Arab-Americans rank civil rights as key issue

Monday, October 3, 2005

By MITCHEL MADDUX
STAFF WRITER

NEWARK - An Arab-American group said civil rights issues rank as its foremost concern in New Jersey's gubernatorial race.

At a political forum here on Sunday, participants said they hope New Jersey's next governor will protect Arab-Americans from the specter of racial profiling - at a time when the nation is jittery over terrorism.

"This is a very hot issue," said Aref Assad, who lives in Morris County.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Forrester, who attended the Arab American Institute's forum, told the group he would not permit such practices if elected.

"Racial profiling is something New Jersey has had a problem with," he said. If law enforcement agencies are using ethnicity or religious affiliation as the sole basis for selecting targets in terrorism probes, Forrester said, "we've got to end it now."

U.S. Sen. Jon Corzine, the Democratic gubernatorial nominee, was invited to the forum at the Newark Airport Sheraton hotel, but did not attend because of other commitments.

The moderator of the forum, Maya Munayyer Kabbash, an attorney who practices in Morris County, told those attending that the Arab/Muslim Advisory Committee to the state Attorney General's Office will produce an educational videotape for police agencies across the state.

The 20-minute-long videotape will focus on Arab and Muslim communities in New Jersey and aims to touch upon "issues of cultural sensitivity," Kabbash said.

Several people at the forum raised questions about the way New Jersey logs its antiterrorism information in a police computer database, after concerns that Muslims in the state were being unfairly targeted by law enforcement.

The issue arose recently amid an intra-agency squabble between the state police and a rival agency, the New Jersey Office of Counter-Terrorism.

The state police said they were worried that the Counter-Terrorism Office had entered large numbers of reports about individual Muslims and groups into its intelligence database, several sources said.

They then temporarily barred counterterrorism agents from making entries while the issue is being reviewed by the Governor's Office and federal officials.

However, several intelligence experts and officials said the Counter-Terrorism Office was simply reporting raw intelligence about suspicious individuals or activity it receives routinely from police and other law enforcement agencies, private industry and citizens. The entries focused on suspicious conduct, not ethnicity or beliefs, officials said.

Kabbash said the issue of how terrorism investigations are initiated in New Jersey was an important one. The state's Arab-Americans voting in November should ask "what criteria does the [next] governor think it's right to use or not to use," in selecting targets of terrorism probes, she said.

Over the past two years, several of New Jersey's Arab-American groups have been urging members of their community to become more involved in the state's political system.

There are 80,000 Arab-Americans living in the state, and about 3 million in the nation, census figures show. Some Arab-American groups say that number is inaccurate, and suggest the community's population in New Jersey actually ranges from 240,000 to 300,000.