COS 50 Research Questions: Religious Profiling

Alizamaan Datoo
Prof. Sara Campbell
COS 50
Research Questions: Religious Profiling
1. Is Racial profiling an effective counterterrorist measure and does it violate the Right to be free from discrimination?

Alizamaan Datoo
Prof Sara Campbell
COS 50

Patel, Faiza, and Elizabeth Goitein. "Religious Profiling: An Unwelcome Guest." The Hill. N.p., 12 Apr. 2012. Web. .
The article starts off by stating the laws against profiling. In 2003, the Department of Justice issued guidance prohibiting racial and ethnic profiling by federal law enforcement agencies, which it characterized as “invidious discrimination” rejecting our commitment to liberty and justice for all. Like racial
profiling, religious profiling is “invidious discrimination” that is prejudicial to America’s founding principles. The first settlers and many of our ancestors came to this country because religious persecution. The right to freedom of religion is so central to American democracy that it was enshrined in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. But when police openly use the practice of Islam as a substitution for terrorist suspicion, American Muslims hesitate to pray at mosques and sometimes even try to hide their religious identity.
Faiza Patel and Elizabeth Goitein are co-directors of Brennan Center for Justice's Liberty & National Security Program. The Brennan Center seeks national security policies that are effective and respect constitutional values and the rule of law while protecting our people. One of the program’s main goal focus is ensuring government policies targeting terrorists do so effectively and without religious or ethnic profiling. This source is very useful for my research essay because both directors, Faiza Patel and Elizabeth Goitein, support their ideas that racial profiling goes against the rights of the people. Patel and Goitein contradict the American government’s Constitution about the freedom of Religion. Being enshrined as the First Amendment and the main cause why The Founding Father’s came to America, shows how authorities go against the people’s rights.
Congresswoman Clarke's Speech on Ending Racial and Religious Profiling. Lanham: Federal Information & News Dispatch, Inc, 2014. ProQuest. 26 Mar 2014 

Congresswoman Clarke has tried to eliminate racial profiling, by agencies of the federal government and in New York City. For example, she has been criticizing the New York Police Department's policy of spying Muslim organizations without any suspicion that a crime had been committed and the policy of Stop-and-Frisk under which the privacy of millions of African-Americans and Latinos was violated without any legal basis. Congresswomen Clarke compares the policy of Stop and Frisk to the South African apartheid. She believes it is what the American people feel like and is an embarrassment to the public. Instead of suspicion the authorities should concentrate on how they could keep the nation a safer place. Not just by suspicion.
Congresswoman Yvette D. Clarke is a New York Congresswoman. She has worked to eliminate racial profiling, by agencies of the federal government and in New York City. Clarke’s speeches are persuading when she talks. She persuades her audience by criticizing the NYPD policy of Stop and Frisk. She has done a lot to stop racial profiling. Congresswoman Clarke hosted New York City elected officials on Capitol Hill for End Racial Profiling Advocacy Day.
This source would be an important part of my research because the Stop and Frisk policy has been a very controversial topic has angered many people. The policy of Stop and Frisk opposes the rights of Americans.
Fisher, William.
"DISCRIMINATION: RIGHTS GROUPS SUE U.S. OVER 'RELIGIOUS PROFILING'." Global Information Network Apr 21 2005: 1. ProQuest. 26 Mar. 2014 

In simultaneous news conferences held in New York City and Buffalo, on the Canadian border, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the New York Civil Liberties Union and the American Civil Liberties Union announced that they were suing the head of the Department of Homeland Security over the practice of targeting U.S. citizens participating in religious conferences outside the United States.
The lawsuit was filed in U.S. district court on behalf of five Muslim-Americans who, along with dozens of others, were detained for six and a half hours, interrogated, fingerprinted, and photographed at the Canadian border crossing to Buffalo as they returned home from an annual Islamic conference in Toronto.
Among the conference's keynote speakers was Hamza Yusuf, a U.S. citizen and prominent imam from Hayward, California, who has advised President George W. Bush on several occasions on matters regarding Islam. Yusuf sat near First Lady Laura Bush during the president's Sep. 20, 2001 address to a joint session of
Congress.

Pratt, Mary Louis. “Arts of the Contact Zones.” Modern Language Association. JSTOR (1991), pp 60- 68. Print. 27 Mar 2014 The article “Art of the Contact Zones” by Mary Louis Pratt is mainly about “contact zones” and how they are a place for language, literacy, and culture. She defines contact zones as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power such as, colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today.” Pratt states that transculturation is a phenomenon of the contact zones. Mary Louis Pratt is a Silver Professor and Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at New York University. Throughout her article, Pratt uses supporting arguments and uses her own experiences to support her argument. An example of this is in the beginning of the article when Pratt talks about her son’s experience with baseball cards. Pratt uses a major example to illustrate the dominant- subordinate relationship in the “contact zones.” Pratt talks about how her son Manuel was given an assignment by his teacher requiring them to write single- sentence responses to a list of questions on a “helpful invention.” Although Manuel did the assignment, he had a lot of spelling errors; thus, he received a star. Pratt uses this example to illustrate the relationship between teachers and student, as a relationship that consists of the teacher being the higher source of authority, and the student being subordinate in this “contact” with the teacher. Manuel’s teacher gave him an assignment that he was expected to do, however, Manuel tries to resist the subordination by intentionally misspelling a lot of words throughout his paragraph. He still received a star for the assignment.
This is useful for my research because the idea of dominant- subordinate in the “contact zones” that Pratt discusses in her article is similar to the higher authority against the minority. The Stop and Frisk policy shows how the police is the higher source of authority and minorities are subordinate in the “contact zone.” The police uses their power to stop a person based on suspicion of criminal activity, and some minorities try to resist this practice, while others try to obey the higher source of authority.

Friedersdorf, Conor. "The Horrifying Effects of NYPD Ethnic Profiling on Innocent Muslim Americans." The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, 28 Mar. 2013. Web. 1 Apr. 2014.

Starting shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks, officers infiltrated Muslim communities and spied on hundreds or perhaps thousands of totally innocent Americans at mosques, colleges, and elsewhere.
These officers "put American citizens under surveillance and scrutinized where they ate, prayed and worked, not because of charges of wrongdoing but because of their ethnicity," the news agency reported, citing NYPD documents.
"In more than six years of spying on Muslim neighborhoods, eavesdropping on conversations and cataloguing mosques," the Associated Press reported, "the New York Police Department's secret Demographics Unit never generated a lead or triggered a terrorism investigation." They acknowledged, in court testimony, having generated zero leads.
Conor Friedersdorf is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he focuses on politics and national affairs. He lives in Venice, California, and is the founding editor of The Best of Journalism, a newsletter that is devoted for non
fiction.
This source would be helpful with my research essay because New York City’s stop-and-frisk policy is again being challenged as racial profiling. And Muslim Americans continue to be profiled at work, in their houses of worship, where they eat and even when they play cricket. Americans would be outraged if Catholics or Jews were targeted by the Police Department in this way doubtly so if the surveillance produced zero leads and no evidence of averting any serious crime.