>LA Times, July 20, 2002
>FBI Targets Black Muslims in Anti-Terrorist Watch
>
>By PATRICK J. MCDONNELL, Times Staff Writer
>
>
>SEATTLE -- The brawny man in the Muslim skullcap gestured toward a brick
>apartment building across the street from where he was standing guard at
>a shelter for homeless families.
>
>"See that window over there?" said the man, Abdul-Hakim, pointing to an
>upper floor. "The FBI watches me from that window."
>
>The FBI will not comment. But a federal investigation of a possible
>terrorist cell in the Pacific Northwest is focusing on a group of
>African American converts to Islam, possibly opening a new chapter in
>the domestic war on terrorism.
>
>Across the nation, court papers suggest that FBI anxiety about radical
>African American Muslims has reemerged in the last decade as the bureau
>has concentrated on Islamic terrorism.
>
>Federal investigations into the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and a
>related plot to blow up New York landmarks discovered the names of black
>Americans associated with the "blind sheik," Omar Abdel Rahman, now
>serving a life term for his part in the bombing conspiracy. Among those
>convicted in the same plot was U.S.-born Rodney Hampton-el, a former New
>York clinic worker and ex-moujahedeen volunteer in Afghanistan.
>
>"FBI scrutiny of African American Muslims has clearly increased since
>the [1993] World Trade Center bombing," said Ihsan Bagby, a professor at
>Shaw University in North Carolina who has studied the nation's Muslims.
>"A lot of this is a combination of a focus on terrorism and an agenda
>about black 'radicals' and Muslims--all lumped together."
>