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Pressure
may smother dialogue
Michael Putney, Posted on Wed,
Sep. 10, 2003 in The
Miami Herald.
When the Latin Grammys came off without a hitch
and without anyone's right of free speech being
infringed on, I was encouraged. Especially when
you remember how some Cuban exiles taunted and
spat upon concertgoers who were going into a Gonzalo
Rubalcaba concert at the Gusman Center in 1996.
Or the near-riot that occurred when Los Van Van
played the Miami Arena in 2000.
Of course, no Cuban performer was within 100
miles of the AmericanAirlines Arena last Wednesday
night, thanks to the Castro regime's applying
late for U.S. visas (and for only three nominees)
and the State Department's taking its own sweet
time processing them. Still, everyone involved
in setting up protest zones had crafted such a
nifty plan that it might not have made any difference
had Chucho Valdés or any other Cuban artist
shown up.
I came away thinking that free speech is alive
and well in Miami. The First Amendment rocks here,
even to a salsa beat.
Now I'm having second thoughts. It's because
of pressure being put on various participants
to drop out of a town meeting scheduled for tonight
(and to be broadcast live on WLRN-TV) at Miami
Dade College's Wolfson campus. I've agreed to
moderate the discussion about how Washington and
Tallahassee have responded to the threat of terrorism
after 9/11. A special focus will be the impact
on immigrant communities. One of them, of necessity,
is the South Florida Muslim community and, apparently,
there's the rub. The representative will be Ali
Altaf, executive director of the Council on American
Islamic Relations-Florida, one of the town meeting's
co-sponsors.
While no one has questioned Altaf's credentials,
plenty of objections have been raised about CAIR.
The principal objection? That it's a front for
Hamas, the virulently anti-Israel terrorist group.
Is that true? I've talked to several people who
think so and have flooded me with material that
they say proves it.
The most incriminating evidence shows that CAIR
was founded in 1994 by a couple of leaders of
the Islamic League of Palestine, a group with
direct ties to Hamas. Some of the money used to
start CAIR came from the Holy Land Foundation,
shut down in 2001 by federal prosecutors who said
it had funneled millions of dollars to Hamas.
HLF founder Ghassan Elashi, who incorporated CAIR
in Texas, was indicted last December for engaging
in financial transactions with a Hamas leader
whom the Justice Department calls a ''designated
terrorist.'' The ties between CAIR and these people
and groups are, indeed, troubling.
Troubling enough that U.S. Attorney Marcos Jiménez
has dropped out as one of tonight's panelists
(although he hasn't given reasons) along with
Rabbi Solomon Schiff, head of the Dade Rabbinical
Association. Pressure is also being put on other
panelists to pull out, including James Sewell,
the No. 2 man at the Florida Department of Law
Enforcement.
As it happens, FDLE and the Florida Commission
on Human Relations have looked into CAIR-Florida
and reportedly given it a clean bill of health,
according to Altaf. He says that, in response
to a complaint of anti-Semitism from the Anti-Defamation
League and a Palm Beach-based Jewish group, CAIR
was investigated, and the CHR "assured us
that there is nothing on record on either CAIR
or Mr. Ali.''
Arthur Teitelbaum, executive director of the
Florida ADL, isn't convinced.
Neither is Barry Silverman, a local leader of
the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
They haven't recommended that I withdraw as moderator
of tonight's town meeting, but Americans Against
Hate did. In a news release sent out Monday, the
Broward-based group urged me to pull out ''to
preserve his and his station's integrity.'' It
also called law-enforcement representatives not
to participate.
BEGIN TONIGHT
I'll be there tonight, and I hope that Jiménez,
the FBI and FDLE, too, will be there. If they
have any evidence that CAIR-Florida and its national
leadership engage in improper or illegal acts,
I'd like to hear about it.
If they don't, let's hear that, too. Let's hear
from a broad spectrum of people, as long as they're
law-abiding and respectful of other points of
view. We need this dialogue. Let it begin tonight.
mputney@click10.com
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