpart, that is David Bonior, former member of the Democratic leadership and the current candidate for governor of Michigan. He has enthusiastically embraced the Muslim political agenda, especially the effort to force disclosure of classified evidence in terrorist deportation proceedings. To be fair, this is still something that President Bush strongly supports, although I'm not quite sure why. Another sign of the growing Muslim political power is that Congressman Bonior's bill, which was introduced before September 11th had 101 sponsors on September 11, and only one person has withdrawn. One hundred co-sponsors have kept their names on there because this is such a high priority issue among the Muslim organizations. Perhaps even more disturbing is Bonior's assessment that accepting money from supporters of anti-Israel terrorist groups is no longer politically damaging. Bonior proudly and publicly refused to return contributions from two high profile apologists for anti-Israel terror groups, Abdurahman Alamoudi, who publicly in front of the White House announced his support for Hamas and Hezbollah and Sami AlArian, a University of South Florida professor, who was fired after revelations about his ties with Islamic Jihad. As Muslim immigration continues we can expect to see a lot more David Boniors, who politicians no longer feel the need to burnish their philo-Semitic credentials, and, in fact, may fear that being seen as excessively philo-Semitic is a liability. I'll just briefly touch on two other reasons that Muslim immigration undermines U.S. support for Israel. First is that immigration makes possible, creates a base, for these so-called Muslim civil rights groups: CAIR, AMC, MPAC, and others. These groups, by presenting themselves as civil rights groups and voices for an aggrieved minority, sort of parasitically benefit from the struggle of black Americans, achieve a far more legitimate access to the political system than some lobbyist from the Saudi government can hire. The third and final act of longer-term threat to American support for Israel caused by Muslim immigration is what I would call terrorism. Muslim immigration creates communities that, intentionally or not, serve as cover for terrorism. To the degree that Americans come to see terrorist attacks on our own soil as a price for supporting Israel, even people who are well disposed towards Israel might start to rethink that support. Muslim immigration is what creates in a sense, enables these attacks. Let me briefly just mention in closing that most of the Jewish organizations the major organizations remain firmly wedded to a policy of high immigration. I would specifically point to the National Immigration Forum, which is the leading umbrella group lobbying for, in effect, open borders. This is something that Steve, having been on board of directors meetings for the National Immigration Forum, can talk about in more detail. The chairman of the board of directors is Diana Aviv from the United Jewish Community. And interestingly enough, this group is seen as so mainstream that Hadassah Lieberman is an honorary chairman of their annual banquet this year. One of the things that I think is kind of curious is that one of the other board members, one of the most important activists in high immigration lobbying, is the head of the American Immigration Lawyers Association Jeanne Butterfield. It seldom gets noticed that Jeanne Butterfield is the former director of something called the Palestine Solidarity Committee, which was formerly known, according to the ADL as the November 29th Committee for Palestine. The ADL further reported that Jeanne Butterfield's former organization that she ran, was, in effect, an alliance between I'm not making this up the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Trotskyite Workers World. However, if this woman had been head of a Ku Klux Klan organization she would have been permanently discredited for, you know, being involved in these kind of activities. On the other hand, having been essentially a fellow traveler with violent Jew hating organizations doesn't disqualify her, not only in participating in high immigration lobbying, but in intimately working with Jewish organizations in defending high immigration. But Jewish public opinion seems to be changing quite significantly. The American Jewish Committee last year at their annual survey, annual survey of American Jewish opinion found a large swing towards restricting immigration from 27 percent supporting some reduction, now it's 49 percent in 2001. And would I leave you just with the choice that we as Americans and
specifically Jewish Americans need to make. That is we can either defend
high immigration and guarantee a continued erosion of U.S. support for
Israel or we can try to reduce immigration, slow the growth of the
Muslim population, and promote the assimilation that is so powerful in
the American society in order to try to continue our support for Israel.
But we can't have both. Thank you. MR. MANN: I don't think I'll take five minutes, first of all, because Stephen Steinlight, his presentation was largely factual so far. There will be more, but I don't disagree with any of the facts that he set forth. When it comes to Mark Krikorian, I do have some differences, probably not differences about what we ought to be doing as a Jewish community in influencing American laws that will make it easier to keep out of the United States potential terrorists. That was part of the guts of my own presentation. But the way he got there, I found very disturbing. Perhaps mostly because Diana Aviv, with whom he has by virtue of his having connected her to Butterfield, Diana Aviv is, I think, one of the truly outstanding Jewish community relations people that I've ever met in the last 25 years. I think she's doing a phenomenal job. And if you begin to tear down people who are trying to do what you said, Mark, in the last sentence of your talk, who are trying to find ways of dialoguing with Muslims in America in order to do what the Jewish community has always done with different groups in America, that's what community relations is all about. If you're going to liable somebody for associating with people in dialogue, I think we're in deep trouble. And that's as great a danger for our society and certainly for our Jewish people as the one we're supposed to be talking about today. I am very upset about that. I want to say that there are many dangers confronting us. But I'll tell you, I've been around a long time. I've been in the community relations field for 50 years, 50 since I got out of law school at the age of 24, and I spend except for my time with my family and my law practice, I spend all of my time on Jewish community relations matters of one sort or another. I always did from the first day out of school and I still do. And I've heard this story about we got to worry because some group or other is going to grow faster than we and is going to have more political influence than we and Jews are going to be hurt in the long run. Indeed, it was part of the story 35 years ago or 30 years ago during the course of the emerging black power movement in the sixties and seventies. I've heard it time and again. And I'm afraid people who say that underestimate the political acumen of the American Jews, the American Jewish community, whether it is 5 percent of America or today 2.1 percent of America or tomorrow one and a half percent of America. Political influence in America goes to those who work hard, and I've never met a group except for business lobbyists, who have money interests and can be very energetic about politics I've never met another ethnic group or any other kind of non-commercial group in America that has had the political acumen and energy of American Jews. It amazes me all the time. It has not lessened one drop in 50 years. If anything it's gotten to be much better. You know, we were an effective lobbying organization, a very effective lobbying organization through APAC 30 years ago when it had one professional and it could produce letters signed by 98 Senators in supporting Israel just as easily as the huge APAC organization that we now have that does the same thing. We are a remarkable people. And if and let me just repeat one thing and I'll sit down. I think dealing with Muslims, new immigration into this society is one issue, and one issue that we have the ability if we're smart to do something about. I think the question of treating with Muslims who are already in this society, and some of them are terrible and some of them are good, and all of them are in one way or another our neighbors. Neighbors and another group of Americans is quite another thing. And we should think about it differently. They are Americans like we are Americans and they must be treated as such. Thank you. DR. STEINLIGHT: I think I would sleep a great deal better at night if I believed what Ted is saying but I don't. I think the organized Jewish community has a great deal of power. And I think that we are watching the high noon of American Jewish power in the United States, and it's moving downwards. We have 52 percent intermarriage. We have young people by every record who do not identify with Israel. We have a community which is assimilating to a remarkable degree. At the same time we have the influx of a large Muslim community with an extremely strong etiological identity and religious identity which is founded on antipathy to us. The Muslim community is not like any other community. Every single one of their national organizations with the exception of the Islamic Supreme Council is an Islamist organization. If you visited their websites, and I get all their websites, before 9/11 you would have heard you would have seen the most violent anti-Semitism, the most violent acts on Israel, the strongest support for slave regimes, strong support for Iraq, strong support for Tehran, and strong support for the Taliban. Now we're hearing something else because they're fine tuning their propaganda game. The fact of the matter also is that we are living in an age when immigrants are different than the immigrants that we used to know. For one thing, Jews tend to romanticize immigration because they think all immigration was like Jewish immigration. The fact of the matter is that if you read Bill Katzman's writing, he's done a great deal of work on this, the Russell Sage Foundation, Jewish immigration in American was ultimately atypical. Jews came went in one direction. They came here. They didn't go back. Why didn't they go back? Because they fled persecution. Half of all the Italians who came to America in the 19th century went back to Italy. So Jews went one way because Jews were adept at languages. Jews were the only group that in one generation learned English. Nobody else did. Jews also came to America, if you will, for all the right reasons, political and religious freedom and equality. We have a situation now where groups are coming for one reason alone, that is economic advantage. And they are also tied to their sending communities with powerful forces that did not affect the immigrants of yesteryear. You know, cheap phone calls, e-mail, cheap air flights give the sending communities continuing power over the lives and etiology of these communities in this country and will do so for a long time. I know in the Muslim community, for example I'll give you the example of the Pakistani community, that I know very well. If you're going to prosper in business the Pakistani community the local emon must bless your business. If you are politically independent or anti-Islamist, the local emon will help to boycott you and you'll be ruined. The fact of the matter is that the most atomistic attitudes are here and if you think MTV is going to kill them any time soon, you're wrong. In the long run, I believe that American assimilation will work. I don't doubt that. The lure of individual liberty and economic prosperity is very powerful. I think in the end -- in over 20 years MTV will win. I'm not so sure that's an entirely good thing but it will win. But in the next say ten years when the final settlement over the Middle East crisis is going to take place, when the deal is going to be cut about Israel, it's going to occur at the time of the maximum Muslim immigration, maximum desertion of Muslim political power and that's something we've got to watch out for. You know, I'm all for constitutional principles but I also remember Justice Goldberg telling us the constitution is not a suicide pact. MR. KRIKORIAN: I probably will take my five minutes. Maybe six. Let me start by pointing out that I don't know Diana Aviv. I have nothing against her. I'm sure she's a beautiful woman. It's not about Diana, nor is it even about my concern about interfaith dialogue or interaction and cooperation with new immigrant groups. That's imperative. I mean, the folks who are here are us now or their kids certainly will be. And it's imperative that we integrate them and draw them into our society successfully something my wife, by the way, actively tries to do. The main minority group in my kid's school in Northern Virginia is Muslim. The problem, though, is a blind adherence to an archaic immigration policy, one that leads to active, intimate cooperation with enemies of America and enemies of Jews. And the high immigration lobbying groups whether it's the National Immigration Forum I referred to or the American Immigration Lawyers Immigration Association, two of the most important locomotives of high immigration lobbying actively lobby against all measures to successfully reform and tighten up our immigration laws in order to improve security. This is no longer a matter of no longer a matter of dispute. Every measure the Justice Department has attempted to take, even submitting the names of people ordered deported but whom fled the law rather than comply with their deportation orders, the Justice Department only after September 11th decided to hand those names over to the FBI's criminal database so that if they were stopped for a traffic stop or something else their names would pop up. Even that measure has been opposed by the high immigration lobbying groups. My other point I want to bring up, this is something that has sort of been Ted briefly touched on, and I've heard it very frequently among other people, obviously in private conversation they're far more explicit, but what it really amounts to is, why don't you stop taking the Arabs. Let's not let any more Muslims in. I would submit to you that it doesn't work. Whether or not one sees this as compatible or incompatible with American ideals, practically speaking, attempting to target, exclusionist policies towards Muslims, keep out anybody from Saudi Arabia, whatever, doesn't work. It's not going to work. It's practically not going to work. Let me tell you why. We initially raised the bar, made it more difficult to come to the United States for people from the terrorist sending countries, people from the list of countries that the State Department identifies as terrorist sponsors, Syria, Iraq and Libya. Well, we don't have we stopped getting terrorists from those places. It's harder to get in. So now where do we get terrorists from? From other Muslim countries Egypt, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates. Now we've raised the bar for admission to the United States, made it somewhat more difficult to get in from those countries. I predict now what we're going to see then is domestic terrorism from non-Muslim majority countries that have large aggrieved Muslim minorities, India, the Philippines, China, Russia. Then we try to exclude people from China and the Philippines, India, Russia, some of the top immigrant sending countries in the world, we still have large aggrieved radicalized Muslim populations in Western Europe, in France, in Britain, Germany and Italy. In those countries, people citizens of those countries don't even require visas to come to the United States. They simply get on a plane. As long as they have a passport they can get on a plane and come to JFK. In fact, that's what we saw with Zacarias Moussaoui, the French citizen who didn't need a visa to come to the United States, likewise with Richard Reid, who didn't need a visa, did not have a visa to come to the United States. I would just submit that whatever reforms or changes or tightening up
we enact in our immigration policy, need to be across the board and not
targeted at Muslims because ultimately that's not going to work. Question and Answer Session MR. BENDER: Now is your chance to ask questions. I'll start by asking whoever has a question now has the opportunity to get in line and we will take your question. Let me ask our panelists, and they'll be sitting here, to answer your questions in an informal way. Each panelist can chime in if they want to answer the question particularly or not. You can direct your question, if you want, to an individual on the panel. QUESTION: Given the Jewish community historically being in favor of open and unfettered immigration and given what we have learned since 9/11, should immigration from the Islamic world and we have not really talked about this yet today, but in my view, the Koran, the holiest book, considers specifically Jews and Christians not to be trusted, who are subservient and eventually possibly destroyed should we support open and unrestricted immigration from the Islamic world? And what should the Jewish community's role in this action be? DR. STEINLIGHT: Let me jump in and I'll pass it along to my colleagues. I agree with Mark certainly on practical grounds, and I agree with Ted on philosophical grounds that national origins exclusion is impractical and loathsome and as Jews it would be the height of hypocrisy for us to support a policy that was so ruinous to our own situation in the thirties and after. But I would say that the way we can deal with this issue is not perfect. It is a way to begin to deal with this issue is to focus ideologically. That is to say we have barred communists and fascists from coming to the United States. We should similarly bar Islamists. That is to say anyone who can be proven to belong to a Islamist political party in the sending country, we can cooperate with their police forces and intelligence forces in doing that. Again, it is not a failsafe. There is no failsafe. But I would favor a policy of ideological exclusion of those who support Islamist ideology. I think that we can do. And at the same time I think we here in the United States need to work on that thing that I talked about as a project that I'm working on with my Muslim colleagues and that is to do the critical thing. And that is to see that there is the beginning of an Islamic reformation. Because Islam, and now I'm talking about classic Islam, the religion, not the political etiology of Islamism, the classical Islam has the problems that you've described. There is an arrogant supremacist system, and it has to give rise to a pluralistic Islam that is more suitable to America. And if that's going to happen, it can only happen here in the United States. MR. MANN: Should we support open, unfettered immigration, definitely not. I thought I made that clear. I think there is and has been a tendency in American Jewish policy makers over the years to be more supportive of liberal and unfettered immigration than I have wanted them to be. I remember having arguments in several of the organizations that I've led pointing out particularly what I tried to point out at the beginning of my remarks tonight that if you open the door too wide and the American electorate gets very angry about it for a long enough period of time, you will have a legislative shutdown of all immigration, of almost all immigration. And that gets to the question of is it good for the Jews, would be horrendous. So I think moderation is absolutely essential. The problem is how do you develop I'm kind of in agreement with the policy of your organization, as I have heard you say it, if it is to have less immigration but treat the immigrants better, however it was said. I can't remember. I think that's that would be a very good policy. Islamic reformation, sure. But, you know, first I could say who are we to try to reform the Islamists. I tried to come up with a practical solution. I don't know if it's a good one. But the solution, as I see it, is that the American bully pulpit has to be used in one way or another to say to those states from which most terrorists emanate, unless you change your ways, unless you do your work to turn your society into a non-hating society, we're not going to let your people in here. Now, I don't know if there's a better way. And I'm sure what Mark said about how that would not handle the problem of Islamic potential terrorists coming from non-Islamic societies, I don't know the answer to that either. What I would like to see is the American Jewish community, in conjunction with others, call up for Congressional hearings, to be very public and alert Americans through the process of Congressional hearings publicized on television what the problem is and what the various ways might be of solving it within the American tradition. And then I'm confident that something good will come of it. MR. KRIKORIAN: I just want to touch on two points. One I wanted to elaborate on Steve's point about ideological exclusion. We actually have a very limited and constricted tool now to exclude people for ideological reasons. But it's very difficult. A visa officer at a consulate overseas has the right to reject a visa applicant for any reason he wants, in effect. In other words, there is no appeal and the burden of proof is on the applicant. He has to prove that he's not going to become an illegal alien. Unfortunately, in practice it's gone the other way around and a culture of customer service has developed in the State Department, where the visa applicant is a customer and we have to do whatever is necessary to satisfy him. Is he the customer rather than the American people? And, frankly, the tool exists now, if the State Department wanted to use it, to permit visa officer's authority to exclude people who are sympathetic with the Islamic radicals. Because now at least the way the statute reads, the people who can be automatically excluded are people who are actually involved in terrorism, directly raising money for terrorists, what have you. But the law actually says that simple membership in a terrorist group is not grounds for exclusion. Well, that's absurd. Of course simple membership in a terrorist group should be grounds for exclusion. In fact, the person who leads the "Death to America" rally every Tuesday in Karachi should also be excluded, regardless of what organization he belongs to. Our consular officers need sweeping powers to reject people because after all, coming to the United States to visit Disneyland or blow up Paterson, New Jersey or whatever objective you have, it's not a right. It's a privilege that we extend at our discretion. Quickly, a final point on this Islamic reformation idea. This has nothing to do with immigration but I have written on this stuff. The Islamic reformation has happened and the Islamic fundamentalism is the Islamic reformation. I think the way things are going to work is, frankly, if you borrow from, I believe, Trotsky, worse is better. There's a short-term risk. But the only way it is going to work out is for the radicals to take over Islamic societies and completely screw them up. And only then are people going to realize, as is already happening in Iran, by the way, that Islamism is not the answer. And until that happens there's no way we can teach them what they're supposed to do. MR. BENDER: Now let's get to our audience here. QUESTION: This is a question for Dr. Steinlight. At dinner you discussed some legislation. I was wondering if you could comment on that. The second thing, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about this issue of the Islamist organizations in America, particularly I have I'm on the board of an orthodox Jewish organization out of Seattle heavily supported by Jack Abramoff. He's a personal friend of Rabbi Lapin. He is working close to with Grover Norquist. Perhaps it is well known there is a movement in the Jewish community towards conservative Republican viewpoint. It is very, put it mildly, a matter of conflict for me, that Jack Abramoff and Grover Norquist, who I did not know was an orthodox Jew, who is also very close to Rabbi Lapin and the orthodox community has this community has this acceptance and frankly, although I agree with a lot of what Ted Mann has said, I did not hear Mark Krikorian say anything negative about this woman Diane Aviv, who I don't know, but it has the same problem that Islamists are in organizations and have this of authenticity it's a civil rights organization, like they're, you know, Martin Luther King or something. Can you tell us a little more about that? MR. STEINLIGHT: Let me go just a little on Grover Norquist and the organizations. By the way, I once attended a meeting you look much too sane to be in that group. This is going back now about five years. I have seen Grover Norquist twice in the last six weeks, once at a dinner party in New York City, a small dinner party and once at party given for Max Booth at the Wall Street Journal reception for the book that he just did. On both occasions I took Grover Norquist aside and I said, "What on earth are you doing? Are you the only one in America who doesn't know that the Council on American Islamic relations, that Muslim American Council, that the Muslim Student Association are not only extreme Islamist groups but are, in fact, are American incarnations of foreign Islamist political parties?" That's what they are. And although, by the way, the biggest part of the American Muslim community is in South Asia, most of these organizations are Middle Eastern and are headed by people with a particular agenda having to do with Israel. They're working very hard to get the hold of the Muslim community with regard to, you know, Palestine is the ultimate Grail, is the Holy Grail. But it took a while to get the thinking that way. They're working very hard at it. I really do think in the case of Norquist, who I don't know personally except to know that he's a clever and amiable machiavel, that he is a Republican operative who will get his party elected by hook or by crook, and he's willing clearly to go to bed with the worst villains imaginable to do so. He knows perfectly well what CAIR is and what the Muslim Student Association is. These are not areas that he's ignorant on, believe me. Grover Norquist does his homework. This is all about Republican power. And, again, the comment that was made by Mark earlier, that you have Republican strategists who will tell you that the election started with Gore (Indiscernible) MR. BENDER: The next question. QUESTION: This is for Mr. Mann. Even though you were the first I took notes of what you said, so you're not spared. You suggested that a lists of states that implement hatred is created and that natives of that country can't emigrate here. That makes me think of two things. I have two questions for you. First of all, various embargos against Cuba and Iraq haven't worked. So economic embargos haven't changed those countries. Why do you think that the lesser act of preventing their citizens from coming here will change them? My send point is, isn't it unfair to punish people who are fleeing for political reasons and not let them in because they come from this list of countries? MR. MANN: Yes. The answer to your second question is, yes, it is unfair. That is why I did not say bar them from coming in. I said be more strict in the process of accepting immigrants from those states on the list I would like to see created. I don't remember your first question. Could you repeat it? QUESTION: Sure. Since economic embargos against countries like Cuba and Iraq haven't caused the effect that we were hoping for, why would this weaker offer this standard act do anything? MR. MANN: No, because the purpose that I tried what I tried to develop was that there are two separate but interrelated purposes in maintaining such a list. One is to deal with the immigration problem by using the list to have stricter standards. The other is altogether different. It is to permit the president of the United States and the executive branch to use the bully pulpit to say to the leaders of these countries who are on that list and want to get off it for economic reasons, the only way you're going to get off of it is to start changing your own society otherwise no deal. Now I don't know how that relates to the Cuba QUESTION: I don't think it will work because more hard measures haven't worked. What makes you think that will work? MR. MANN: Because I have a great deal of confidence that most of the societies that will be on that list desperately want the approval of the United States and will go very far to get it. We've got to watch them to make sure they're not just kidding us, but and I tried to give several illustrations. I guess the Soviet Union is by far the best illustration. Don't underestimate the power of the American presidency when it comes to getting other countries to change their human rights policies. If we press hard and long enough, we've proved that it can be done. QUESTION: The question is the JDL, the Jewish Defense League was, we must do what must be done. Like President Roosevelt they advocated they rounded up 110,000 Japanese and then Japanese became very good writers because the citizenship meant something. I think we have to be willing to round up, not to expel the terrorists as they cause terror, assassinate people, instead of just expelling them, they should be rounded up and held. Everyone who comes to America should have a visa. They should have a statement. They can be checked if they have this hatred in them. Like Mann said, if there's hatred, let them write a statement why they're persecuted because they are terrorists who are fundamentalists who want to destroy our society MR. BENDER: Do you have a question? QUESTION: Yes. Why not do what needs to be done like any sane person, like Roosevelt would do and have military tribunals to try DR. STEINLIGHT: I find it it wasn't addressed to me. I must say Roosevelt was one of my favorite heroes in this world despite some of the criticism Jews have a right to have of him. To select this rounding up of people and putting them in camps as one of his better as one of the policies that we ought to follow, I must tell you I consider very gross. MR. KRIKORIAN: I would sort of underline what Ted said. The problem I mean, who will you round up? The problem with the round ups of the Japanese immigrants and Japanese-Americans was indiscriminate. It was everybody on the West Coast. We're not going to start rounding up every Muslim or every Arab. Now, if we're talking about stricter surveillance and more active detention of people who are involved in questionable activities, I'm all for that and we're actually seeing that since September 11th. The FBI before September 11th was terrified of infiltrating mosques, for instance, because these are religious organizations. And Democrats will jump all over their backs if they found out about this. Well, they're not quite as ready to do that as they used to be. The idea of being a little more hard headed as far as security goes with regard to Muslim immigrants is something we're already seeing. But rounding up people is morally dubious and impractical. It wouldn't do any good. MR. MANN: Can I give one more answer, if you don't mind. I wanted to comment on the fact that there is less to our differences that appears to the naked eye. I'm looking at a Jewish Forward publication of a couple of weeks ago in which there was a debate on this very issue. And one guy, Jim Chapin was very much to the what's the word to the right about having a reformed immigration policy. And the president of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Leonard Bergman, purported to be very much to the left. But when you got down to read what he was saying very carefully, you finally come to the line that says, while nationals from a certain country obviously warrant closer scrutiny, there is no reason for an outright ban based on their religion or ethnicity. I don't think anybody on this panel disagrees with that comment. I think that's where we all are. DR. STEINLIGHT: I agree with that. I certainly wouldn't want to repeat the Japanese I don't think it was a great moment in American history. Although I would like to note the extraordinary achievements of Japanese Americans who fought in the American military, particularly in Italy. I would like to just pick a little bit of a bone with something that Ted just said and that was to say the right and the left. There's a curious notion that somehow to be in support of moving in the motion is to the left position and to be against it is the right position. The fact of the matter is the strongest supporters of open immigration are none other than the Chamber of Commerce and the Wall Street Journal. We know why they support it because they want an endless supply of slave labor in the service sector of the economy. Whereas I in the trades union movement and the African American community and the environmental community are strongly opposed to open immigration. I think we should be a little more careful about left and right here. I don't think it falls so easily into ideological boundaries. MR. MANN: I stand corrected. You are absolutely right. QUESTION: I think that every infidel should be afraid of Islamism. And I think mostly the Jews are afraid. Why doesn't the rest of the world understand that after we're attacked they'll go when they are going after the Hindus and the Christians. Why doesn't the world seem to understand this? MR. KRIKORIAN: Well, the Hindus do understand. Let me put it this way, the Christians who are still Christian in any meaningful sense, also understand it. The Christians in Africa should understand it because they deal with the business end of Islam every day. This is an issue more secularized nominally Christian that meets in Western Europe and the United States, rather than an issue of Jews alone feeling threatened by militant Islam. DR. STEINLIGHT: I would just like to answer that. I think, you know, if you sort of zero in on society after society, you will see that these problems and these fears are really quite universal. Again, some of the elites for reasons of their own are evasive, reticent, evasive about this. I mean, I will give you an example from a country I just spent 10 days in. I just came back from Macedonia where I was a member of a group sent to try to get the Orthodox clergy and the Muslim clergy involved in trying to stop that country from falling back into open civil war. And to see that that country may be the only one in the Balkans that will not experience what the other countries in the Balkans have experienced. Again, what you see in Macedonia, you see, yes, resistance on the part of orthodox Christians who have certain privileges, but you also see out and out terror of Islamic political power. Macedonia sits between Kosovo, which is Serbian but is 80 percent Muslim. It has a population which is about 40 percent Muslim, and its neighbor to the south is Albania, which is Muslim. The fact of the matter is that one could argue looking at the Balkan policy of the United States that it is encouraged, I think unwittingly and stupidly, on the rise from Islamic power in Europe itself. And also I would argue led the Bosnians into their own slaughter I think the closer you look at society after society, the more you see that this tension does, in fact, exist. The elites don't want to talk about it much but it's there. MR. BENDER: We have a few more minutes. Let's try to move forward. QUESTION: Recently I read an article in the Jewish Exponent that published an article by a very inflaming Arab an Arab letter. But essentially it said blame the Jews for having blame discrimination on the Jews to every other countries thinking towards the Jews since going back to Biblical times. It was an incredibly inflammatory and vicious letter that apparently Arabs are teaching to their children. And all of a sudden it occurred to me, shouldn't we as Jews and perhaps American Jewish Congress and all of the other organized Jewish organizations rather than having take a more offensive position and try to poke holes in all of these terrible types of inflammatory statements and actions that have occurred over time. In other words, we're not Christ killers. We're not we're not the worst people that ever existed. I think don't you think it's time? And how would you propose that we as individuals, as well as organizations, basically teach the world what we really are? DR. STEINLIGHT: I don't really think I want to take a crack at that. I would just pose the question to you, how do you have a dialogue with paranoid, insane people? How do you have a dialogue with people who claim that the Jews bombed the World Trade Center, that the official Saudi press published recently the truth of a blood libel now saying the Jews not only use Christians but also use the blood of Muslim children in the making of matzoh I have to say that there are some people that want this is very hard for dialoguers to accept. People like dialogue for its own sake. I don't. I only like dialogue if it leads somewhere. Dialoguing with paranoid lunatics who believe in conspiracy theories, I don't think really goes anywhere at all. QUESTION: Those people were past dialoguing, I agree with you. However, there are people that are willing to be swayed one way or the other, people that are on the cusp, if you will, the people who are yet to be educated about who we are. They're the people I think we need to have a dialogue with and teach, again, who we really are and what we really stand for what we really believe in. DR. STEINLIGHT: I think what we need are dialogue partners on the other side. Right now we don't have almost anybody. The problem is that independent minded Muslims in the United States, and there are many of them, and I know them very well. I mean, I know this sounds like a racist comment but it's not. I mean, my two dearest friends are both devout Muslims MR. MANN: I'm beginning to worry about you DR. STEINLIGHT: I know. There are wonderful people in the Muslim community. The problem is they don't come forward very much. You know why they don't come forward very much? Because they get killed if they do. All of the organizations, on the other hand, that right now represent the Muslim community, with the exception of Shaikh Kabbani, are ideological, political, and exactly in the kind of conspiratorial madness that we're describing. What I have been trying to do, I can only speak to what I've been trying to do, is to encourage Muslim intellectuals that I know to found new organizations, to give the Muslim community new voices. The problem, however, is this issue of Islamic reformation. I agree with Mark it's something unthinkable abroad, and probably the best thing cynically speaking is the Islamists take power and then everybody sees how hideous they are. They don't usually last in power very long. What do we do here in the United States. I think here in the United States an Islamic reformation is possible. But it's going to take people who will come out in public and say what they say to each other in private and in private meetings that I've attended and that is that the Koran is not you know, the Koran is treated by Muslims like the incarnation in Christianity. It is uncreated. Unless you believe that the Koran is divinely inspired and (indiscernible) MR. MANN: I have a very brief comment. I see Hester right behind you. I looked at her and wondered whether she remembered like I did that 50 years ago American Jewish Congress used to have programs under the title of "How to answer a bigot." And much of what you're asking has to do with that. You've got to know and I can't explain the reason for this, that as powerful as we are, as controlling of all the important media in America as we are, Jews, when it comes to public relations, either about themselves or public relations in respect to Israel are the worst. They really are. They always have been. I can't begin to explain why. When I was chairman of the Congress of Presidents it was the bane of my existence. Every "macher" in America that was an important federation person was saying we're so smart why can't we blah, blah. It's still going on today. I think we're a little better at it today than we used to be. But I don't think there is any answer to your question. MR. BENDER: I'm going to give we have two more questions. We're really running out of time. MR. KRIKORIAN: The question, as I understood it was, why don't we assert our values with regard to Muslims who are here. I think the problem here is a kind of relativist multiculturalism. If you come here and you believe in mutilating little girls genitals, well, that's you know, there's nothing wrong with that, that's your cultural inheritance. If you come here and you believe in putting maps up on the wall that cut Israel out with a little knife and have what have Palestine pointing to it, well, that's your tradition, that's what you bring with you. Unfortunately, we have succumb to this cultural relativism that disarms us against people who hold values that are inimical, fundamentally inimical to American life. MR. BENDER: Two more questions. QUESTION: Ted gave me an opening. I have labored as long as Ted, though in lower echelons for 50 years and I do remember that course. In fact, I just quoted it the other day. And one of the points that has to be made on that thing of how to answer a bigot, which they made at that time, my memory also goes back that far, was that it is very important for all of you, not just the people on the platform, to answer a bigot, because although you will not change his mind, be he Arab or otherwise, you will nevertheless change the minds of many who have not yet made up their mind. And so that's an extremely important issue, I think, but not my question. My question is that I looked at again, at the title of this evening's procedure before I wanted to voice my question, but I'm going to voice it anyway because I think it's appropriate. We have heard a great deal tonight to raise my apprehensions, and believe you me they were very high to begin with. What I heard tonight, we talked about in the long run assimilation might and hearings before the Congress might and continuing what we have done might. But what about the steps that our government thinks is necessary to take, which we are hearing, which raises my apprehensions even higher, as to what the FBI thinks it should be doing in order to handle terrorism on a national basis. And I have heard nothing in reference to that whatsoever this evening. MR. KRIKORIAN: I think I actually addressed some of those issues. I mean, the fact is whatever I have no opinions as far as my expertise on issues like eavesdropping and the rest of it. There's people that have a variety of opinions on that. But as far as immigration related issues go, detention of foreign visitors, the efforts to actually enforce the immigration law, which nobody has ever wanted to do before. In fact before September 11 after September 11 we had people in Congress who should have known better saying they were shocked, shocked to find out that we had no effective tools to enforce our immigration laws. Congress made sure we had no tools to enforce our immigration laws. They didn't want the immigration law to be enforced. This is both parties. This is executive branch and Congress. Nobody has ever wanted the immigration law to actually work because it would cut into their action if it did. Now the FBI is taking what I would, frankly, in the immigration context of baby steps to enforce the immigration law. And, you know, we need a whole heck of a lot more concerted activity. And one of the reasons we're not seeing it is because the immigration services is headed, the director and his right hand man in charge of policy and planning, headed by people who oppose the very concept of immigration enforcement. They're libertarians, self-confessed, activist libertarians who reject the idea of border enforcement. And until the administration gets serious about enforcing the immigration law, which it is not, the steps that have been taken so far just aren't going to prove to be useful. QUESTION: What about the fact that immigrants become suspect simply because they are immigrants from certain countries, that is certainly part of what we the government is visualizing right now from everything I hear. DR. STEINLIGHT: I'm guessing you didn't hear it from me because I don't perceive it as a great a threat as you apparently do. I'm more concerned, quite frankly, with terrorist cells in the United States and I am concerned about John Ashcroft. I know that's not the politically correct thing to say but that's my belief. I believe that monitoring mosques is way overdue. It's about time. I think that is what sometimes is called racial profiling is also called policing the probabilities. I think, for example, let me give you a story why I think the fear is on the other side. I mentioned this subject over dinner. There was an interview about a month ago with Norman Mineta, which should have led to his immediate firing. He was asked by Peter Jennings on the issue of, quote, unquote racial profiling, whether he would treat with the same attention at an airport screening a Danish grandmother flying back from Minnesota to Denmark with her suitcases as he would a Middle Eastern young man with no luggage paying for his ticket with cash and flying one way. And Mineta said absolutely. Now, that is political correctness gone insane. And I put it to you that the problem is exactly the other way around. It's not our civil liberties I'm worried about, it's our security. QUESTION: Given the fact that refugee admission has already declined by 50 percent, in other words, five or six years ago going we were letting in 140,000 refugees. This year the president has said we can have 70,000 refugees, many of whom are Jews from the former Soviet Union and that there's been a virtual standstill on refugee admissions. About 11,000 have come in. What do you by lower immigration numbers if you say, which I agree with you, you can't control it by nationality, what in your view would be a reasonable number, what would that have to do with the refugee program, and I know my mother is from Poland, and that there are many immigrants who really are like us, there are some who are different, but there are many who are just like us. What would it look like and if it had restrictive immigration policy since we certainly the refugee policy has declined by 50 percent and actually has declined by 85 percent. MR. KRIKORIAN: Bringing up the refugee issue is really a good question. After September 11th only one component of our immigration policy was shut down. Saudis continued to be able to come to the United States using something called Visa Express where they go to a travel agency to be screened. They never even see an American consular officer. That continued. All other parts of our immigration system continued. The only part of our immigration system that was shut down was refugee resettlement. And, interestingly enough, refugee resettlement is the only part of our immigration system that terrorists haven't used so far. We released a report last week that identified how the 48 Al Qaeda terrorists over the past ten years, first World Trade Center Trade attack as well as 9/11 and other attacks, got into the country. They were legal aliens. They were illegal immigrants. Some were naturalized citizens. Some applied for asylum. Some snuck across the border. Some were foreign students. Not one of them was a resettled refugee. And, nonetheless, that was the only part of our immigration program that was shut down. I would agree that this was an absurd error. It's almost like searching the Danish grandmother and letting the 25 year old unmarried, one-way, no luggage Arab go through. It was crazy. But as far as what my idea of what an immigration policy should look like, as far as the legal immigration component, I won't go into a lot of details, but I would restrict family immigration to spouses and minor children of U.S. citizens and that's it. And that would still be one-quarter of a million people right there. Maybe 25,000 genuinely skilled people from, you know, highly skilled people from around the world and 50,000 or so real refugees, the most desperate refugees we have in the world. The U.N. actually identifies people. They identify millions of people as meeting the definition of a refugee. We're not letting millions of people in. So we ought to be taking the worst off people. The U.N. actually defines refugees of special concern. People who can never go home, never are going to be able to go home, can't stay where they are. That's what we ought to be drawing from instead of what we have now, which is a refugee system that's based on kind of a political log rolling. The black caucus says we need African refugees. So the president increases the quota for African refugees probably a good idea. We are probably not taking in enough African refugees, but the system has become so politicized that it's no longer what people think. DR. STEINLIGHT: Just to add on the issue of politicization, I'm telling you something that you probably know a great deal more than I do. One of the great causes of friction between Latino lobbyists from the Hill and the lobbyists for American Jewish organizations and American Jewish community, who I ran into in my days at the National Immigration Forum and in my days at AJC generally was basically the residue of the Lautenberg amendment, which we all supported and think it was a wonderful thing. If you were interested in getting refugee status to Nicaraguans and El Salvadorians you didn't think the Lautenberg Amendment was such a good thing. I think, first of all, that refugee policy and immigration policy are separate issues and separate matters. My own view of this is probably to support numbers higher than those that Mark has mentioned. But, again, I think we're dealing with a political football here, and I think that we need to understand that it is a thoroughly politicized issue from the get-go. MR. MANN: Just one other comment dealing with the specifically Jewish aspect that you raised, which goes back to arguments with between the state of Israel and the American Jewish leadership 25 years ago. But it's very hard for me, I must say and you won't like it, I suppose, to regard the Jews who want to come to the United States from the Soviet Union as people in desperate need to have refugee status when every single one of them can go to Israel. QUESTION: This is not a question. I want to thank our panelists for being here today. I won't say that I agree with everything that was said but I thought it was really informative and enlightening. I wanted to make a comment and actually partially answer one of the other questions. Unfortunately, I don't think I see the woman in the audience who posed the question, the third one from the end asked about dialogue. And is she here? There are groups that are trying to dialogue. And I think the American Jewish Congress is one of them, where we have active efforts at interfaith relations and to dialogue with Muslims and others. And I can cite one very vivid example for you that just happened within the last two months. Thanks to efforts from our executive director Joe Puder, a group of us were invited to attend seder on the first night of Passover at the Austrian Embassy in Washington. There were about four or five of us in the audience who attended that seder. It was absolutely inspiring to hear Muslims participating in that seder. So there is this dialogue actively going on and we are actively involved in that. MR. BENDER: We've run close to our limit. We want to give each of our speakers several minutes to make concluding remarks. I think we have planned five minutes each. But now it's almost 9 o'clock. I think they can maybe shorten it to about two and a half minutes. MR. MANN: I have a couple of comments I never got to make in reaction to other statements that other people made. Mark was talking about the erosion of America's support for Israel and that we're already seeing that. I must say I'm not already seeing it. I think President Bush has been, if anything, even more supportive of Israel than my favorite president, President Clinton. I just don't see it. Steve talked about how support is lessening but we're at the high noon of our influence. If we're at high noon of our influence, and you're saying support is lessening, that's just the prediction of the future. Because it does mean that we've never had it so good and you don't think it's going to continue. And, finally, I want to make the comment that it's not response, in agreement with Mark, I suppose, that many of the problems we're having, the enforcement of the immigration laws, comes down simply to the fact that some of our civil service personnel are not very good, not very careful and are full of human error, just as people in business are, just as the FBI and the CIA appear to be. And it's very, very disturbing that these are human errors. I'm not sure there's anything more that can be done about it. And I go back to the need to publicize this problem through Congressional hearings, so that people will get upset enough and make sure that our laws are enforced appropriately. MR. KRIKORIAN: Let me wrap up by continuing on something that Ted had said. This is about the issue of enforcement often not working well because the INS doesn't work well. This is a common theme over past eight or nine months, the INS bashing, the agency that can't shoot straight. The INS has been the Rodney Dangerfield of the federal government for decades and often with good reason. But let's understand this is not just an issue of incompetent bureaucrats. There are always going to be problems with bureaucracies. The problem here, though, is what the INS is being asked to enforce and how it's being asked to do it. Congress until just recently passed a requirement that every plane from oversees had to be processed, everybody on it had to be processed through immigration within 45 minutes, period. The travel industry and the airlines insisted on this in. And Congress, since they really never cared less about immigration enforcement, anyway, said, sure, whatever you want. When the INS with its limited abilities actually has tried to enforce the law, Congress has slapped it down. In Nebraska a couple of years ago they tried a kinder, gentler enforcement policy against the employment of illegal aliens. Instead of raiding factories and rounding up people, they said let's just go to the personnel offices, subpoena the personnel records and take them back to the office and verify the information. They came back with a list of names that appeared not to have authorization to work. And they said we want to interview these people. If they're illegals they have to go. If they're not illegals then we have something mixed up, the numbers are wrong, their maiden name is there, something like that, we want to fix our records. Well, they did it, and 4,000 names they came up with. Three thousand people were never heard from again. They were illegal aliens. The other thousand got the records straight. Now the INS said we want to do this every two or three months to wean this industry off of using illegal aliens. It never happened a second time because Congress went berserk. And they said we do not intend for you to enforce the immigration law. We're passing the tough law we don't need for you to actually implement it. That is the problem with the INS, it really is, not fallibility even fallibility that all large organizations experienced. DR. STEINLIGHT: Again, we're comparing immigrants today and immigrants, say, at the turn of the century, the early twentieth century when most of our folks came to this country. Christopher Jencks did a brilliant two part piece in the New York Review of Books. He pointed something out which I think is well to remember. In 1910 the overwhelming majority of immigrant laborers say from places like Italy and Poland was making 88 cents to the dollar of the American worker. Jews at that point were already making the same amount of money. Today 53 percent of our immigrants come from Mexico and Central America, make 40 cents to the dollar. I'll alarm you that the unrestricted immigration policy is giving us a permanent underclass, which is going to prove a great problem down the road. From factoid let me go to the point that I think needs something that we all can do. There's a big lie out there that's getting pushed by Muslim organizations and, unfortunately, this big lie is getting picked up and getting reproduced in places like The Washington Post. That is the question of what is the exact number of Muslims in United States. The Washington Post recently congratulated the Muslim community at the conclusion of Ramadan and talked about the, quote, unquote, 7 million Muslims in the United States. Nobody, no demographer worth their salt believes anything like that number. For a long time, the number 6 million was the favorite number among Muslim organizations, why, because it gave -- it did two things. It granted automatic parody with the Jews and, secondly, they hate the number 6 million because its number is the number of the Jews killed during the Holocaust and that gives Jews moral and political advantages than Muslims. Tom Smith at the University of Chicago, who is probably the best demographer in the United States, puts the number of Muslims at 2.5 million, the majority of whom are African American converts. My friend Khalid Duran would put he number closer to about 3 or 4 million. The number is less than half of what the Muslim spokesmen are saying. They're saying it for political effect. It's a big lie. And individual Jews and Jewish organizations should puncture this big lie because it can cause us a great deal of damage and, again, it's founded on nothing. (Whereupon meeting concluded at 9:10 p.m.)
|