[News] Where Have All the Muslims Gone? - The 2018 Hashmi Award

[Anti-Imperialist News]

*Where Have All the Muslims Gone?
The 2018 Hashmi Award*
by Susie Day

http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2013/day250213.html

New York, N.Y., 2018 -- Every year about this time, since way back in 
2013, the City of New York 
<http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/02/2013211102339764399.html> 
has bestowed its prestigious Hashmi Award upon a worthy New York 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/28/nyregion/new-york-police-commissioner-defends-monitoring-of-muslims.html> 
resident who lives openly as an observant Muslim.  The Hashmi recipient 
-- preferably of Asian, Middle Eastern, or African descent -- must have 
paid taxes, abided by Western law, held no criminal record, valued 
higher education, and demonstrated all-around Good Muslim Sportsmanship 
in the war against terror.

The Hashmi, according to Mayor Christine Quinn 
<http://blogs.wsj.com/metropolis/2012/02/27/speaker-quinn-voices-support-for-nypd-monitoring-of-muslims/>, 
"is our way of saying, 'Thanks, observant Muslims, for allowing us to 
project our post-9-11 fear and hatred onto you.  Your sinister hijabs, 
skullcaps, and beards, not to mention your wacky halal food, have 
justified years of the NYPD 
<http://www.ap.org/Index/AP-In-The-News/NYPD> secretly monitoring your 
communities 
<http://www.ap.org/Content/AP-In-The-News/2011/Inside-the-spy-unit-that-NYPD-says-doesnt-exist>.'"

In a dignified ceremony at City Hall, the Hashmi honoree is presented 
with a pair of complimentary waterproof socks and a rain poncho.  The 
lucky prizewinner is then immediately arrested on suspicion of intent to 
give these items to Al Qaeda.

Now, in 2018, the Awards Committee would again like to honor a deserving 
man or woman of the Islamic faith.  Unfortunately, the Committee can't 
seem to find one.  Virtually all New York's observant Muslims appear to 
have been deported or are assumed to be on the down-low, hoping to avoid 
"persecution."

The Hashmi Award, begun in 2013, was named for the ultimate Good Muslim 
Sport, Syed Fahad Hashmi 
<http://chronicle.com/article/My-Student-the-Terrorist/126937/>.  Mr. 
Hashmi, born 1980 in Pakistan, did not, unfortunately, begin life as a 
Good Sport.  When he was three, he moved with his family to the United 
States and became an American citizen, thus succumbing to his inborn 
jihadist urge to infiltrate Western society.  The youthful Mr. Hashmi 
soon launched himself on a downward spiral, moving ever deeper into the 
netherworld of fanaticism by not smoking, not drinking, not cursing, 
respecting his teachers, pursuing an interest in current events, and 
abusing his First-Amendment rights in arguing against U.S. foreign policy.

By 2003, when he received a degree in political science from Brooklyn 
College, Mr. Hashmi had all but completed his descent into terror. 
  Seeking to expand Islam's worldwide web, he went to England to study 
for a master's degree in international relations at the London 
Metropolitan University.  There, Mr. Hashmi, in a wanton perversion of 
niceness, allowed an acquaintance, Mohammed Junaid Babar 
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/8322346/Terrorist-who-trained-77-bomber-released-after-five-years.html>, 
to spend two weeks in his apartment.  He also permitted Mr. Babar to use 
his cell phone and to stow some luggage.  Luggage of doom, as it turned 
out: for it contained waterproof socks, raincoats, and ponchos that Mr. 
Babar later delivered to Al Qaeda in Pakistan.

Mr. Babar was arrested in 2004 and jailed.  Then, to avoid a prison 
sentence, he agreed to testify against the /real/ terrorist: the vile, 
apartment-renting, sock-storing Syed Fahad Hashmi.

Mr. Hashmi, 26, was arrested in London in 2006, extradited to New York, 
and held in solitary confinement under Special Administrative Measures 
for three years before trial 
<http://www.villagevoice.com/2008-11-05/columns/a-brooklyn-college-grad-experiences-the-constitution-in-a-cage/>. 
  Then, a miracle: In detention, cut off from family, friends, and most 
sensory stimuli -- while contemplating a possible 70-year sentence 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/28/nyregion/28hashmi.html> -- Mr. Hashmi 
allowed the healing power of Good Muslim Sportsmanship into his heart as 
his personal savior.

Finally embracing the tenets of Western Enlightenment, Mr. Hashmi made 
the inspiring decision to plead guilty 
<http://www.democracynow.org/2010/4/28/after_3_years_in_pretrial_solitary> 
to one count of providing material support to Al Qaeda.  By so doing, he 
saved the U.S. government millions upon millions of dollars in the 
beefed-up security that would have been needed for news media to evoke 
the proper level of dread and revulsion 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/nyregion/27hashmi.html>.

Mr. Hashmi now resides in the Florence, Colorado ADX, the most 
locked-down prison in the U.S., where he will probably spend every 
remaining day of his 15-year sentence.  Unlike observant Christians 
serving time for bombing abortion clinics or murdering doctors, Mr. 
Hashmi lives alone in a bathroom-sized cell, devoid of human contact, 
where, as one reporter from the /Guardian 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/18/us-supermax-prison-international-opprobrium>/ 
put it, "The only possible means of communicating with other humans is 
to yell into the toilet bowl and hope that someone may hear."

All this, for non-Muslim New Yorkers, makes not having a Hashmi Award 
recipient especially hard to bear.  "I'd hate to see that award 
disappear," said veteran gay rights activist Herbie Brownstein, in an 
impromptu sidewalk interview.  "We of the LGBT community doff our 
chapeaux to Mr. Hashmi and to the other brave folk of Islam who, in 
this, and many other legal cases, have taken the place of us commie fags 
as the main threat to Western civilization."  Mr. Brownstein is 
president of the New York Chapter of Militant Communist Homosexuals for 
Domination of the Entire Globe.

"I hate that evil Muslim," interjected passerby Mildred Knucklewrapper, 
who teaches third grade in the Bronx.  "Thanks to that guy, we may never 
know how many terrorists in South Waziristan now go to bed with dry 
feet.  That Hashmi Award is the perfect way to remember why we need to 
forget about people like Syed Fahad Hashmi."

This reporter would have asked a challenging question at this juncture, 
but was afraid to be seen as supporting terrorism.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Susie Day is a writer.
-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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