Is a Muslim Always Suspect?
By Daniel Pipes

The U.S. government wrongly arrested Brandon Mayfield, 37, of Beaverton, Ore. on May 6. A fingerprint sent from Madrid apparently connected him to the March 11 bombings there that killed 191 people and injured 2,000. When the Spanish government two weeks later identified the fingerprint as that of an Algerian, the Department of Justice requested that Mayfield be released, and he was.

Putting aside the technical mistake, the Department of Justice has come under severe criticism for having built its case against Mayfield in part by noting his Islamic affiliations. "I am an American Muslim," Mayfield declared on release; "I have been singled out and discriminated against, I feel, as a Muslim." His father Bill concurred: "They picked him out because they wanted someone who fit this profile. This was the closest they had, and he was a Muslim."

"If you are Muslim you are suspect," commented Samer Horani of the Islamic Center of Portland. Dave Fidanque of the American Civil Liberties Union piled on: "as far as the Justice Department is concerned, if you're Muslim and attend particular mosques that are suspect, you're presumed guilty until you're proved innocent." And the New York Times disapprovingly notes that the decision to detain Mayfield "was clearly influenced by his Muslim ties."

But did U.S. law enforcement err in noting Mayfield's identity?

No, this was entirely appropriate. It would have been myopic to ignore Mayfield's many connections to militant Islam and the global jihad.

• He prayed in the same Bilal Mosque as did several individuals (Maher Nawash, Ahmed Ibrahim Bilal, Muhammad Ibrahim Bilal) who pleaded guilty in 2003 to conspiring to help the Taliban. The mosque's website includes links to militant Islamic organizations, including some "charities" closed down by the U.S. government for funding terrorism. Saudi specialist Stephen Schwartz finds Bilal to be "a fairly typical Wahhabi-controlled mosque."

• While studying law at Washburn University in Kansas, Mayfield helped organize a branch of the Muslim Student Association, a group described by analyst Jonathan Dowd-Gailey as "an overtly political organization" espousing "Wahhabism, anti-Americanism, and anti-Semitism … and expressing solidarity with militant Islamic ideologies, sometimes with criminal results."

• In 2002, Mayfield volunteered to represent Jeffrey Leon Battle -– who subsequently pleaded guilty to conspiracy to levy war against the United States and was sentenced to 18 years in prison -– in a custody dispute over his then-6-year-old son. Strangely (according to Quanell X, national spokesperson for the New Black Panthers and a friend of Battle's), Mayfield flew to Texas at his own expense for Battle's sake.

• Someone in Mayfield's house was in telephone contact with Perouz Sedaghaty (a.k.a. Pete Seda), director of the U.S. office of the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, a number of whose foreign branches have been designated as terrorist organizations.

• Mayfield advertised his solo law practice in a "Muslim" yellow pages run by Jerusalem Enterprises Inc., a company owned by Farid Adlouni. Adlouni is a person "directly linked in business dealings" with Wadih El Hage, Osama Bin Laden's personal secretary in the 1990s and convicted of conspiring to murder U.S. citizens in 2001.

In addition:

• Mayfield's political profile fits that of many disaffected, U.S.-hating terrorists: he strongly opposes the USA Patriot Act, inveighs against U.S. foreign policy related to Muslim countries, and is "particularly angered," according to his brother Kent, by close U.S. relations with Israel. Mayfield speculates that the Bush administration knew in advance about 9/11 but chose to let the attacks go ahead so as to justify going to war. And on his release from custody, he compared the U.S. federal government to Nazi Germany.

• In common with many violence-prone Islamists in the United States (including Maher Hawash, Mohammed Ali Alayed, Zacarias Moussaoui, and the "Lackawanna Six"), Mayfield went from being a nominal Muslim to one whose Islamic beliefs "got more and more intense."

Are government prosecutors, when they have apparently incriminating physical evidence, supposed to shut their eyes and disregard these many connections and patterns? The Department of Justice was simply doing its job in pointing them out.

Even Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations –- an Islamist group with multiple connections of its own to violence –- admits that "no Muslim is more than six degrees away from terrorism." Governments worldwide must take this reality into account.

Daniel Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org) is director of the Middle East Forum and author of Miniatures (Transaction).